Lady Catherine Dyer

Elegy for Sir William Dyer

1641

Scraped from a web page (http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/elegies.html) and fixed.

Remarks:

In addition to being merely great poetry, formally this sonnet is of great interest, as a powerful revision of a conventional love poem to be engraved on a tomb. “My dear, my dearest dust, I come, I come” takes on powerful multiple meanings when the lover is, literally, dust becoming dust. There are layers here, in the resonance of the “gentle death (as sleep)” topos explored in a stately series of couplets that only gradually become, clearly, a sonnet. Rhymed lines lie up against each other like two bodies side by side warming each other in the cold English night, or like graves in a churchyard. The enjambment “stay / One hour longer” enacts its pause, and leads into a momentary suspension of meter into speech rhythms, lending the poem a personal, intimate quality — which, for the contemporary reader, may only be enhanced by the gentle archaisms. Lines 6 and 10 are tetrameters, lending to the same informal effect while simultaneous evoking more conventional (tetrameter) elegaic forms, and stopping up the poem as if stopped by emotion; in the sestet, the poem becomes less restless, finding the repose it looks forward to.