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Twelve poems

Chapter 9: ELEGY [1918]
By Edith Wharton
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Poetry

About This Book

A sequence of lyrical poems moves between sunlit Mediterranean landscapes and inward, elegiac reflection, using vivid sensory detail to evoke thyme-scented hills, wind-driven seas, and classical ruins. Several pieces celebrate beauty and the transports of sight and song, while others register loss, mourning, and the human costs of conflict, portraying bereavement, domestic desolation, and the persistence of memory. The collection alternates narrative vignettes and compact meditations, shifting tone from exultant natural observation to restrained grief and philosophical acceptance, exploring how art, place, and memory mediate desire, beauty, and mortality.

ELEGY
[1918]

Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave
All that they were, and might become, that we
With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea
Reweave its patterning of silver wave
Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay.
No more shall any rose along the way,
The myrtled way that wanders to the shore,
Nor jonquil-twinkling meadow any more,
Nor the warm lavender that takes the spray,
Smell only of the sea-salt and the sun,
But, through recurring seasons, every one
Shall speak to us with lips the darkness closes,
Shall look at us with eyes that missed the roses,
Clutch us with hands whose work was just begun,
Laid idle now beneath the earth we tread—
And always we shall walk with the young dead—
Ah, how I pity the young dead, whose eyes
Strain through the sod to see these perfect skies,
Who feel the new wheat springing in their stead,
And the lark singing for them overhead!