Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying items 1-10 of 13 in total of Poetry For All with the tag "elegy".
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Episode 114: Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
September 10th, 2026 | 26 mins 40 secs
elegy, grief and loss, refrain, repetition, twentieth century, villanelle
In this episode, we introduce the first villanelle in our three-part series on that poetic form. We begin with Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem that attempts to stave off the inevitability of mortality.
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Episode 101: Emerald GoingSnake, Someday I'll Love--
November 19th, 2025 | Season 7 | 23 mins 53 secs
21st century, aging, elegy, free verse, gratitude, grief and loss, guest on the show, love, native american heritage month
This episode opens "Someday I'll Love" poems through the vivid imagery of a young poet's connection with their grandmother, remembering in love as memory begins to slip.
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Episode 100: Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
October 29th, 2025 | Season 7 | 34 mins 53 secs
18th century, elegy, grief and loss, melancholy, night, rhymed verse
This episode takes us to a graveyard for Halloween and explores one of the most canonical poems in the English language, poised between two huge eras of poetry as it meditates on how "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."
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Episode 92: Dorianne Laux, Singer
May 8th, 2025 | Season 6 | 25 mins 44 secs
21st century, elegy, free verse, gratitude, joy, love, mother's day, narrative, ode, women's history month
In this episode, we read and discuss "Singer," a narrative poem that creates a catalog of details that celebrates the poetic speaker's mother in all of her complexity.
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Episode 83: Emily Dickinson, "I went to thank Her–"
November 27th, 2024 | Season 6 | 20 mins
elegy, grief and loss, nineteenth century, rhymed verse, women's history month
In this episode, we read and discuss Emily Dickinson's poem about the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We discuss Dickinson's innovative syntax, her use of deep pauses, and her meditations on death and grief that create surprising effects in this short lyric.
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Episode 74: Diane Seuss, [The sonnet, like poverty]
July 26th, 2024 | Season 6 | 24 mins 22 secs
21st century, ars poetica, elegy, gratitude, grief and loss, labor day, laborers, repetition or refrain, sonnet
This remarkable sonnet dives into issues of poverty, poetry, and grief. We talk about the pedagogy of constraint, while exploring the achievements, including the hardbitten gratitude, embedded in this poem.
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Episode 72: Victoria Chang, My Mother--died unpeacefully...
May 22nd, 2024 | Season 6 | 20 mins 1 sec
21st century, aging, asian american, elegy, free verse, grief and loss
In this episode, we read one of Victoria Chang’s moving poems from her collection OBIT, and discuss how the poem explores the interplay between life, death, grieving, and memory as the poet tries to process her mother’s passing.
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Episode 59: Tichborne's Elegy
April 7th, 2023 | Season 5 | 21 mins 25 secs
16th century, christianity, elegy, grief and loss, repetition or refrain, rhymed verse
In this episode, we read the elegy of Chidiock Tichborne, written the night before his execution, and contemplate the power of repetitions, the balanced precision of a man facing his end, and the drumbeat of monosyllables that takes his imagination beyond the moment of his death.
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Episode 49: Lisel Mueller, When I am Asked
September 12th, 2022 | Season 5 | 19 mins 57 secs
20th century, ars poetica, elegy, free verse, grief and loss, repetition or refrain
In this episode, we closely read Lisel Mueller's "When I am Asked" in order to better understand grief as a deep source of artistic expression.
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Episode 45: Ben Jonson, On My First Son
March 23rd, 2022 | Season 4 | 21 mins 18 secs
17th century, children, christianity, elegy, grief and loss, loneliness, rhymed verse
In this episode, we look at Ben Jonson's elegy for his son who died of the plague at the age of 7. This poem is so brief, and yet, it manages to cross a lot of emotional terrain as Jonson struggles to understand the profundity of his loss.