AustLit

In his close examination of Hope's elegy, Weinfield argues that the bird is not a Romantic symbol, or a Modernist anti-symbol, but rather a form of life that the poet is capable of understanding, because 'he understands that he himself is a form of life and that, therefore, nothing living is alien to him' (164). Although its artistic values might now be out of fashion, Weinfield finds the poem original and extraordinary because of the Hope's ability to evoke love and tenderness, 'not only as a theme but through his language and the movement of his quatrains' (170), and he predicts that the poem is 'going to remain with us for a long time - as long as English poetry is read' (171).