David Baker

The day moon the
                                     spirit of the morning

He walks back from the
                                         window in half-shadow

a half-shade himself

All the years of nights
rapt for each other
all the joy and later
all the trouble

And if purple’s the new black as Vogue says
(according to their latest ad-by-tweet,
it s the seasons thing), perhaps erasure’s
our poetry du jour.

Walt Whitman was a poet of hope and encouragement, but his greatest poem is bleak at heart, ripped bloody, and shredded with despair. He was our verbal cheerleader, our avid egoist as well as our most enthusiastic inclusionist.

The problems with people have provided poets with their subjects for millennia. In our own investigations of three primary lyric modes, we have previously considered the love poem (and the problems of passion, heartbreak, betrayal), the elegy (and the problems of death and loss or forgetting), and the ode (and the problems of social rhetoric and lyric progression).

I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, particularly the lyric elegy of the American 19th century, for I think it is a creature unto itself. At hand is the problem of Walt Whitman's great poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” I want first to remind us of the complex narrative structure of Whitman’s poem for his beloved deceased, and to unpack the poem’s dense sets of images, stories, locations, and most important, its figures. As I intend the term, a figure is not just a body, a human figure; and not just a trope or metaphor, a figure of speech; but also a number, a mathematical figure. Next, I will relate this poem to another central 19th-century American elegy, Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” Finally I will propose a paradigm shift in our thinking, and reading, about the American elegy.

The beautiful athletes on the white beach
work out in unison for the camera
this morning, their muscle clothes the colors
of berries, of bright flags and fields growing,

I lift my head from under the hood,
that shadowy pit, to see the sun still high
and my bright lawn blinking
with tulips, the quick traffic of wings.

At first only fog lifting off
the snow and snow
     sifting through it,

 A short ride in the van, then the eight of us 
   there in the heat—white shirtsleeves sticking,
the women's gloves off—fanning our faces.