 And people get the words eulogy and elegy mixed up. A eulogy is a speech that praises someone or something, typically after they no longer exist. Funerals, as you've probably experienced, are the standard occasion for giving a eulogy in which one person reflects on and celebrates the deceased's life. An elegy is a poem, and it has a particular kind of emotion driving it. That emotion is lament, meaning to feel and express sorrow and to mourn for something. And yes, elegies are very often about someone who has died, but it might also be something that has died, say a feeling or a relationship. Or I should say, elegies are an expression on the occasion of loss generally. They are the expression of the hurt, the wound. They are the howl of grief. They are a study of what is weaped for. They are the blues. The emotion of lament and what to make of that lament is the subject of the elegy. I'll say it again. Where a eulogy at a funeral might reflect on the achievements, private and public of someone who has just died, an elegy is more interested in the poet's feelings of loss and most important in finding metaphors for the awareness, perception, tangibility, or even the strange pleasures of the poet's feelings of grief and mourning. Like what you get when the blues man buddy guy sings, all that makes me happy is the blues. So the elegy is a poem interested, above all, in making a metaphor from loss. The model of the contemporary elegy is 400 years old. It comes from the British poet John Milton's 17th century poem, Lisidas. It's an amazing poem that mourns the death of Milton's friend but does something that was so new at the time, its consequences are still being felt by poets all over the world on every continent. Milton didn't just share his grief about his friend or tally his achievements, he explored the grief, turning from a feeling into a metaphor and he tried to understand what the grief means. In other words, think of contemporary elegy like this. There's a disturbance, a loss, say, or a death, then the poet responds by asking themselves, how do I feel about that? Not just what is the feeling I'm having but more important, what is that loss like? Then the poem explores what the feeling is like and compares it to something and explores the comparison itself. The exploration of the comparison is the heart of the elegy. And then finally, the poem resolves the metaphor. Not the disturbance, mind you, the person remains dead but the feeling of loss turned into a metaphor is freshly alive. Take Stanley Plumlee's heartbreaking elegy, The Marriage in the Trees. When I finish this video, I'll read it to you. It's about the breakup of a relationship as the title indicates of a marriage. But in the poem, Plumlee laments that loss by lamenting what happened to the trees around their house that the married couple lived in. That is, he compares the experience of a failing relationship with the inability to heal the trees. Now, when I read it, try to track the breakup feelings that are expressed in the poem, meaning the words that are about trees and also about lamenting the death of the love between the two people. That's the elegy's power. Not just to eulogize a death, but to create a new way of exploring loss. Here's the poem, The Marriage in the Trees by Stanley Plumlee. When the wind was right, everything else was wrong, like the oak we thought built better than the house split like a ship on a rock. We let it stand the winter, spectral, shag it. Every sky it snowed, then cut it down, dismantled it in pieces like disease. Then limbs from the yellow poplar broke at will, fell from the heights like bones of the Puritans, even to gather them in bundles seemed puritanical. And the willow by its nature wept, long tears of its overbranching. So pale, they were autumnal. These we turned too easily to switches, mocking the bickering in the spruce's nesting eaves which crows, then jays bothered all they could. The list, the list. The sycamore made maps of disappearance. The copper beach, parental and its girth was clipped hard by a car with a wound that wouldn't heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then love. Nothing we tried would work. More apple trees that grew nowhere but down, more maples spilling sugar. More hawthorns blazing out telling truth. That's the elegy, the marriage in the trees by Stanley Plumlee.