No Consolation
No Consolation
The Lamenting Voice and Public Memory
This chapter considers the question of whether poetry is useful as a public statement of grief. It focuses on an elemental poetic response to death: the lament. Laments were performed by women who were professional or semiprofessional mourners; they were intended to evoke a strong response in the community gathered at the funeral. Making pain audible through their wept songs, and visual, through their dishevelled hair and lacerated cheeks, lamenting women orchestrated a spectacle of mourning that was part theatre, part spontaneous response to the anguish of grief.
Keywords: poetry, poems, public statement, laments, mourning, grief, lamenting women
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .