The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies

Introduction - Who Could Not Sing: Elegy and Its (Female) Discontents

Introduction Who Could Not Sing Elegy and Its (Female) Discontents For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme …….. Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring, Begin and somewhat loudly sweep the string. — John Milton, “Lycidas” “To Build the Lofty Rhyme”: Muses, Nightingales, and Female Elegists I blame it on Milton. And given the opportunity, who would not? More specifically, I credit an early encounter with Milton’s “Lycidas” with awakening my questions about consolation as a possibility and the elegy as a genre, and for eventually nudging me towards thornier questions about female elegists, literary mourning, and father–daughter kinship . There may be irony to be found in this kind of beginning—a very homosocial elegy written by one young man for another young man in the seventeenth century as the spark for feminist questions about the political energy of melancholia in late-twentieth-century elegy—but sometimes the question that will not go away is the question that can be followed like a ball of string through the labyrinth of literary history. 3 4 T h e Da u g h t e r ’ s Wa y Milton’s poem, with the epigraph “the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately drown’d...on the Irish Sea, 1637,” has become an important example of the endurance of elegiac convention in the Western canon despite the fact that it is an immature work compared to almost all of Milton ’s other poetry and certainly has neither the scope nor the poetic power of Paradise Lost. In fact, Milton’s use of elegiac convention in “Lycidas” has been deemed so stylized that “its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind,” as Dr. Johnson famously declared as early as 1790 in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (226), but even so, these conventions have retained a remarkable hold upon the contemporary imagination . “Lycidas” is considered by elegy theorists to be the gold standard, a kind of precedent text that demands attention for its crystallization of the poetic command to which all subsequent elegists must listen: sing for your dead, if you are human. Mourning in this poem is an imperative underscored by a question that rings with incredulity: who would not sing for the dead? This uncomfortably necessary question has become indispensable to the rhetoric of elegy for the way, among other things, that it does not let the reader off the hook. The implicit answer is that no listener, no bystander, no callow young reader would dare to dishonour the dead by refusing to sing, or by extension, refusing to acknowledge the importance of singing for the dead. This injunction carries weight even in the classroom where “Lycidas” is often encountered as assigned reading. While it would not be accurate to say that the injunction necessarily inspires mourning, it can and does inspire a resistance to mourning that connotes the need for the question itself. Part of the poem’s strange appeal is its demanding, almost accusatory, tone, and its influence on contemporary elegy lies in its appeal to affect and its still resonating inquiry into the demands of mourning. I was young—a very naïve twenty—when I first read these lines. Despite my confusion over the copious classical allusions that loomed in the latter half of the poem, Milton’s resonant prosody combined with the skill of the professor—the generous and patient Dr. Clement Wyke at the University of Winnipeg—made it nearly impossible for me to squirm away from the uncomfortable demands of “Lycidas.” (I had also agreed to lead a seminar on it in an effort to keep my head above water in a course in which I was the youngest and least experienced student. “Do this poem,” my older and wiser fellow seminar participants said when the sign-up sheet came around. “It’s short.” Dr. Wyke said nothing, though now many years later, I imagine that he must have laughed, inwardly at least. Short? It was Milton.) Who would be hard-hearted enough, arrogant enough not to sing either a dirge or a hymn of praise for someone so emphatically “dead, dead ere his prime”? The question dared me to resist at the same time that it promised [3.137.178.133] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12...