We might also look at the last thirteen lines to see more closely how things resolve themselves. The two legs in these lines derive from the rocking chair image earlier, and the stockings are literally “high-lows” suggesting the “silken ladder” image and also the precipice that was the original rift. In the space of a few lines, high, low, and center have been conflated, suggesting eventually the “fusion” of presence and absence. All this is meant to establish a logic of sorts to fuse ending and beginning as the poem repeats its first line title, literally starting over. And yet, for all its triumph, the poem also acknowledges the seriousness of the precipice; throughout the poem there have been “plants stripped,” branches that “scratch” threateningly, the “dark falling wing of plants,” and words such as “hopeless” and “unknown” that can’t be kept out. If the style provides a protection against time, as Derrida suggests, the elegiac sense nonetheless threatens in these words and the history in the poem, providing a dramatic tension.

In linking, on a philosophical level, stylistics and elegiacs, I am not suggesting a terribly dark vision of what a poem tries to do. Poets like James Tate, for instance, project a comic and surrealistic surface that becomes more comic as the vision it masks becomes more tragic. And we should remember that an elegy is not meant to be a dark and sad poem, but a triumphant one, if we are to listen to the elegies from Ovid through Tasso and Milton, to Rilke, Jiménez and Auden in our own age; these elegies always define themselves within a larger context of consolations. It might be useful to examine an elegy — Anna Akhmatova’s “March Elegy” — to explore these connections. As in the case of Breton’s poem, a certain risk is involved in using a translation, but in both cases the translations are excellent English poems. Besides, our concern is with style as a mode of thought, with a philosophy of style. Joseph Brodsky notes that Akhmatova’s style is characterized by strict rhymes and meters, relaxed a bit by the time of this poem, and short sentences with little or no subordination. It is, he says, a non-assertive style that diminishes the role of the “I.” And yet, Brodsky notes, there is a kind of movement that rivals the push of Breton’s lines: “Often within just one stanza she’d cover a variety of seemingly unrelated things,” Brodsky says, so many so quickly that she undermines the “formality” of the poem. The effect, I believe, is that the voice lets down its guard, the timeless metronomic ring of the lines is disrupted, and time, with all its reminders of death and loss, subtly enters the poem. Her poems hold off, but never fully, what they argue against, and this tension is the source of their dramatic power. Here is the poem, translated by Stanley Kunitz:

The struggle within the poem is against memory: the more we remember from the past, the more we remember how irretrievably past our experiences are. The little catalogue of images beginning in line 5 suggests the sort of failure of traditional consolations that the poem argues against — beginning with a “modest church” and ending with “Bible-oaks,” but containing within that frame a movement from “a harsh chorus” to a “secret conclave,” a kind of “jail” for the soul. Memory, in fact, becomes “malevolent.” In addition, the quick movement and the impersonal notation method mutes the elegiac potential in this part of the poem; this impersonality is then underscored by the notion that the whole catalogue comprises an unknown “somebody’s dreams.” However, the reference to the “somebody,” with its rowboat that comes out of nowhere, presents the first problem for the drama of the poem, for while allowing the poem to escape a reference to a personal and concrete loss, it also suggests the kind of detachment and coldness where, the poem goes on, “winter… fills the world.”