Mourning Nature: The Elegiac and the Not Yet Lost: Re-reading Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”

Francesco Giusti

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Chapter 3 Mourning Nature: The Elegiac and the Not Yet Lost

Re-reading Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”

In: The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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Francesco Giusti

Francesco Giusti
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 52–75

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004723603_005

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Abstract

Discourses about environmental crises are imbued with an elegiac tone; they are often inflected as acts of mourning for a lost nature, extinct species, or a dying planet. This article discusses the resources and limits of the elegiac when it comes to acknowledging or, conversely, obscuring the systemic forces behind such crises. The investigation focuses on two crucial issues: the act of naming and the particular-universal dichotomy, a conundrum at the heart of elegy and ecopoetry alike. Re-reading Juliana Spahr’s poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” (2005), which has been interpreted as an elegy governed by a melancholic structure, this article argues that what the poem reveals is not so much a retrospective idealization of a lost primal world, as the extent to which that world was already contaminated and the socio-economic system that prevented a community from becoming aware of that contamination while it was happening. Seeking a way out of the mourning vs. melancholia framework, the poem will also be discussed with the aid of Sigmund Freud’s essay “On Transience,” rather than the classic “Mourning and Melancholia.”

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

Series: DQR Studies in Literature Online, Volume: 66/1, DQR Studies in the Lyric, Volume: 66/1, and DQR Studies in Literature, Volume: 66/1

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004723603

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 14 Jan 2025

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Chapter 3 Mourning Nature: The Elegiac and the Not Yet Lost

Re-reading Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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