This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions.

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Read the poems here:

Ben Jonson: On My First Son

https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld

Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld

Geoffrey Hill: September Song

https://lrb.me/hillcrld

Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia

https://lrb.me/bishopcrld

Read more in the LRB:

Blair Worden on Ben Jonson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben

Blair Worden on puritanism

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben

Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n04/colin-burrow/rancorous-old-sod

Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose

Next episode:

Two elegies by Thomas Gray:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes

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