Elegy For My Father, Who is Not Dead

"I see myself on deck, convinced/ his ship's gone down, while he's convinced/ I'll see him standing on the dock/ and waving, shouting, Welcome back."

It was quite obvious that the speaker is not ready for his father to die even though he wrote a premature elegy. His father is ready to die, however, and it seems that he is even looking forward to death. The son is preparing himself by writing the elegy, getting ready to answer that phone call when the time comes. The son and the father have very different outlooks on death which accounts for their levels of preparedness. The father is much more optimistic than his son, and he sees death as a beginning. On the contrary, the son is pessimistic and sees death as an end. While he prepares himself for the inevitable, the speaker mourns the eventual loss of his father. The poem does not have an overall optimistic or pessimistic tone; both sides, hopeful and dejected, are represented. The speaker is making an effort to understand his father's view, but the speaker does not think he is right. This can be considered an elegy because the son is already mourning for his father and for his father's eventual death.