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Close Readings

Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop

Feb 17, 2025
13:37

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions.


Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:


Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld


Read the poems here:


Ben Jonson: On My First Son

https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld


Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld


Geoffrey Hill: September Song

https://lrb.me/hillcrld


Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia

https://lrb.me/bishopcrld


Read more in the LRB:


Blair Worden on Ben Jonson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben


Blair Worden on puritanism

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben


Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n04/colin-burrow/rancorous-old-sod


Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose


Next episode:


Two elegies by Thomas Gray:


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes





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