Elegy for a Lost Companion

J. D. H. likely represents a deeply personal loss for Sidney Lanier, possibly a friend or family member who died young. The poem captures unresolvable grief - a pain that cannot be escaped by memory or distance.

Lanier uses compact, musical language to express emotional complexity. The repeated structural symmetries ("breaks if it cling" / "breaks, if far") mirror the speaker's psychological oscillation between attachment and separation.

Emotional Landscape of Mourning

The poem transforms natural imagery into emotional terrain. Sea-winds and stars become companions in mourning, personified to share the speaker's sense of loss.

Notice how death is portrayed not as peaceful, but as a torturous state of perpetual separation. The repeated phrase "so cold, so cold" emphasizes the physical and emotional distance between the living and dead.

Sidney Lanier

To J. D. H.

• • • • •

Dear friend, forgive a wild lament

Insanely following thy flight.

I would not cumber thine ascent

Nor drag thee back into the night;

But the great sea-winds sigh with me,

The fair-faced stars seem wrinkled, old,

And I would that I might lie with thee

There in the grave so cold, so cold!

Grave walls are thick, I cannot see thee,

And the round skies are far and steep;

Mythic afterlife reference

Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. The speaker wants oblivion to escape grief.

A-wild to quaff some cup of Lethe,

Pain is proud and scorns to weep.

My heart breaks if it cling about thee,

Paradoxical grief logic

Notice the emotional contradiction: the speaker is simultaneously desperate to be with and without the lost person.

And still breaks, if far from thine.

O drear, drear death, to live without thee,

O sad life—to keep thee mine.

• • • • •

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation