“these days of grief / Before the grief”: Registering Shock in Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (1985)

Abstract

Douglas Dunn was only 39 when his wife died prematurely of cancer at the age of 37. Out of this traumatic experience, the Scottish poet composed Elegies, a poignant and intimate sequence which attempts to articulate the numbing sensation of shock following the diagnosis and preceding actual death, an in-between period of time oscillating between the annihilating effect of shock and a furious desire to live to the last. This article focuses on the first three elegies of the sequence. Shock is mainly perceived through its side effects on the poetic persona, the most conspicuous side effect being an altered perception of time and reality. Initially, logic and language seem to fail; grief remains largely unarticulated; and the poet paradoxically strives to represent grief as speechlessness. Refusing a disturbing reality, the poet’s mind takes refuge in the unreal of the fairy tale, in a momentary reflex of self-preservation. Familiar childhood motifs and images offer a short-lived diversion; the imagination creates a less traumatic counter-story, but grief becomes synonymous with alienation. It is only when the bereaved husband/poet bridges the gap between social and private grief that appeasement is achieved. Irony emerges as an aesthetic balm, allowing the poet to distance himself from his experience, metamorphosing acute pain into tenderness and nostalgia, and giving it a broader social significance.