Writing poetic elegies and eulogies

 

How to write poetic elegies and eulogies - info, examples, writing task

 

This is the fourth in a series of articles about different types of poetry. Like it’s predecessors, it begins with an introduction to the poetic form and its effects, including giving you some well-known examples and some websites you can look up for further information. It then moves on to showcase some of my own published poems in this form, and ends with a suggested writing activity for you to try yourself if you wish.

 

I like the similarity in the words ’elegy’ and ‘eulogy’. An elegy, in Greek and Latin verse, was a poem written in elegiac couplets, a notable exponent being Catullus. These days it means a serious, reflective poem, often a lament for someone who has died. A eulogy is a piece of writing that praises someone highly, particularly following their death. Quite often, elegies and eulogies blur together when we write about the death of someone close to us.

            There is no doubt that events that give rise to deep emotion can also inspire deeply felt, emotionally-powerful writing. Poetry lends itself to the expression of grief. However, in the first aftermath of loss, our emotions are likely to be too raw to allow us to shape our writing into poems that are meaningful to others. Writing can be therapeutic in these circumstances, allowing us to express our intense feelings in a chaotic outpouring that can have the same cathartic effect as weeping. But I have found that the later shaping of that initial deluge of pain can often lead to poems that serve several functions:

A)  1.  They provide me with a personal reminder of the person who has died and how I felt about them

B)    2. They honour the dead, making me feel I have made a public statement about the significance, to me at least, of the life that has been lost

C)    3. They help me to grieve, to come to terms with my feelings – the act of creating a poem in itself is calming and challenging, and it focuses my thoughts onto my memories of the person who has died

D)  4.  Sometimes, they are a comfort to others who are grieving, making them realise the importance of their lost one in someone else’s life

        The pain of bereavement is not always about a human. My beloved cat, Asbo, was euthanised some years ago and I wrote the following poem about the experience:

 

Last Appointment At The Vet

 

It was cold as we carried the cat-basket down the path, through the garden gate;

as the basket swung from fence to garage wall, the sleet stuck our hair to our faces;

it was cold and all I could hear was his cry, my knuckles red raw on the plastic grip.

 

It was cold as we lifted the cat-basket into the car, and we knew we’d be late;

as his quiet cry filled the shadowy space, we shook our sleeves and took our places;

it was cold driving down the salted roads, wiping the tears from our cheeks and lips.

 

It was cold as we opened the basket, lifting him out, watching his backbone elongate;

he was trembling and quiet, though he still took a stab at grabbing my old bootlaces;

it was cold as we talked to him, stroking his fur from the back of his black ear-tip

 

to his swaggering tail.  It was cold in the vet’s. She said it was ‘time’ but we still had to wait

til a nurse measured out the right dose. He was held close but squirmed, like all such cases.

Strong hands like clamps round his shoulders ensured that ‘the needle won’t slip’.

 

It was cold as his eye-lids closed.  I’d expected to feel – not happy, not great,

but maybe relieved. Naively, I’d thought it was kind or brave, looking him full in the face.

They say it takes away the pain, but that car journey home was our longest, coldest trip.

 

As you know, I only put poems on here that have already been published elsewhere, as I wish to save the others for submission to magazines, most of which are only interested in previously unpublished work.  ‘Last appointment at the vet’ was Commended in the Poetryspace competition in 2019, winning £10 and being included in their Winners Anthology.

        I tried to do several specific things in this poem. I was experimenting with using long lines, and a rigid pattern of tercets where each stanza followed the same rhyme-scheme: abc abc abc etc. But more importantly I wanted the poem to be a record of this intense experience and how it felt, but I didn’t want it to become maudlin or saccharin. I wanted some repetition so I used ‘It was cold’, and here is where the ‘poetic license’ comes in. It wasn’t actually particularly cold that day. It was just raining a bit. But it felt emotionally wintry, and the repetition of ‘It was cold’ felt right to me. When you are writing about real events, you don’t have to be earnestly faithful to every detail. You can begin with a real experience but move well away from it if you wish. In this poem, I didn’t move far away, and I felt I captured the experience truthfully even though the odd detail might be invented, and the use of 'cold' meant I could play with its metaphorical meaning.

            Sometimes, writing about a person’s death can not only help you personally but it can be a public tribute and a farewell, and can be a way of trying to comfort others who are grieving more than yourself.  In 2020, I received a letter telling me that my old ‘landlady’ had died. I put quote marks round the word ‘landlady’ because I didn’t really see Beryl as my landlady, though I lodged in her house for three years when I first moved to London. I saw her as a good friend. We spent a lot of time together and she was very kind to me. I eventually moved out so I could move in with my boyfriend (now, many years later, my husband), but Beryl and I wrote to each other every Christmas between 1993 and 2019, occasionally more often. Though it was the middle of the first lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, Beryl actually died peacefully in bed in her eighties of non-Covid-related heart failure.

            Her death upset me greatly and I could write loads here about her, but that isn’t the purpose of this article. I started to think about things I had done with Beryl when I lived in London, visiting art galleries and the theatre, going for walks. And, while I was walking round Dam Flask Reservoir I remembered the first walk I ever went on with her and the crowd of buttercups we saw outside the church where she is now buried. This led to my writing the following poem:

 

Buttercups

The card said you ‘died peacefully at home’.

I can’t quite see you tiptoeing away,

without a fight.

                         Today, I’m moving through

a green tunnel, raindrops shivering through pine

and birch to polka-dot the path beneath my feet.

I’m thinking of nothing but the ache in my back,

the tightness in my foot when I step a certain way –

the notes of my mortality.

                                         The forest breathes,

digs its gnarled grey fingers in the rocky soil;

Dam Flask stretches cool across the afternoon.

I’m thinking of nothing but the damp, green

smell, sap pulsing, life pushing out the leaves

and plumping up the purple thistles.

                                                         Then,

I see buttercups outside St Giles’s church,

three hundred miles away and thirty years ago,

on our first walk together to High Elms.

A long, long way from here and now, a life

elsewhere. Tomorrow they’ll bury you in that

churchyard, under the Kentish sky. I hope

they read the Tennyson you loved: Crossing

the Bar.

             You’d have liked it here, old friend.

The air tastes of June and rain. I’m lost

in time and space between the hanging beech

boughs and the bramble. Barbed spines rise

from tangled shadows to stab the sky.

                                                           I hope

your son was honest, not nesting words

in kindly euphemism. You loved that house,

your home. It breathed in weariness

and breathed out warmth. Another life,

a long, long way from here and now. The best

I can wish you is a peaceful crossing. I never

shared your faith – but I shared your hope.

If we must die, let’s have the death

we deserve.

                   Tree trunks, the colour

of mushroom gills, hold up their dark

green bunting in sombre homage. Drifts

of cow parsley follow the crook of the path,

bowed heads mourning. Pallbearer poppies,

red faces cowled by shadow, bend

to their task.

                    Your eyes were speedwell-blue,

skin the pearly cream of woodbine, bearing

as patrician as a foxglove.

                                         Suddenly, three

buttercups are glinting from the shadows,

gold-bright, caught for an instant in the light

that follows rain.  You used to say they stole

a spark from the sun. I’d never seen so many

buttercups as we saw that day, three decades

since, three hundred miles away – such a crowd,

shoulder to shoulder on that August afternoon.

 

 

I sent this poem to Beryl’s son, David, as a tribute to his mother. He actually read it out at her funeral, which I couldn’t attend due to Covid but I was very touched that he read it out. It was subsequently published in Pushing Out The Boat, and is one of the most personal poems I’ve ever had published. Beryl loved nature and I wanted to weave her into the landscape. She lived in Kent and I live in Yorkshire, so I wanted to unite my memory of the Kentish countryside with my current familiarity with the countryside of the north east. She loved poetry – we were both fond of Tennyson. I felt that the poem expressed my feelings about her and my memories of her, and I am pleased with how it turned out.

            Some poems about death are very difficult to write (and they can be upsetting to read as they provide a kind of diary entry reminding you of a part of your life that has gone forever). I have written several about the death of my father-in-law, for example, none of which have been published so I’m not sharing them here, which have been very emotionally challenging. The following poem is about a friend of mine who died suddenly, in his forties. I only knew him online, and only for a couple of years before he died, but we became very close during that brief time, sharing a mutual respect for each other’s writing. We helped each other a great deal during the MA course we both did, which is how we met. When two people who respect each other share their creative writing it brings them together in a distinctive and astonishingly intimate way, even if they have never met in the flesh. This is a poem about an unusual friendship and a person I think about frequently even now. It contains several invented, imagined episodes but is true to the reality of our friendship. It was published in Jaden magazine last year:  

 

 

You died in the night.

 

They said you died in your sleep.

But the sleepless nights pressed up against that night

still disagree. The moon kept you awake.

No pain, no buzzing worry,

just edginess. Grit in your eyes.

A quiet ache you couldn’t place.

I see you, through that last dark chain of midnights,

pacing the length of the room,

hearing the wooden floorboards

creak beneath your naked feet,

pulling the duvet tighter round your shoulders,

stepping, aimless, through the cold still air of winter.

You stand at the window, staring

at the spine of hilltops, black beneath the stars,

against the smoke-grey mist of sky.

 

Hearing the hoot of a distant owl,

an early van on the gravel road beyond the field’s edge,

smelling the snow through the ill-fitting glass,

did fragments of poems drift in and out,

a tide of memory and desire? I wonder – shyly –

if you thought of me,

like on those other lonely nights,

as you paced and sat and pressed your head

against the creased pillow, screwing shut your eyes,

willing yourself to shrug off consciousness.

 

Wakefulness was always your trial.

Fighting off oblivion.

 

Your messages still sit on my phone.

 

How can the world not have you in it?

How many times must I think

‘What would he make of this?’ and then remember

you will never read a word of mine again.

We were two minds in the air, rubbing

up against each other, the beat of shared thoughts.

You were the lapping of waves against the shore,

sucking at rattling pebbles till they shifted,

worn down, worn out.

Sometimes you were a stone bruising the water’s skin.

 

I’m aching for the part of you I knew.

I’m aching to believe – though I can’t believe –

that you died in your sleep – painless, fearless –

not seeing the cold, white moon through the curtainless glass.

 

 

YOUR WRITING TASK [if you wish to accept it]:

1, Think about someone famous who has died, like David Bowie, or a character from a book or film or TV drama who died – Boromir from Lord Of The Rings, say, or Romeo & Juliet.

2. Jot down four or five things about this person/character that you feel would be worth commenting on if you were writing a poetic eulogy about them. These might be achievements or characteristics about them you admire.  Try writing the first stanza of three different potential eulogies – one might be rhyming, another might be free verse, a third might be written in an experimental form such as a shopping list or a list of instructions.

3. Now think about what you would write if you were writing an elegy about this person/character. You might wish to broaden out your thoughts to the nature of death or heroism or honour or weakness itself. You might wish to focus in on a specific incident or memory, or your own feelings about the death you are writing about. Again, try out different forms.

4. Look through the stuff you’ve written and pick out the bits that excite you most. Have a go at developing these into complete poems. You might find they transform into new forms as you progress.

You might find you are able to write an elegy and/or a eulogy (or a combination) about someone you know personally who has died. I suggest you don’t use someone who has died very recently or someone who was extremely close to you, as that might be too upsetting for you. You might choose to write about a pet who died some years ago.  Or you might even choose to write about a metaphorical death – the death of an early ambition, or a relationship that didn’t work out.