Mortality, Elegy, and the Imperishability of the Soul: Death, Memory, and Transcendence in the Poetry of Hari Singh Gour

Abstract

In this paper, a close reading of five poems by Hari Singh Gour will be undertaken on a sustained basis (Random Rhymes, 1892; 2024 Anuugya edition, ed. Laxmi Pandey) which form the most intensive part of the collection in the form of mortality, grief, elegy and transcendence: In Memoriam (To My Sister) (p. 65), Death (p. 30), On the Tomb of Tamerlane (pp. 32–33), “Hadrian’s Address to His Soul” (p. 38), and “On the Tomb of Fawcett” (pp. 41). With reference to the tradition of elegy found in classical antiquity in both the English Romantics and the Victorians, on neo-Platonic philosophy of soul and immortality, and on Indian conceptions of the persistence of the ātman after physical death, the paper claims that the death poetry of Gour represents a strict and emotionally direct meditation upon the question of what remains. The paper places the elegiac poetics of Gour and the poetry of Tennyson, Keats, Shelley and Matthew Arnold and pays due attention to the distinctly Indian aspect of his philosophical and aesthetic legacy. It contends that the most striking feature of the elegiac vision of Gour is that it never accepts the finality of death: in each of the five poems, death is not an end but a change, the transformation of the body into earth, of the individual soul into something that brings to life the natural world, of human greatness into something that lives or, more educatively, does not. The paper concludes that the death poetry of Gour is worthy of appreciation as a pioneer work in the genre of Indian English elegy.