Exercise
Open the exercise and listen as your teacher reads the poem aloud.
Elegy
by Constance Carrier
Here where the elm trees were
is only empty air.
Where once they stood
how blunt the buildings are!
Where the trees were,
sky itself has fled
far overhead.
We have lost the leafy shield
between us and that space,
that lonely tract, revealed,
that light too straitly shed—
and lost as well the lace,
the filigree, that gave
the works of man a grace
not theirs by right.
The world is smaller and larger
with the tall trees gone.
Through sunlight yellow as pollen
we walk where the elms have fallen.
We walk in too much light.
{from America Poetry: The Twentieth Century Volume Two pg. 582}