Today’s Poem: Tichborne's Elegy

The wondrous one-hit, the life cut short

The Tower of London in a 15th-century manuscript (Wikimedia Commons)

“There’s something especially moving,” the poet Brad Leithauser wrote in a 2013 New Yorker essay, “about those poets who, in the mind of the individual reader, have effectively created one poem.” However many poems of Conrad Aiken you might read, really there’s only one poem: “Morning Song,” from “Senlin.” Think of John McRae, and what comes to mind is not a whole body of work, but “In Flanders Fields.” You say, Christopher Smart; I say, “My Cat Jeoffry.” The name of Emma Lazarus has become synonymous with “The New Colossus” (which demonstrates, maybe, that not every one-hit wonder’s one hit is exactly a model of excellence).

The case of Chidiock Tichborne (1562–1586), however, is both obvious and freighted with pathos. Tichborne is a one-hit wonder for the simple reason that he didn’t effectively write one poem. He literally wrote one poem, a lament for life’s brevity, a sad poem made tragic by the fact that its twen…