Resources

Teachers & Writers Magazine Online Resources:
Here is a list of elegies to use in the classroom
compiled by Michael Morse, author of “Lost and Found: Reading and Writing the Elegy”
in Teachers & Writers Magazine
Summer 2010, Volume 41, no. 4

A short and far-from-all-inclusive list of elegies or elegiac poems that work well in the classroom (bold marks a collection as opposed to an individual poem)

Althaus, Keith: Little Elegy
Amichai, Yehuda: Elegy on an Abandoned Village; A Pity
Auden, W.H.: In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Bang, Mary Jo: Elegy
Barnett, Catherine: Into Such Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced
Berryman, John: The Dreamsongs [see #s 147, 149, 324 ]
Bishop, Elizabeth: First Death in Nova Scotia
Boland, Eavan: The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me
Brooks, Gwendolyn: Throwing Out the Flowers
Clampitt, Amy: A Procession at Candlemas
Cox, Mark: Things My Grandfather Must Have Said
Darwish, Mahmoud: I Come from There
Dennis, Carl: Candles
Doty, Mark: Tiara
Dubie, Norman: Of Politics and Art
Dunbar, William: Lament for the Makers
Gilbert, Jack: Searching for Pittsburgh
Hass, Robert – Meditation at Lagunitas
Hopkins, Gerard Manley: Spring and Fall: To a Young Child; Felix Randal
Howe, Marie: What the Living Do
Jonson, Ben: On My First Son
Kinnell, Galway: Freedom, New Hampshire
Komunyakka, Yusef: Facing It
Kunitz, Stanley: Halley’s Comet
Levis, Larry: Elegy
Merwin, W.S.: For the Anniversary of My Death
Milton, John: Lycidas
Morrison, Rusty: The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story
McPherson, Sandra: Elegies for the Hot Season
O’Rourke, Meghan: My Life as a Teenager
Rilke, Ranier Maria: Duino Elegies
Schulman, Grace: Apples
Stevens, Wallace: Puella Parvula, A Postcard from the Volcano, Madame la Fleurie
St. John, David: Iris
Schnackenberg, Gertrude: Supernatural Love
Shahid Ali, Agha: I See Chile in my Rearview Mirror
Tate, James: The Lost Pilot
Theocritus: Idyls
Whitman, Walt: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Wright, James: On the Skeleton of a Hound
Young, David: Chloe in Late January
Zagajewski, Adam: To Go to Lvov