Time For The Elegy Poem Analysis

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Jennings has always been careful about the relation of the poem to the poet’s experience. She does not advocate a poetics of literal truth, but she does endorse an attitude of fearlessness in the examination of experience. The creation of poetry is an integral part of the way in which she explores and constitutes experience. As she says in “Time for the Elegy”: “The lift of language is an art one earns,” / “After dumb and hidden suffering.”(509) Further she draws upon the metaphor of music as she continues to describe her search for the ideal relation between “truth” and “artistry.” “Shall I ever find/ This music which I seek” she asks in “A Music Sought,” and in the next room she answers, But now the melody’s on me at last, the clear/ Pslam you don’t seek but find” (“Arrival and Preparation”) . “You need not search for music in your poems,” she writes in “Spring and a Blackbird,” “They find each other out/ Plangent, intransigent and never in doubt….” In “Waiting,” she describes the conditions preceding the harmonious blending of “words and their particular music”: “you must listen to both/And give them space, allow them the freedom of your/ Expectant …show more content…

It embodies a conflict between the desire for continuity and control. This conflict is a variation on the conflict underlying many of Jennings’s poems, the conflict between her desire to accept established cultural and religious beliefs and her leaning to draw upon her own experiences as the basis for “truth.” A question which reappears in different forms in many of her collections is whether she should use her art to adorn or to challenge conventional truths and beliefs. Jennings in the poem “I Heard a Voice” draws attention to the mind in the process of selecting, evading, or rejecting impressions and ideas. She makes the difficulties encountered in trying to relate these ideas to an overall pattern part of the poem

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