Here we see the subject of last week’s elegy writing an elegy of his own for one of his students who died after a fall from a horse, Theodore Roethke having been a notable teacher of the young. It is a poem that walks the edge both of feeling and expression, yet in the end triumphs through an obvious sincerity coupled with a humility, a recognition that the poet’s grief is a marginal one, lacking the entitlement of someone with familial or romantic ties to the young woman. The language sometimes seems on the point of veering off into the merely poetic – ‘And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose’ is a bit too Dylan Thomas for my taste – and yet this slightly over-the-top imagery is sufficiently reined in and redeemed by the touching simplicity of the closing stanzas.

Pickerel: a young pike. It might be thought that being described as having a smile like a pike, even a young one, is not entirely complimentary, especially remembering Ted Hughes’s lines (see week 553): ‘Finally one/With a sag belly and the grin it was born with’. But I suspect that Roethke is thinking here not of the pike’s apparent facial expression but of the shy, elusive nature of the young woman’s smile, like the shadowy flicker of a fish moving underwater.

Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow,
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Theodore Roethke