- 追加された行はこの色です。
- 削除された行はこの色です。
Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane” was generally relaly sad to read which caught me by surprise even, after reading the title which tells us it is an elegy written for a girl named Jane who fell off a horse. What was interesting to me was that although the poem has a sad tone to it and is an elegy, it remains honest and perhaps accurate to this student, Jane, in a mildly humorous way. Roethke describes her face, “And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile (2).” After defining “pickerel” and looking up images of it, I found describing a persons smile in this way (especially in an elegy) to be amusing and original. He describes this girl as anything but graceful, he states about Jane how “ once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her (3).” I imagine her upbeat, yelling out syllables. Roethke’s description of the girl remains honest and admirable, it made the image of her truly alive. I love the two lines describing that her sadness consisted of such “pure depth” that “even a father could not find her.” Following the images of her being energetic and happy, it encouraged me to reread the stanza and seemed to increase the depth of the poem. Later on in the poem Roethke continues to call Jane by names that describe her apparent disheveled nature, they include sparrow, skittery pigeon and maimed darling. While reading the poem, the relationship between the speaker and the girl becomes blurred yet you are reminded of it in a powerful way within the last stanza where the speaker claims to have “no rights in this matter” for he has no close relationship to her in a traditional sense. Yet, its clear in the poem that even if the speaker wasn’t related to Jane or know her as a lover may, he admires her nature.
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