It is a spare, melancholy elegy. The speaker looks at a landscape where life continues as usual—sun, sowing, birds pairing—and says that only the wind seems to notice or care that a man has died. The world does not stop. But then the speaker hears the wind moving through the pines and hemlocks, trees the dead man himself planted, and the wind speaks a simple truth: his acres are waking with the turning year, but he is asleep. The poem’s mood is lonely and hushed, with grief carried almost entirely by the sound of the wind in the trees. The speaker seems to share that private sorrow, suggesting that remembering someone through the living things he left behind is a tender, elegiac way to mourn.
Wind Elegy — Summary
Only the wind knows he is gone, Only the wind grieves, The sun shines, the fields are sown, Sparrows mate in the eaves; But I heard the wind in the pines he planted And the hemlocks overhead, “His acres wake, for the year turns, But he is asleep,” it said.