Poetic mourning in the Darkness of Solitude: echoing conversations in the poetry of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Thomas Gray

In this article, I examine the role of conversations with the dead in the darkened solitude of grief in the poetry of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Thomas Gray. Close reading reveals how grieving in darkness is often paralleled with a feeling of separation from a light-filled system of nature, and how these poets used this separation to produce an alternate darkened landscape filled with echoes of mourners and the dead. I explore some of the ways Rowe and Gray question the substantiality of poetic language in the mourning process through images of darkness and echoes in desolate landscapes. By studying the echoes in their works, I argue that Rowe's and Gray's mourning poetry attempts to speak with the dead, and that by using echoed language, invocations of light and darkness, and depopulated landscapes, both poets produce a poetry that compensates for their grieving loss by creating a fantasy of company.