Miguel de Unamuno and Heraclitus: from ‘The Eternal Elegy’ (‘La elegía eterna’) to ‘The Cut Flower’(‘La flor tronchada’)

The aim of this brief article is to demonstrate and analyze the influence of Heraclitus’s thought on some of the poems written by Miguel de Unamuno, in particular ‘La elegía eterna’ and ‘La flor tronchada’. At times –as in ‘La elegía eterna’– Heraclitus merely serves as a sort of a walking stick, an aid to his efforts to poetically reveal his anxieties. On other occasions –as in ‘La flor tronchada’– he genuinely needs Heraclitus’s philosophy to illustrate his view of human life and its relation to God as unending warfare.

The drowned and the saved: shipwrecks and the 'cursus' of Latin love elegy

Throughout the corpus of Latin love elegy, the imaginary tombs envisaged by the elegists for their own personae and for other inhabitants of their poetic world display a striking tendency to take on the characteristic attributes and personalities of those interred within. The final resting-place of Propertius, for instance, that self-proclaimed acolyte of Callimachean miniaturism and exclusivity, is to be sequestered from the degrading attentions of the passing populace (Prop. 3.16.25–30) and crowned with the poet's laurel (2.13.33–4). What remains of his meagre form will rest in a ‘tiny little urn’ (paruula testa, 2.13.32) beneath a monument declaring the lover's slavery to a single passion (2.13.35–6), and the grave is to be attended, or so he hopes, by the object of that passion herself (3.16.23–4), or occasionally (though he is not so confident of this) by his patron Maecenas (2.1.71–8). Likewise the memorial designed by Ovid for Corinna's pet parrot - an imitatrix ales endowed with the most distinctive foibles of the elegiac tradition - in Amores 2.6, comprising a burial mound pro corpore magnus (2.6.59) topped with a tombstone described as exiguus (‘tiny’, 2.6.60; cf. Prop. 2.1.72, 2.13.33), exhibits an elegiac emphasis worthy of the parrot's human counterparts among Ovid's poetic predecessors.

Rumshisky`s Music Album. Mamenu. Including an Elegy to the Triangle Fire Victims. Violinsatz

A.Schorr

"Mameniu"! Including an Elegy to the Triangle Fire Victims

A.Schorr

[Excerpt from the poem "An Elegy"], undated

Folio-sized leaf containing a handwritten copy of stanzas 13-24 of "An elegy on the late Rt. Hon. W------ P---, Esq," a satirical poem about William Pitt first published in London in 1766. The excerpt begins "Where the dull slave, or Scycophant confess'd," and ends, "And swells quite crimson'd with Britania's Blood." The copy is marked with scribbles.

Elegy written in a country churchyard /

Cover title: Gray's elegy.

Elegy for strings : op. 58 /

Mode of access: Internet.

In honour : an elegy /

Mode of access: Internet.

Thysia : an elegy.

Mode of access: Internet.

Eustace; an elegy.

Dedication signed: C. d'E.

Gray's Elegy and its author.

Mode of access: Internet.