And its title is apt: it is a true Proustian reclamation, not simply of "the past", that vaguest of phantoms, but of an all-too-real, once-breathing, once-loved individual. And it is out of precise and specific details, unflinchingly recalled, that she re-arises before us. As Raine puts it, in his closing lines — evoking Conrad's famous introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus (to which his lover had introduced him) — the ultimate object of the poem, reinforced by the final punning rhyme, is
To make you real.
To make you see, to make you feel,
to make you hear.
To make you here.
Such attentive compassion produces that pity and terror which Aristotle identified as the consummate effect of genuine tragedy, and which brings catharsis. In this elegy, as well as in the almost unbearably poignant poem "I Remember My Mother Dying", Raine evokes that pity and that terror. Both elegies draw their cumulative force out of memory; the struggle to remember, to recover the past, gives each poem its fierce momentum. In the poem on his mother's death, again written in his seemingly shambling but in fact, quite skilfully calibrated couplets, Raine introduces delicate echoes which intensify the effect of the poem. There are hints, for example, of Louis MacNeice's "Autobiography", also composed in couplets ("My mother wore a yellow dress;/ Gently, gently, gentleness"), of nursery rhymes, even a suggestion of Thomas Hood's sentimental old lyric "I Remember, I Remember", here turned harrowing, as when Raine writes:
I remember
that before she became ill
my mother had a dark-eyed, frail
wispy delicacy, a gracefulness
created by her partial sight loss.
