Elegy as Political Expression in Women's Poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov, Forché
Author(s): Carole Stone
Source: College Literature , Feb., 1991, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 84-91
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25111879
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to College Literature
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
84 College Literature
Elegy as Political Expression in Women's Poetry:
Akhmatova, Levertov, Forch?
Carole Stone
Stone, a poet and critic, is associate professor of English at Montclair State Colleg
Her recent articles have appeared in Western Ohio Journal, CEA Critic, Seatt
Review, and Women's Studies.
The elegy traditionally centers on men, women appearing only as attendant charac
ters such as nymphs or as the muse who inspired the poem. A classical example of t
elegy's use of muse figures is Hesiod's Theogony:
With the Heliconian Muses let us start
our song; they hold the great and godly mount
of Helicon, and on their delicate feet
They dance around the darkly bubbling spring
And around the altar of the mighty Zeus, (lines 1-5)
The muses here are the poem's beginning rather than its destination, inspiring song rath
than creating it. Similarly, an example of the role of nymphs in elegy can be seen in Milton
"Lycidas," which asks, "Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep / Closed o'
the head of your loved Lycidas?" (50-51). Milton presents the nymphs as figures who cou
be consoling but who have failed to appear.
Since women in traditional elegy have no voice, when women have written eleg
they have had to invent new conventions to place themselves authoritatively at the poem
center and to describe the female journey of mourning rather than the male. If th
traditional (male) elegy addresses the question "Where were you?" ?or in essence, "Ho
could you allow him to die?" ?to stylized female figures, to whom do women elegis
address this question? The answer, I believe, is to each other, as mothers, daughters, an
sisters rather than nymphs or muses, in consolation rather than accusation, and as a mea
of redressing their loss. Likewise, women and men appear to differ in the ways they free t
energy of grief and rage. I would suggest that for women, political protest?in which the
mediate between public and private worlds ? offers a solution to the problem of how to de
with grief.
The "work of mourning," to use Freud's term, is undertaken communally as well a
individually; according to Freud, it requires that "the ego . . . [free] its libido from the lost
object" (589). I would regard the conventions of the elegy, among which Peter Sacks list
pastoral contextualization, the myth of the vegetation deity (particularly the
sexual elements of such myths and their relation to the sexuality of the
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carole Stone 85
mourner), the use of repetitions and refrains, the reiterated questions, the
outbreak of vengeful anger or cursing, the procession of mourners, the
movement from grief to consolation, and the traditional images of resurrec
tion, (2)
as strategies of the mourning self to detach its libido from the loved object. In the case of
women, however, most of these conventions do not work because, as Celeste Schenck
points out, "Women poets from the first refuse or rework the central symbolism and
procedures of elegy, mainly, I think, because the genre itself excludes the feminine from its
perimeter except as muse principle or attendant nymph" (13). Schenck sees the female elegy
as "a poem of connectedness; women inheritors seem to achieve poetic identity in relation
to ancestresses, in connection to the dead" (15). Arguing that they "seem unwilling to
render up their dead" (15), she shows how women poets suspend traditional elegiac
procedures, thus deconstructing prescribed elegiac conventions.
I would argue that for women elegy can also be a form of political protest, allied
with their need for affiliation with each other that puts women's voices at the center of
women's elegies. Additionally, the elegiac mode provides an acceptable form for expressing
the anger women feel against oppression, since their anger is read as a stage of grief. As
Freud would suggest, the elegy for women is indeed both an individual and a communal
mourning, a process we shall see in the elegies of three twentieth-century poets who
nevertheless refuse to give up their personal and their collective dead, the victims of war and
oppression. Belonging to three different generations, they illustrate the passing of tradition
from literary foremother (Anna Akhmatova) to literary daughter (Denise Levertov) to
literary granddaughter (Carolyn Forch?). The connectedness to each other that Schenck
identifies as a major feature of female elegy can be seen in their awareness of a common
tradition. Levertov, half-Russian through her father and nurtured on Russian fairy tales and
literature, allies herself culturally with Akhmatova; Forch? ties herself to the Akhmatovian
line by citing Akhmatova's "Requiem" (written 1935-40) as a source of inspiration for her
own work.
In each of the three elegies we shall examine, the woman's voice is decidedly at the
center, where it bears witness to the atrocities of war and the price of protest. Rather than
functioning as the attendant nymphs of traditional elegy, these three poets conduct funerals
on their own terms. One might even call their voices revolutionary as they transform
domestic and private grief into a collective grief for nations and for the struggle for
freedom. Akhmatova mourns the victims of Stalin's oppression, including her son; Lever
tov grieves for her sister as a political protester whose life was destroyed in trying to effect
change; Forch? speaks for those who died as victims in wars and for those, like her friend
Terrence Des Pr?s, who write about them, thus exposing themselves to the sorrow and
suffering of others.
In this essay I want to demonstrate how Akhmatova's, Levertov's, and Forch?'s
poems comprise a specific tradition of female elegy. I shall begin by pointing out that
women in the past have been excluded not only from the writing of elegy, but also from the
experience of war that is at the core of Akhmatova's, Levertov's, and Forch?'s poems. As
Susan Schweik observes, anthologists and critics in the past "have attempted to discard or
repress the active presence of women as subjects in the discourse of war" (310). No doubt
one reason for this exclusion is that war poetry has traditionally been defined as a literal
narrative of the soldier's direct participation in warfare. Schweik notes, "In American
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
86 College Literature
forties war poetry, for instance, experience of war' was generally taken to comprehend the
experience of the soldier but not ... the experience of the Holocaust victim, the Japanese
American in an internment camp, or a woman working in a defense plant" (327). Thus
women artists have not been empowered to construct a literary tradition involving either
war or political protest against all of war's manifestations?rape, murder of civilians,
bombing of cities, genocide?and against the many tyrannies war sets in motion. Yet
especially since World War II, it has become impossible to define participation in war by
gender, since women are as directly involved as men, as brutalized by the atrocities of wars
and of political repression that has no identifiable front.
I would argue that artists such as Akhmatova, Levertov, and Forch?, well aware of
the prohibitions against women's writing about war in political protest and also unable to
look to female predecessors for a political war poetry, turned to the elegy as a more
apparently conventional form in which they could mourn and protest simultaneously. They
could mould the elegy into a female vehicle uniquely suited to political subjects. Accord
ingly, the first of the characteristics common to these three poems suggesting a specifically
female elegiac political tradition is their fusion of the political and the personal. These poets'
elegies mediate between the public and the private worlds and thus allow them to express
grief for a loved one, an acceptable outlet for a woman, while simultaneously protesting the
cause of the loved one's death?in these elegies, the political repression it is less permissible
for women to write about.
The occasion for "Requiem" is the imprisonment of Akhmatova's son; the poet
transforms that private loss into public loss as her song of grief for her son becomes an elegy
for all victims of Stalinist oppression. By depicting herself standing in line for hours with
other mothers in front of the gray prison walls, waiting to see her son, she uses elegy to
protest the horrors of the Stalinist years. Similarly, in "Olga Poems" (1967) Levertov
mourns her sister as a victim of her socialist ideals, which led to her premature death.
Levertov numbers her sister among the many who have fought against injustice and have
suffered for their attempts to change the world into a better place. Finally, Forch? also
merges public and private worlds by dedicating "Ourselves or Nothing" (1981) to Des Pr?s,
a close friend who worked on the reminiscences of Holocaust survivors and suffered
depression in doing so. Forch?'s elegy mourns the victims Des Pr?s writes about as well as
the victims of more recent wars.
In addition to the merging of public and private grief, these three poems suggest an
elegiac political tradition specific to women by virtue of the strong bond each poet feels
with other women whose spirit she shares and who shape her imagination. The catalyst for
"Requiem" is an ordinary Russian woman, face turned blue with cold, who stands with
Akhmatova in the prison queue. In her prefatory note datelined "1 April 1937, Leningrad,"
Akhmatova explains how this woman stimulated her to write her poem as a means of
bearing witness:
In the fearful years of the Yzhov terror I spent seventeen months in
prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody identified me. Beside
me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course,
never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common
to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes I can." And then something
like the shadow of a smile crossed what once had been her face. (23)
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carole Stone 87
Likewise, Levertov grieves for her older sister, her symbolic mother, a mentor who
example of political activism turns Levertov into the political poet she is, strongly prote
ing against the Vietnam War and more recently the killings by those in power in E
Salvador. And Forch? identifies with Akhmatova, connecting herself to a specifically female
elegiac tradition by explicitly acknowledging her indebtedness to the other poet for havi
borne witness for the woman in line:
I am only imagining this,
as if I had not entered your life
like the dark fact of a gun on your pillow,
or Anna Akhmatova's "requiem"
and its final I can when the faceless woman
before her asked can you describe this? (50-55)
Forch? not only recalls Akhmatova's recording of persecution in "Requiem" but also the
oral description of the famine and hardship of World War II given to her by her Cze
friend Anna. Anna, the subject of other poems in Forch?'s collection The Country Betwe
Us (1981), represents the closeness and identification Forch?, like the other two poets, fee
for other women?a feeling that ties in with Schenck's notion that "Women elegists . . .
deploy writing as a strategy for prolonging attachment" (22).
One theory explaining the personal attachment to other women these poems exhibi
is Nancy Chodorow's contention that feminine development is characterized by closenes
with the mother, with whom a woman begins life in a symbiotic merger. Thus she mus
develop in such a manner that she can re-create the mother-infant symbiosis when s
becomes a mother herself. Consequently, women develop the capacity for nurturanc
dependence, and empathy, and the female personality is relational (6-7). Chodorow's theo
of female development could account for women's using the elegy as a strategy for deferrin
separation, as well as accounting for the mother-daughter bond that can be seen in t
passing on of the Akhmatovian tradition of political elegy. For as Judith Kegan Gardin
observes, "Bonds between women structure the deepest layers of female personality and
establish the patterns to which literary identifications are analogous" (363).
In these poets* elegies I see not only literary identification, but a shared concern for
humanity. Akhmatova, Levertov, and Forch? speak for all women who are directly affect
by political history and for those who, like Forch?, voluntarily go to places such as
Salvador to try to change history by witnessing it and writing about it. Sylvia Townsen
Warner once argued that women are not commonly accepted as professional writers
Although Warner was speaking in a different context, Barbara Brothers's response,
"Women are writers and they are witnesses to history" (352), is germane; like male write
women must record what they see.
So another characteristic of the political elegy exhibited in these poems is a deep sense
of history combined with a love of country. This patriotism can be seen in Akhmatova
prologue to "Requiem": "Innocent Russia / Writhed under bloodstained boots, and
Under the tyres, of Black Marias" (10-13). The public sphere of country and the priva
sphere of family conflate in her reference to the persecution she has experienced, "Son
irons and husband clay" (28). By referring to her first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, wh
was executed in 1921 on charges of being a counterrevolutionary, she evokes more th
personal sorrow; she gives us a sense of Russian history during the Stalin years. Th
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
88 College Literature
continuity of this oppression is reinforced by Gumilyov's being the father of her imprisoned
son.
Levertov shares Akhmatova's historical perspective; one might say she in
through her ancestry?her father was a Russian Jew who emigrated to Englan
Levertov refers to her sister as "Riding anguish as Tartars ride mares" (72), she co
both personal and public historical pasts, the "anguish" of family and nation. In
and her sister inherit more than their father's Russian background; he may
bequeathed to them their dedication to effecting change in human beings. For their
after marrying their Welsh mother, converted to Christianity and ran a halfway ho
Christians and Jews.
Thus Levertov's sister's obsession with a cause that cost her dearly in "y
humiliation, / of paranoia and blackmail and near-starvation, losing / the love of
loved, one after another, / parents, lovers, children, idolized friends" (255-58) is
trait she shares with the poet, who has (happily) used such idealism more constru
Love of country and a sense of history can be seen in other Levertov poems, such as
Vietnam War poem "Life at War" and the oratorio "El Salvador: Requiem an
tion." So although Levertov's poem to her sister is not directly mourning such vic
literal war as the "raped woman" of her poem "Thinking about El Salvador"
doomed people in Akhmatova's and Forch?'s poems, it nevertheless explains Le
inheritance of protest. For Levertov the elegy form demonstrates her credo of "t
total involvement in life" (Poet in the World 19), which is akin to what Judith Hem
calls Akhmatova's "faith in the sacramental character of poetry and . . . sense of res
ity for everything that happens in this world" (24).
As with Levertov and Akhmatova, historical consciousness and love of coun
crucial elements in Forch?. They encompass both her Czech background, which sh
about in her first book, Gathering the Tribes (1976), and her adopted country, El
Forch?'s visit to Prague illustrates once more that the fusion of public and private w
a salient feature of women's political elegy. When her friend Anna tells her about
hardship, Forch? has a sense of her own history, growing up of Czech backg
Detroit during World War II. She identifies with the Czech women, for as she
"The Island," "I have the fatty eyelids / of a Slavic factory girl" (21-22). Her
Prague makes her feel these women's pain:
In Prague, Anna told me, there was bread,
stubborn potatoes and fish, armies and the women
who lie down with them, eggs perhaps but never
meat, never meat but the dead.
In Theresienstadt she said there was only the dying.
Never bread, potatoes, fish or women.
They were all as yet girls then. ("Ourselves" 38-44)
The name of the concentration camp Theresienstadt, which was located in Czech
has special significance for her. She remembers how that word "ran screaming i
girlhood, lifting its grey wool dress, / the smoke in its violent plumes and feath
dark wormy heart of the human desire to die" (34-37).
Forch?'s sense of herself as a woman of Czech background widens to her
present history as she identifies with the women of the more recent Vietnam W
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carole Stone 89
. . . the long war
that misted country turned to the moon's surface
grey and ring-wormed with ridges of light,
the women in their silk ao dais along
the river, those flowers under fire, rolled
at night in the desperate arms of American men. (78-83)
For each of the three poets, history functions as part of the mourning process as they
bear witness to the tragedies of a people, a nation, a world in which human beings kill each
other. In doing so they pass through individual grief to collective grief, as exemplified by
Akhmatova's grieving for her son. In Section Eight, entitled "To Death," she laments her
son's pain, remembering "the stone face, hollow blanks / of eyes, my son's, through pain's
exquisite / Chisel" (28-30). In the epilogue she moves from her imprisoned son to all the
prisoners, remembering "how faces fall apart, / How fear looks out from under the
eyelids," recalling "terror's dry coughing sound" (1-2). Now she becomes a witness
speaking for "all those who stood there / in bitter cold, or in the July heat, / under that red
blind prison-wall" (10-12). Public and private grief merge at the end of the poem when she
speaks of her "tormented mouth / Through which a hundred million of my people cry"
(25-26). She is no attendant nymph, but the chief mourner, elegist for a nation:
I see, hear touch
All of you: the cripple they had to support
Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;
And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and
Say: "I come here as if it were home."
I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists ...
I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.
I remember them always and everywhere. (14-23)
Of the three poets' griefs, Levertov's is the most personal, and it is she who seems
least able to relinquish the love-object, her sister, and to turn her sorrow toward external
reality. Here the speaker's grief resembles what Freud has described as "the process of
regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism" (587). The poet's mourning is
close to Freud's melancholia, in which the mourner is self-tormented, reproaches himself
or herself for the loss of the love-object, and feels ambivalence toward the lost one.
"Black one, black one, / there was a white / candle in your heart" (37-39) is a direct
address to Levertov's dead, expressing both rage at the loss and such an ambivalence
toward Olga.
The poet's melancholia is perhaps explained by her sister's having served as a role
model for her; the mother identification makes the loss a deep wound. Yet Levertov can
overcome the narcissistic merger to ask, "What kept compassion's candle alight in you?", a
question raised by all three elegies. How, in the face of obstacles to speaking out, can
women retain their idealism? In "Olga," the speaker aches to find the answer from her dead
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
90 College Literature
sister, saying, "So many questions my eyes / smart to ask of your eyes" (267-68). We kno
from Levertov's 1966 poem "A Note to Olga," in which the poet pickets at Times Square
against the Vietnam War, that the resolution to her grief is activism. Imagining her sister's
high soprano singing "We Shall Overcome" along with her, she has achieved enoug
detachment from her loss to place her ego in the service of humanity. Moreover, she keep
her dead sister's ideals alive in the refusal to give up the dead that characterizes fema
elegy.
While Forch?'s "Ourselves or Nothing" does not mourn a specific person, ironically
the poem now serves as an elegy to Des Pr?s, dead at 49, to whom she dedicates the work.
In a reversal of the male invocation to the female muse, Des Pr?s is the muse who mediates
between public and private worlds. Forch? speaks of how his work has inspired her and
how it "swept / through the memoirs of men and women / who would not give up"
(20-22). She then moves to the atrocities of "Belsen, Dachau, Saigon, Calcutta, Salvador,"
in a collective grieving for the collective dead. Like the other two poets, she identifies with
women who have suffered and who resist injustice:
the woman beside me became my sister,
her hand cupping her mouth, the blood
that would later spill from her face
if what we believed were the truth. (110-13)
In her epigraph to Section 11 of The Country Between Us, Forch? quotes Constantine
P. Cavafy: "An obstacle was there transforming / The actions and the manner of my life /
An obstacle was often there / To silence me when I began to speak." Through elegy, Forch?
and her predecessors Akhmatova and Levertov have overcome the obstacles women face in
speaking out. They have invented elegiac conventions permitting them to write in a female
voice that expresses both private and collective grief. In their hands elegy becomes a form
that at once witnesses history and tries to change it.
WORKS CITED
Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem and Poem Without a Hero. Trans. D. M. Thomas. Athens:
Ohio UP, 1976.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Forch?, Carolyn. The Country Between Us. New York: Harper, 1981.
Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." Rpt. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay.
New York: Norton, 1989. 584-89.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "On Female Identity and Writing by Women." Critical Inquiry 8
(Winter 1981): 347-61.
Hemschemeyer, Judith. "A Poet and Her Country." Field 39 (Fall 1988): 22-24.
Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Dorothea Wender. London: Penguin, 1973.
Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973.
_. To Stay Alive. New York: New Directions, 1971.
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carole Stone 91
Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1985.
Schenck, Celeste. "Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy." Tulsa Stud
ies in Women's Literature 6 (Spring 1986): 13-27.
Schweik, Susan. "Writing War Poetry Like a Woman." Speaking of Gender. Ed. Elaine
Showalter. New York: Routledge, 1989. 310-32.
This content downloaded from
122.172.85.126 on Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:41:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
