Poems 1912-1913 – A psychoanalytical walkthrough of Thomas Hardy’s elegies for Emma Lavinia

Abstract

Elegiac poetry has an apparent reason for existence: mourning. However, the mourning for the faded one, is mostly written and heard by the living rather than the buried one. Therefore, elegies often involve more prominence of the poet’s self, who could have a thousand intertwined ideas each one evolving a renewed image of the one who passed away. And hence, express their interpretations under the lead of those notions and reflections to fulfill the lack of this figure. We can seek here the essential idea of the elegy: to relieve the living through engaging with the passed away figure, as the elegy keeps us away from the sin of forgetting the dead.