The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion
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back) by repeating to myself the last two lines of “Rose Aylmer,” Walter Savage Landor’s 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmer’s who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of “Rose Aylmer” since I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what had been said about it in whichever class I had heard it analyzed. “Rose Aylmer” worked, whoever was teaching this class had said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise for the deceased in the first four lines (“Ah, what avails the sceptred race! / Ah, what the form divine! / What every virtue, every grace! / Rose Aylmer, all were thine”) gets brought into sudden, even shocking relief by “the hard sweet wisdom” of the last two lines, which suggest that mourning has its place but also its limits: “A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee.”
“‘A night of memories and sighs,’ ” I remembered the lecturer repeating. “A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn’t even say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours.”
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