Kilmer's "In Memory" is a tribute to a dead poet, and it never names her. The clues are all in the text: a woman who "lay and read your learned books," steeped in "curious Grecian lore," whose song was released by a lover's kiss, and who was haunted by "the ghosts of toiling children." Those details point to a Victorian woman poet, perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but that is an inference, since the poem leaves her anonymous. What it gives us is a portrait of how a poet's heart grows outward in three stages.
Each of the three sections is a fourteen-line sonnet, and the three share one pattern. The first eight lines rhyme ABBA ABBA, and the last six alternate CDCDCD. Section I shows the pattern clearly: *wise, lore, bore, sighs* open it, and *wonder, pain, thunder, rain, under, remain* close it. Kilmer uses the sonnet's usual turn, but the three poems also form a staircase. The first is about love between two people, the second about love for humanity, and the third about love for Christ. The sonnets are nearly identical in shape, so the content has to carry the development, and it does.
Section I begins with stillness: a reader "serene," carrying "a weight of unshed tears and silent sighs." The image of a song that "could never rise" until love made it "spread its wings and soar" turns the quiet scholar into something airborne. Then the poem defines love in a rush of opposites. It is "ecstasy and wonder" but also "a poignant and accustomed pain," both "Heaven-shaking thunder" and "a linnet's fluting after rain." The feminine rhymes on *wonder* and *thunder* make the lines feel looser and more breathless than the firm rhymes before them.
Section II widens the lens. Mankind is "glad and brave and young," yet "wrung / By Fate's wild hands." The poet becomes "a harp Aeolian on Life's branches hung," an instrument played by the wind, which suggests she does not invent sorrow but picks up the world's. The sestet then gets specific and angry. The "ghosts of toiling children" hover at "the piteous portals of your mind," and her eyes, which "looked on glory," can still see "the angry scar to which the world was blind." The final couplet-like pair, "it was grief that made Mankind your lover, / And it was grief that made you love Mankind," reverses its own word order in the second line. Mankind loves her because she grieves, and she loves Mankind for the same reason, so grief joins them.
Section III is the boldest. Kilmer imagines Christ's "shadow" falling on the ancient world before the Incarnation, and people who glimpsed it mistook it for Apollo, crying "thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" The poem treats pagan poetry as an unknowing reaching toward Christ. That claim suits a poet steeped in Greek, whose classical learning the poem now redeems. The phrase "the feet that on the mountain are so fair" echoes a verse from Isaiah about the beautiful feet of the messenger of good news. Here it is placed in a "cypress-darkened hollow," so the glad news is found in the middle of mourning. The cypress, a tree of graves, matters because the poet reaches Christ "through even love's despair."
The last line joins the poem's two traditions: "thorns were in the laurel on your hair." The laurel is the poet's crown from Greek tradition, and the thorns recall the crown Christ wore. Fame and suffering are fused into one wreath. It also answers the earlier claim that grief made Mankind her lover, since the same pain that earned her readers' love also made her like Christ.
The poem is significant for the way it makes an elegy argue something. It says that a poet's greatness comes from sympathy, that sympathy comes from pain, and that this pain, properly followed, leads from private feeling to public conscience to faith. Its diction is formal, with "Thou art" and "thy," and it is deliberately old-fashioned, a bow to the Victorian poet it honours. The tight sonnet structure keeps that ambitious argument from sprawling, and the thorned laurel gives it a final image that is hard to forget.