‘Incomprehensible wonder’: Elegiac Expression in Dorothy Porter’s Wild Surmise

Abstract

This article contends that Dorothy Porter’s verse novel Wild Surmise (2002) is a postmodern elegiac work, which explores the role of unfulfilled desire and mourning. It is through Porter’s paralleled exploration of the ‘incomprehensible wonder’ offered by outer space, alongside the familiarities of domestic life that allow Wild Surmise to explore the grief attached to desire and loss. In order to read Wild Surmise as an elegiac work this paper will predominantly draw from studies of modern and postmodern Anglophone elegies. This approach will allow for a literary-historical account for how the elegiac mode stems from the elegy genre and will reveal how a discussion of elegy conventions may expand upon an understanding of the elegiac mode. This paper is informed by the scholarship of Jahan Ramazani (1994), Karen E. Smythe (1992), David Kennedy (2007) and Tammy Clewell (2009), specifically in relation to their writing of the politics of mourning and consolation within elegiac works. Accordingly, Wild Surmise will be interpreted as a postmodern elegiac work due the ways in which desire, mourning and consolation are depicted throughout the verse novel.