“Our dead”: Michael Field and the Elegiac Tradition

Chapter Four asks: how do Michael Field’s elegiac texts fit into the rich literary tradition of elegy; and how does Michael Field's writing about grief compare to other Victorian representations of death, loss, and mourning? Through analysis of their early elegiac verse, the "Longer Allegiance" cycle from Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), and Whym Chow, Flame of Love (1914), Chapter Four argues that the coauthors’ paradoxical gearing into and taking up of death and mourning manifests a complex relation to masculine tradition and patriarchal norms: rejecting elegiac tradition to some extent in favor of continued modes of eco-entanglement, yet also continuing to employ the Dionysian and Decadent tropes also used by those homoerotically-inclined male Aesthetes who were their contemporaries. Michael Field’s later, queer erotics of mourning their beloved dog, Whym Chow, like their earlier elegiac texts and rituals, reside within existing elegiac traditions; but also move beyond them through active mourning strategies also found in modernist, and later, thought. Thus, this chapter demonstrates how Michael Field provides exceptional and important examples of Victorian elegy, examples that both shed light upon and complicate their era’s literary elegiac forms and other practices of grief.