Elegy for N. N. (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Czesław Miłosz
- First Published: 1974
- Type of Work: Meditation/elegy
- Genres: Poetry, Elegy, Meditation
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Memory, Europe or Europeans, World War II, Poetry or poets, California, West, U.S., Death or dying, Germany or German people, Holocaust, Jewish
The Poem
Written in free verse, this elegy by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz consists of seven irregular verse-paragraphs that form an extended meditation on human love, remorse, and memory. It is addressed to “N. N.,” a woman who is not so much the subject of the poem as its audience and who shares with the poet certain memories of youth in Lithuania. Elegies are traditionally occasioned by a death, but here it is not a person but the poet’s sense of connection to his past that has been lost. The poem is composed in the first person, and the reader seems to be...
[The entire page is 1393 words long]
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