analysis of elegy for jane

7/29/2019 Analysis of Elegy for Jane

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Analysis of Elegy for Jane: my student thrown by ahorse, by Theodore Roethke

Elegyfor Jane

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

In Elegy for Jane, Theodore Roethke compiles images that are most unelegiac in nature. The

definition of an elegy is a poem in memory of a deceased acquaintance. Its tone should be somber

and it is devoid of humor.

Ask anyone who has read this poem long ago or even recently and theyll more than likely say, Oh,

yeah! The sidelong pickerel smile. An elegy is supposed to be mournful, but who can remain

unamused when a girls smile is related not just to a fish but to a singularly unhandsome one. Line

ones description of neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils is less arresting but certainly does not

focus on aspects of beauty.

And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

The remainder of the opening quatrain describes the students habitual taciturnity that, when startled

into talk, produced not sentences of weighty profundity but leaping syllables that induced delight in

her as well as her auditors.


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A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

The first bird image is carefully selected and denotes a commonplace fowl that is happy not

joyous, blissful or exuberant and who is blast beruffled with tail into the wind. Hardly a thing of

beauty.

And when she happened to be sad, she was beyond the comforting words of a father, much less an

instructoracting in loco parentis.

My sparrow, you are not here,

A sparrow, like a wren, is the most ordinary of birdlife. Had the poet been wanting to suggest beauty

and grandeur, he had a host of winged creatures at his disposal, from robins to cardinals to

chickadees and kingfishers. Instead she is for him a skittery pigeon.

Clearly the poet has feelings for the girl who died so early and so tragically, The feelings will be

familiar to anyone who has taught at the secondary or college level. There are students we love

without a trace of lust or animal desire. Roethke is not describing an affair with a mature female of

beauty as he did in I Knew a Woman. The images are nothing like lovely in her bones . . . the way a

body sways. . .she moved in circles and those circles moved. There has been no prodigious mowing

here no sickle, no rake.

Instead there is deep affection and a sense of loss. The girl was a wren, a sparrow, and a pigeon.

The poet possibly feels somewhat out of place at her graveside, since he is neither father nor lover.Yet he is innocently bereft.


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Theodore Roethke's poem, Elegy for Jane, is the tragic tale of a man's emotional response to thedeath of one of his pupils. The girl, Jane, was thrown by a horse, resulting in her untimelydemise.

The speaker in this poem is the teacher of the dead girl, which shows the reader an immenseamount about the nature of the relationship between the victim and the person telling the story.

At the end of the story, we see the teacher's comments on how society views his relationship

with the girl, and how he is forced to distance himself from her based on his occupation.

A noted English professor recently said to his students with regard to this poem, Are we allowed

to like our students? Yes. Are we allowed to be fond of our students? Yes. Are we allowed toenjoy the company of our students? Yes. But by no means are we permitted to develop a feeling

of love, whatever that may be, towards our students, for we are in loco parentis, so long as you

are at this school. This is the point at which Roethke is trying to illustrate, that the intitution that

is formalized education prohibits the forming of close emotional ties, and makes teachers (andstudents) feel that they are on a different plane than the other, with neither having even the right

to love the other. In Roethke's words, because the teacher is neither father or lover, he has no

right to love her at all.

Upon looking at the wider picture, it becomes clear what Roethke is getting at. What kind of

world places restrictions on emotions based on occupation. While some teachers have been notedto do unscrupulous things with students, honest and well-meaning teachers now are paralyzed by

societal conventions.

This poem emphasizes the theme of innocence when describing the young girl, using repeated

comparisons to animals and plants. The act of losing something so pure, so innocent, so perfect,makes the loss of the girl's life so much harder on the speaker.

While it is normally prudent to question the reliability of a narrator, it is quite evident that the

speaker in Elegy is speaking from the most deep and innermost part of his heart. Even the title,Elegy shows that there is a certain reverence for the dead girl, as an elegy is most often heard at a

funeral, a place of utmost respect.

Roethke's poem is an introspective work that shows a theme of societal constraints and of

innocence. The combination of the two lead to the narrator being distraught and grieved even

more so than one would expect normally. One can almost feel the moral fibre being strained and

twisted by this most tragic act, and Roethke does an admirable job of evoking the reader's utmostempathy.

analysis of elegy for jane

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