POEM

ANALYSI
S
 NOTES:
Elegy for Jane
Back story: Theodore Roethke
Throughout this poem, Roethke’s speaker uses interesting and memorable images of nature to
describe the life of one of his students, Jane. She died after being thrown from her horse and her
loss has impacted him deeply. He did not love her as a father or as a lover but he feels in her
death the loss of something essential.
Since her bird-like presence has left the earth, he has found himself unable to take pleasure in the
natural world. The poem ends without a decision, he is still mourning her and has come to no
conclusion about what his next steps should be.

Themes:
 Nature
 Love
 Death.
With these themes in mind, Roethke talks about the death of Jane, his speaker’s student. She is
compared to numerous natural images and he spends a good deal of time describing how much
pleasure he takes from nature.
It is at the center of this poem and therefore so too is the process of life and death. He is
interested in the youthful presence she represented in life and now in death as well.
He mourns her, but also spends time talking about the love he feels. It is more similar to a love
for nature than it is a romantic attachment.

Structure and form:

 Does not follow the typical elegiac pattern.
 Free verse(no regular pattern of rhyme).
  4 Stanzas.
 1st of these has 9 lines.
 The 2nd:
-Roethke was pushing the boundaries of what love an remembrance can be, a fact which
corresponds with his desire not to use a traditional pattern.
-Another way that he turns from what readers of elegies might expect, is that there is no
comforting ending to the poem. It ends with questions about love still in the air. It’s clear
that the speaker feels no one understands his connection to this young woman and what
her death has made him experience.
-Take note of the epigraph that comes before the first lines of ‘Elegy for Jane’. The
phrase “(My student, thrown by a horse)” appears, providing the reader with a little
necessary detail about the funeral he’s attending.
-The title itself includes the word “elegy,” signaling to the reader that the “student” who
was “thrown by a horse” did not survive the accident.

Literary Devices:
 Personification
 Metaphor
 Simile.
Personification, is seen at the end of the first stanza as the speaker describes nature singing with
her, whispering, and kissing.
Metaphors and similes play an important role in this piece. Throughout, Roethke makes use of
nature-related images, using them as a way of describing what Jane was like. Some of these are
more complicated than others but they are all effective. Take for example his comparison of her
sadness to storing the “clearest water” in the second stanza. Here, he is saying that she’s so sad
that she’s like a clear pool of water that’s been stirred. All the mud at the bottom has risen up to
affect her image on the surface.

Poem Analysis:
The 1st stanza:
 The speaker begins ‘Elegy for Jane’ by recalling features about Jane, the young female
student who was thrown from her horse and killed. Although describing the deceased is a
common practice in elegies, Roethke’s approach is strikingly different.
 He doesn’t speak of her in glowing, beautiful terms. He calls her hair “limp and damp as
tendrils” (a good example of a simile) and her smile is compared to a fish.
 He compares her, to the wind, birds, landscapes, and light.
 Jane was jumpy like a bird with light and airy speech, that sounded as if it was leaping
from her. Further metaphors and similes follow as Roethke’s speaker compare Jane to a
“wren” who is “happy” flying through the air.

 Her thoughts, words, and general nature make the “Twigs and small branches” tremble.
The whole world is with her, connected to her and the way that all living things are.

 There is a good example of personification at the end of this stanza when the poet
describes the “whispering” of the leaves that turn into “kissing”.
 Additionally, the “mould” is described as singing “in the bleached valley under the
rose”.
 This is a striking and many-sided image that symbolises death and is unusual but suitable
for the occasion.
 The bird’s song overcomes this slightly darker image. Her cheery life is capable of
uplifting even the darkest of images.

The 2nd stanza:

 The second stanza is only four lines long, making it a quatrain.

 This stanza is focused on her sadness. It is in contrast against the uplifting and happy first
stanza.
 When Jane was sad, she’d enter into such a depth that “a father could not find her”. No
one, not even this mysterious father figure was capable of seeking her out.
 You should take careful not of the use of the “a” article in this line. This might make one
think of a religious “father” like a priest rather than a biological father.
 Her depression was so deep that neither family nor religion could pull her out of it.
 The final two lines of the stanza provide more images that help the reader imagine with
Jane’s sadness was like. She metaphorically rubs her head “against straw,” as if she’s an
animal trying to rid itself of an itch or some other discomfort.
 Her sadness is so strong that its able to “stir” the clear waters, muddying them. The dirt
and grim at the bottom of this metaphorical pool come up to the surface and ruins the
image that was once there.

The 3rd stanza:

 The third stanza is also four lines long.

 Here, he refers to Jane as a “sparrow”. He also talks directly to her, an example of
an apostrophe.
 Her light is no longer there to comfort him. Her lovely words and nature are missing and
he is unable to find comfort in the remaining nature around him.
 It is as though she took the best of it with her. There is a good example of alliteration in
the third line with “cannot console”.
 The last line speaks of the “moss, wound with the last light”. It is dotted with the last
light of the day and although beautiful, does nothing to make the speaker feel better.

The 4th stanza:

 The fourth stanza acknowledges the speaker’s desire to take Jane back from death, or to
“nudge” her from “this sleep”. He knows that this is impossible. His “skittery pigeon” is
lost forever and he’s only able to talk to her “Over this damp grave”.
 The repetition of the bird imagery in these last lines - She is compared to a “skittery
pigeon,” a lovely image and a very expressive one.
 By this point, he has outlined her clearly you should have a good understanding of what
this young woman was like.
 It is in these last lines that the speaker first suggests that he loves her. It is not a romantic
love that he feels, nor one of a “father”.
 This is something that he states explicitly in the last lines.
 His love is something different. It is a love for the kind of life she lived, the youth she
represented, and what the loss of that means.
 He loves her as one would love the light on moss at the end of the day or the sound of a
bird song.