Spousal Cancer: The Flowering of Grief

Abstract

‘Lycidas’, John Milton’s pastoral elegy of 1638, first appeared in a booklet of poems commemorating Edward King, who had drowned in the Irish Sea. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker gives a list of funeral flowers and an explanation of their elegiac function. The list includes the violet, the musk rose, and ‘daffadillies’, which will ‘fill their cups with tears, / To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.’1 ‘For so, to interpose a little ease,’ the speaker says, ‘Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.’ Milton aligns the thoughts of the mourners, and thus the words of the elegy, and thus the other elegies bound in the booklet, with the handfuls of ‘frail’ flowers depicted here.2 In a similar way to laying flowers at a grave or on a coffin, arranging the words of an elegy allows, through emotional projection, an adjustment to the sudden disappearance or the longer-term dissolution of other physical and psychological forms, including grief. In its formal arrangements, and in its figures of recovery or relief, elegy is aligned with principles of change and recovery. Like the ceremonial flower arrangement, elegy is a temporary space the poet holds; both allow a framing of feeling that does not prevent passage into the wider world in which other things and feelings are regenerating.