ABSTRACT
Two of the finest Victorian achievements in love poetry are elegies occasioned by the death of a wife: Coventry Patmore's bereavement odes from The Unknown Eros and Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13. The loss of the beloved in death had been a central subject of love poetry at least since Dante and Petrarch; but as Rod Edmond (1981) pointed out in a comparative discussion of the social context of the two Victorian works, 'love elegies on wives were rare before the nineteenth century', Milton's sonnet on his late wife and Henry King's 'The Exequy' being exceptions. Edmond also reviewed the internal evidence that the first poem in Hardy's sequence was influenced by two of Patmore's, which he rightly found to be of less interest than 'the similarities of approach and treatment growing out of their shared situation' (162, 152).
