Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady by Alexander Pope
"Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" by Alexander Pope is a poignant poem consisting of eighty-two lines that explores themes of love, loss, and the tragic consequences of societal constraints. The poem is framed as an elegy, a reflective tribute to a young woman who took her own life after her love was thwarted by her guardian. The speaker addresses her ghost, contemplating the pain of her fate and questioning the injustices she faced, such as familial betrayal and societal expectations. The imagery evokes a sense of melancholy, with references to her unmarked grave and the idea that nature honors her memory despite her tragic end.
Pope employs a blend of elevated poetic diction and structured heroic couplets to convey the emotional weight of the subject matter, utilizing rhetorical questions and vivid imagery to deepen the sense of loss. Critics have noted the poem's emotional intensity, though some argue it lacks clarity in character portrayal and narrative coherence. The work is often seen as a precursor to Romantic sentiments in poetry, especially in its treatment of female experience and the exploration of thwarted passion. Overall, the poem invites reflection on the complexities of love, societal pressure, and the lasting impact of tragedy.
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Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady by Alexander Pope
First published: 1717, in The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope
Type of poem: Elegy
The Poem
“Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” is a melancholy, emotion-charged poem of eighty-two lines, involving a poet’s celebration of his lady, who committed suicide because her guardian thwarted their love. As an elegy, the poem follows the conventions of the genre in its effusive praise of a young, prematurely deceased person whose foreshortened life serves as an inspiration to present and future generations.
The elegy opens with a male poet who beholds his beloved’s ghost with a sword piercing her bleeding heart. He addresses her, until line 74, questioning her fate as a thwarted lover and a suicide: “Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well?” Why has she been treated so shabbily by her family? Will she be remembered for the wonderful woman that she was? Is she now in heaven, now in possession of some kind of peace, despite her Christian sin of suicide? Her ambition destined her for the heavens, and her departure from this earth has deprived her family below of all “virtue (to redeem her race)” (lines 11-28).
The poem proceeds next to a diatribe against her uncle and guardian. The poet-lover actually compounds the guardian’s failings in Christian charity toward his female ward by heaping curses for the early death of the uncle’s entire family to an overwrought, even surrealistic degree (“And frequent hearses shall beseige your gates/…While the long fun’rals blacken all the way”).
There are suggestions that the lady died tended by strangers—that strangers buried her in an unhallowed grave, without Christian burial rights because of her suicide—but that nature restored beauty and sacredness to her unmarked grave site, where angels “o’ershade/ The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.” The next lines add that she is now mere dust, “as all the proud shall be.”
The poem concludes with a memento mori (a reminder to be prepared for death) in which the lover laments that he too will die and will no longer be able to mourn his beloved (lines 75-82): “Life’s idle business at one gasp be o’er,/ The Muse forgot, and thou beloved no more.”
Many critics have found the poem to be somewhat unsatisfactory and problematic. The circumstances of the lady’s life and death, for example, are not clearly portrayed; the feeling sometimes seems forced, the rhetoric artificial. Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Pope (1781), although he “allowed” that parts were written with “vigorous animation” or “a gentle tenderness,” stated that “the tale is not skilfully told,” noting that it was difficult to determine the character of either the lady or her guardian.
Forms and Devices
Alexander Pope’s “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” like his equally melancholy Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard (1717), is usually associated with an atypical impulse toward Romanticism in his canon because of an indulgence in sentiment that is uncommon in his longer poetry. The fact that both poems are monologues, treating women in a similar grandiose vein of thwarted love and loss, emphasizes their kinship, especially in relation to contemporary conventions of excessive passion in the sentimental tragedies of a playwright such as Nicholas Rowe.
The elegy’s opening lines are stagey; they seem an echo of Hamlet’s meeting with his father’s ghost. Pope makes use of a supernatural Gothic situation and a declamatory style of address often seen and heard on the eighteenth century stage. Pulling out all the stops in the presence of the gory ghost, the grieving lover stresses the pathos of his lady’s tragedy.
The heightened sentimentality of the poem stems from its being packed with elaborate rhetoric. There is the pounding symmetry of Pope’s masterful heroic couplets (or closed pentameter couplets) to lend order to the emotionally discordant subject matter of lost love. As part of his declamatory mode, the poet-lover’s couplets can employ rhetorical repetition, replete with parallel phrases, echoing sounds, and modulated meaning that climaxes in a summary closing line possessing internal balance:
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos’d,
By the same token, the poet-lover makes repeated use of rhetorical questions, which bid defiance to any answers other than what he already assumes: that his lady was wronged and should be glorified.
Pope’s heroic couplets give his poetry an aphoristic quality, as in the following observation on human mortality: “A heap of dust alone remains of thee;/ ‘Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.” Poetic diction—elevated poetic statement—comes into play when black funeral clothes are termed “sable weeds.” There is pathetic fallacy when nature is said to cooperate in mourning at her gravesite: “There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow.”
Finally, in keeping with the rhetorical quality of “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” a simile appears in the explicit comparison between dull ordinary mortals with no “ambition,” and lazy oriental monarchs devoid of the dead lady’s godlike ambition (aspiration) in life: “Like Eastern kings a lazy state [sedateness] they keep.”