Poem: Tichborne's Elegy by Chidiock Tichborne
ichborne's Elegy reveals to the reader the poet's reckoning with his own death. It is rare that poets write of their own demises with the foreknowledge of its untimeliness, as in this case, and the difficulty of the situation pervades throughout the verse. Tichborne clearly feels that his life is being severed from its rightful course (line 11), yet we are not directly informed of this notion until the central stanza. We are first thrust into a dismal mood by the first stanza, which reduces all the meaningful aspects of the poet to insignificance...in fact, if not for the note preceding the poem ("Written.../...before his execution") and the name in the title, we would wonder if the lines weren't penned by some bitter old man waiting for his days to run out. Perhaps this was the intention of Tichborne - to make himself feel old and feeble, so that the realization of his own impending expiration could be more easily accepted. The repetition of the last line of each stanza emphasizes the poet's inability to escape his execution, and its simple, matter-of-fact manner manages to bring a tired surrender with it ("And now...and now").The very fact that Tichborne is writing poetry in the last moments of his life gives him an element of grace and dignity - he clearly isn't losing his wits over his unhappy situation. His poem is perfectly iambic pentameter with true a b a b c c rhyme, completely masculine in endings, and a few interesting parallels pull its framework together strongly. Each end rhyme pair is significantly appropriate, each being an opposite of the other and yet equated. For example, lines 1 and 3, "cares" and "tares," or lines 2 and 4, "pain" and "gain." With these words placed carefully in these positions, the poet's youth is degraded further through the association, becoming first a "frost of cares," then equated to "tares," or weeds. This paradox/equation follows through most of the poem, especially well in lines 13 and 15 ("death" = "womb" = "tomb"). Even the fifth and sixth lines of the second and third stanza end in equative diction.
As is customary in elegiac poems beyond the seventeenth century, Tichborne finds some amount of consolation by the end of his verse, realizing that every man will die regardless of the time. Tichborne's elegy to himself is completed in a self-specific resolution, yet it can be generally applicable as well; death begins at birth, and the earth is man's eventual tomb. The poet substitutes a metaphorical hourglass for his life, and he seems to find some amount of acceptance through this as the sands run out with the end of the poem.