#1

Elegies and Aubades and Pastorals. Oh my.

I have no idea how to approach these. I'm not used to writing poetry of this sort. I don't know how to be sentimental without feeling overly cheesy and cliche.

So naturally, I went on good old google and searched for tips on how to write one.

www.mahalo.com (which from what I gather is Hawaiian eHow) gives these helpful tips (complete with grammatical errors):

• An elegy poem is a poem written on the occasion of someone's death. How to Write an Elegy Poem explains everything you need to know to create a lasting work of art.

• Writing an Elegy Poem Tips

  1. Fitting subjects includes the death of a loved one or a president.
  2. The poem must be somber in tone.
  3. There is no set form, but a good elegy should include a metrical pattern or rhyme scheme.
  4. Try to create distinctive imagery.
  5. Include some of your own thoughts about death and dying

I'm sure that whoever wrote that had the best intentions, but I feel like it's quite opinionated, considering the tone of tip number three. So I moved on to the normal eHow site and found this:

An elegy is a poem to memorialize someone beloved or respected who is deceased. One of the most famous elegys ever written is Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln entitled "O Captain! My Captain!" In English literature, this type of poem usually contains specific lyric essentials. When writing your own elegy, include the elements in the steps below to craft a moving and personal tribute.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Step 1

   Describe when and why you are writing the poem. Explain where you, the author, are now and why you are looking back. Depict your relationship with the deceased. Pastoral references, like portraying the author and departed one as shepherds, are commonly used in an elegy as metaphors for the relationship.

2. Step 2

   Explain how the person died and express not just grief, but anger and astonishment that the person has passed. Include the cause of the death. Let the means of death inspire the poem's imagery; for example, if the person drowned, incorporate the sea as a character or symbol.

3. Step 3

   Include attempts to deny the reality of the person's death or resurrect the person. Eventually accept of the unavoidability of the loss.

4. Step 4

   Reflect on how the person's death has impacted the world. Ask how the world can go on without this person. Imagine what this person could have contributed that will never be fulfilled.

5. Step 5

   Meditate on the nature and inevitability of death within the cycle of life. Conclude the elegy with a degree of comfort and reassurance in the certainty of how life progresses and a hope of the afterlife.

This description not only has a spelling error, but they invented a word as well! Unavoidability was, I'm almost certain, meant to be inevitability. I don't know if I'm the only one, but seeing a spelling or grammar error in a document that is supposed to be instructional or informative comepletely discredits it. I don't trust people who can't put a sentence together to inform me of what I'm supposed to do. Maybe I'm crazy for that. Maybe not. Who knows? But back to the point.

There are some good points, though. Step five helps out a bit, guiding me in the direction of the poem at least. But I was still not satisfied. So once again, I searched a bit more. This times I googled "How to be sentimental without being cliche." No luck there. I tried various versions of that phrase, but to no avail. Looks like I'm on my own on this one.