Quote 1: “This was our world.” Adrienne Rich Mourning Picture, line 7

To me, this quote is very evocative of the void grief brings. It seems as though Rich is writing about a grandmother or elderly figure, given the references to a cane and a rocking chair, and this is a type of grief I am familiar with. As grief settles, the world seems to alter itself around what (who) is now missing. “This was our world,” yours and mine, ours together. We played together or talked together, we navigated the world that is no longer ours. It was, and now you are gone and it is no longer. Rich’s poem does an incredible job at bringing out the effects of grief on a young mind.

Quote 2: “A reminder of all those Victorian girls / With death-knell names who died young,” John Seelye Mourning Picture, lines 3-4

Seelye takes a different approach to the poem than Rich does, though they both use the imagery in the painting to provide basis for their ideas. Seelye uses the painting to evoke an image of girls who died young, particularly literary characters such as Beth March, the sister who dies in Alcott’s Little Women. In Seelye’s poem, he focuses in on the girl in the painting as an emblem of death, as the person being mourned, rather than Rich’s posing of her as the mourner.

The juxtaposition of the girl being symbolized as either the mourner or the mourned is very interesting. Given the way the girl is facing, away from the other figures in the painting, she very well could be the reason for mourning. Her facing away is showing that she is the departed, she is leaving the people in her home, and they are mourning her. She is also the only person in the painting not dressed fully in black clothing, contrasted to the sitting figures. Through this analysis, my question becomes: is the girl the mourned or a mourner?