Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry (Narratologia, 55)

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one’s own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus. Table of Contents 1. Introduction (Peter Hühn) 2. Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person 2.0 Introduction (Peter Hühn) 2.1 Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” and “On my First Son” (Peter Hühn) 2.2 John Donne: “Since She Whom I Loved” and John Milton: “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (Peter Hühn) 2.3 Lord Byron: “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” and “And Thou Art Dead” (Peter Hühn) 2.4 E. A. Poe: “Lenore” (Peter Hühn) 2.5 Seamus Heaney: “Mid-Term Break” (Heilna du Plooy) 2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” (Peter Hühn) 2.7 Summary (Peter Hühn) 3. Coping with Loss in Love 3.0 Introduction (Peter Hühn) 3.1 William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Peter Hühn) 3.2 John Donne: “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (Stefan Schenk-Haupt) 3.3 William Wordsworth: “Lucy Poems” (Peter Hühn) 3.4 Emily Dickinson: “After Great Pain” (Heilna du Plooy) 3.5 Thomas Hardy: “The Voice” (Britta Goerke) 3.6 Sylvia Plath: “The Other” (Stefan Schenk-Haupt) 3.7 Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (Peter Hühn) 3.8 Summary (Peter Hühn) 4. Confronting One’s Own Death 4.0 Introduction (Peter Hühn) 4.1 Sir Walter Raleigh: “Verses Made the Night Before He Died” and Chidiock Tichborne: “Tichborne’s Elegy” (Peter Hühn) 4.2 John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (Peter Hühn) 4.3 William Cowper: “The Castaway” (Britta Goerke) 4.4 John Keats: “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” and Lord Byron: “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” (Peter Hühn) 4.5 Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Heilna du Plooy) 4.6 Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” and Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting” (Peter Hühn) 4.7 D. H. Lawrence: “Bavarian Gentians” (Peter Hühn) 4.8 Summary (Peter Hühn) 5. Lamenting the Death of Poets 5.0 Introduction (Peter Hühn) 5.1 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (Peter Hühn) 5.2 Thomas Carew: “An Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr John Donne” (Peter Hühn) 5.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (Peter Hühn) 5.4 W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Peter Hühn) 5.5 Seamus Heaney: “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (Peter Hühn) 5.6 Summary (Peter Hühn) 6. Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order 6.0 Introduction (Peter Hühn) 6.1 John Donne: An Anatomy of the World and William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Peter Hühn) 6.2 William Wordsworth: “The World is too Much with Us” and W. B. Yeats: “High Talk” (Peter Hühn) 6.3 Shelley: “Lift not the Painted Veil” (Peter Hühn) and “The Cloud” (Britta Goerke) 6.4 Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach” and Gerald Manley Hopkins: “No Worst, there is None” (Peter Hühn) 6.5 T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (Peter Hühn) and “Journey of the Magi” (Britta Goerke) 6.6 W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (Peter Hühn) 6.7 Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (Britta Goerke) 6.8 Summary (Peter Hühn) 7. Conclusion: Summary and Results (Peter Hühn) Index (authors and titles) The fruitfulness of this approach is demonstrated by the analyses of English poems from different periods addressing the traumatic experience of loss (death of a beloved person, one's own imminent death, loss of a stabilizing order) and employing various coping strategies.