Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Thomas Lux’s "Elegy for Robert Winner" is a deeply personal and poignant meditation on friendship, mortality, and the limits of the body. The poem is dedicated to Robert Winner, a poet and longtime editor, who was confined to a wheelchair after breaking his neck in 1946 and lived another forty years with that injury. Lux’s elegy eschews grandiose metaphors in favor of a straightforward and raw expression of grief, making its emotional impact all the more powerful.

The poem begins with a dream in which the poet sees his friend walking again: "I dreamed my friend got up and walked; / he was taller than me / and we were young, striding / down some stairs, two at a time, headlong, / on our way to sports or girls." The dream is suffused with youthful energy, evoking a time before Winner’s accident, when the possibilities of life were still open. The movement in the dream—bounding down stairs, rushing toward pleasure—contrasts with the reality of Winner’s later years, confined to a wheelchair. The poet’s subconscious "frees him, freeing me," suggesting that in this dream space, Winner is restored to the vitality that his injury took from him, and Lux himself is released from the sorrow of witnessing his friend’s suffering.

Lux is adamant about rejecting abstraction when confronting Winner’s death: "My friend / is gone; no, no metaphors: dead." This blunt declaration insists on the finality of death, resisting the poetic tendency to soften loss with figurative language. Yet, paradoxically, even as he resists metaphor, he employs one: "who broke / his neck in 1946, six months / before I was born, and then forty years / in a wheelchair." By tying Winner’s injury to Lux’s own birth, the poet implies a kind of fateful overlap, as if their lives were connected in ways beyond their friendship.

Winner’s life was an extraordinary medical anomaly, a "miracle" that placed him "in the textbooks." But despite the remarkable longevity of his survival, the stark truth remains: "and now he?s dead, whom I loved." Lux’s use of "whom I loved" instead of "whom I love" emphasizes the temporal boundary that death imposes, the irrevocable change that comes with losing someone. The inclusion of Winner’s profession—both as a poet and as the administrator of a cemetery—adds a layer of irony. His work with graves made him intimately familiar with death in a professional sense, but now he himself occupies a grave. Lux notes that their conversations were focused on poetry, not "business," reinforcing their shared artistic world and the bond that transcended Winner’s physical condition.

The poem then moves into a surreal wish-fulfillment, expressing a desire to undo or overcome the injury that defined Winner’s life: "In my dream I wished we?d smashed his chair, / sent its bent wheels wobbling / over a cliff." This violent, almost rebellious image suggests Lux’s frustration with the limitations imposed on his friend. The wheelchair, a symbol of restriction, is imagined as something that should be destroyed, cast away in a dramatic act of defiance.

But the alternative wish is even more striking: "or I wished we?d run / to where the boulder is—just beneath / the surface of the stream—on which / he broke his neck, / and dove in together, emerged, / dove again, and emerged..." Here, Lux imagines revisiting the site of Winner’s accident, as if by reliving the moment, they could undo its consequences. The repetition of "dove in together, emerged, / dove again, and emerged" creates a cyclical rhythm, a ritual of renewal, as if immersing themselves in the water could somehow cleanse the past, offering Winner a second chance at life.

The poem closes with a return to the dream: "I dreamed my friend got up and walked. / We were striding down some stairs / and he was tall, taller than me." By repeating this image, Lux emphasizes its emotional weight. The dream offers a glimpse of an alternate reality, one in which Winner is unburdened by his injury. That he is "taller than me" suggests not only physical height but a regained dignity, a restoration of something stolen by fate.

"Elegy for Robert Winner" is a profoundly moving work that captures the complexity of grief—not just the sorrow of loss, but the lingering sense of injustice, the futile yearning to rewrite history, and the brief, bittersweet solace offered by dreams. Lux’s refusal to rely on ornamentation or metaphor for comfort makes the poem all the more powerful. His friend is gone, and no poetic gesture can change that, yet the dream remains—an imagined act of liberation, a final act of love.

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