The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.
They which have no hope of a life to come, may extend their griefs for the loss of this, and equal the days of their mourning with the years of the life of man.
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.
I get inhabited by a character and then you mourn it. There's a period of mourning for me, definitely.
To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.
To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.