Introducing Elegic Poetry to Children

Autumn graces our presence once again.  As the days have become (too) short, and the nights have become clear with cold, we hail the familiar salut! of the geese as we overturn the spent garden, and bid them a good migratory journey.

Inside later, nestled together in footie pajamas and flannels on the couch in our den, we read some wonderful seasonal elegies (n.b.  Not to be confused with seasonal allergies!) from Christina Rossetti’s 1893 volume of nursery rhymes, titled Sing Song:  

Fly away, fly away

 

Fly away, fly away over the sea,
Sun-loving swallow, for summer is done;
Come again, come again, come back to me,
Bringing the summer and bringing the sun.

Twist me a crown

Twist me a crown of wind-flowers;
That I may fly away
To hear the singers at their song,
And players at their play.

Put on your crown of wind-flowers:
But whither would you go?
Beyond the surging of the sea
And the storms that blow.

Alas! your crown of wind-flowers
Can never make you fly:
I twist them in a crown to-day,
And to-night they die.[1]

As with any well wrought seasonal elegy, these poems both commemorate something temperate — a bird, a flower chain -- and treat its passing as a phenomenon taking part in a larger cycle — of departure and return, of life and afterlife, of childhood fancy and adult rationality. 

Now is the time of the year for elegy . . . a time to commemorate the joy of the past summer, and the lush beauty it brought to our senses.  A time to set it in a broader cycle--the story of our lives, our collective memory.

After reading these poems together, I have used them to frame several conversations, and subsequently, activities.   Immediately following the reading of the first poem, for instance, we trying to imagine each speaker and her dramatic occasion in more detail:

• Why does the speaker in “Fly away” tell the swallow to fly away?  What does the speaker want the swallow to bring back? How does the speaker feel about the swallow’s leaving?

After discerning that the speaker observes summer’s passing in the migrating swallow, we draw the dramatic occasion for the poem into context with our own lives, thinking more specifically about the plants and animals whose presence in our lives changes at turn of the season. 

• How do you feel about the end of summer?  What will you miss the most?  What are you looking forward to in the year to come?

• What signs in the environment make us aware that summer is coming to an end?  What “sun-loving” creatures in our own yard are saying goodbye to usas they curl up and become dormant, burrow, or fly away?  Which creatures are already gone?  How do we know?  What trace of themselves have they left in your memory?  In our yard? 

Then, we take a walk through the yard, ambling along our favorite hiking paths with little purpose other than witnessing the passing of a season, the start of another one. 

I set the children to the task of listening to the silent speech of the ‘sun-loving’ creatures in our environment that are saying goodbye for winter.  They take photographs of the plants making their "farewell speeches", some of the images of which are presented here. 

Then, the children write their own elegies in the spirit of Rossetti.  Here are two examples of the elegies that they have written:

Summer, fall, winter, spring, come in time. 

Always.
Every season have fun, but when winter comes,
cold will arise from the dark starry night.
 
Goodnight, goodnight, firefly,

if you're near.

I'll miss your glow when winter comes

rolling from another country 

and wish you were here. 

I'll pretend a fire made of stones

is your light shining bright.

---

[1] This poem is a round, or a dialogue, and the dramatic occasion for the poem is easier to understand if one person reads the call out (stanza one) and another, the response (stanzas two and three)

We are well to remember, however insular our lives, that we do not just move through seasons; they in fact move through us, part of the intricate machinations of our own beings. Even adults have much to benefit from reading elegy now and then — if only to remind ourselves, as in Judaic wisdom, Gam zeh ya'avor , “this too shall pass” — be it joy, be it sorrow, be it summer, be it autumn, be it beauty, be it ugliness.

Among my favorite adult oriented elegies are Thomas Grey’s “An Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: to a Young Child”, and Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” The acuity of each of these poems as an act of perception invites us to actively commemorate our own passings, to locate them within a larger cycle of growth, of meaning.