Most elegies console. This one opens with a comparison that is almost cruel: "Your face did not rot / like the others." The speaker has seen the co-pilot's face "yesterday," and it has become "corn-mush," a flat, farmyard word that refuses all dignity. The widow and daughter "stare / as if he will compose soon," which is chilling because "compose" can mean to settle one's expression or to write. They are waiting for the dead man to finish some last sentence. The father's face, by contrast, "grew dark, / and hard like ebony; / the features progressed in their // distinction." The dead man has become sculpture, a finished object.
The poem's central tension is between wanting to know a dead parent and accepting that you cannot. The dedication, "for my father, 1922-1944," suggests a son or daughter who never knew him as an adult. That gives the speaker's fantasies their ache. He imagines coaxing his father down "from your compulsive / orbiting" and reading his face by touch, the way Dallas, the gunner with "blistered eyes," reads "his braille editions." The comparison is exact and strange. A blinded man reading with his fingertips is the model for a child who has only ever had a missing person to interpret. A moment later the face becomes "an original page" touched by "a disinterested scholar." The speaker half-knows the pose is false, because nobody is less disinterested than a child searching for a parent. The word is there to show how hard he is working to stay calm.
His promises grow oddly protective: "I would not turn you in; I would not make / you face your wife." Here the father is a fugitive, and the pun on "face" quietly recalls the poem's obsession with faces. The speaker will not demand explanations or try "to fully understand what / it means to you." The father is allowed his private madness, his "crazy / orbiting," without being pinned down.
Image carries the second half. The father spins "across the wilds of the sky / like a tiny, African god." The ebony of his face has become a small dark deity, distant and indifferent, seen "at least / once every year of my life," so the vision is a ritual, almost an anniversary. The effect on the speaker is deadening. He feels like "the residue of a stranger's life," something left behind in a pan after the real substance has gone. The line "My head cocked toward the sky, / I cannot get off the ground" turns the father's profession into a bitter joke. He flies, and the child is grounded.
Formally, the poem is free verse in unrhymed three-line stanzas, and the sentences refuse to respect them. Lines break mid-thought, even mid-word ("corn- / mush"), so the reader keeps tripping into the next stanza, as if the speech cannot stop. The tone is conversational, with phrases like "for example" and "the poor ignorant people," which makes the shocks land harder. Because there is no rhyme to cushion them, nothing softens the plain statement "I feel dead."
The ending withholds what the speaker most wants. The father passes "fast, perfect, and unwilling / to tell me that you are doing / well." The final sentence lists three comforts he will not give: that all is well, that it was a "mistake" which placed father and child in separate worlds, or that "misfortune / placed these worlds in us." That last phrase moves the loss from outside to inside. The dead man's world and the living man's have become two conditions within one person, and no explanation arrives to reconcile them.
That is the poem's lasting power. It does not pretend that imagining the dead resolves anything. It lets grief stay a kind of reading that never finishes.
A note on attribution: the dedication dates place the poem's occasion in the twentieth century, so the name Edward Taylor, shared with a much earlier Puritan poet, may be worth double-checking. This reading rests on the text alone.