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<author>
<name>Lady Catherine <index>Dyer</index></name>
</author>
<title>Elegy for Sir William Dyer</title>
<date>1641</date>
<source>Scraped from a web page (<uri>http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/elegies.html</uri>) and fixed.</source>
<remark>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. <quote>My dear, my dearest dust, I come, I come</quote> takes on powerful multiple meanings when the lover is, literally, dust becoming dust. There are layers here, in the resonance of the <called>gentle death (as sleep)</called> 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 <quote>stay / One hour longer</quote> 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.</remark>
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