In the fourth Elegy, we are pressing the heart to reveal the past (but it is possible that it will not). Elegy 4 (“the most bitter and negative of all the Elegies,” Leishman and Spender, 116) moves into the elegiac mode proper, both formally and thematically. Written in a blank verse of largely iambic pentameter lines, it gives voice to a mosaically formed retrospective that is both self-conscious and, at times, possibly ironically plaintive. The tree ontology from the second Elegy receives revitalization that, alas, will be no more than temporary: it must, like us, give way to winter, where the inner self has become a victim of cold self-consciousness. Even for lovers, summer has gone, for in “loving” we evade not only the other but ourselves. Integrity can be found only with, and within, the puppet. It is an artificially and hence artfully fabricated creature, but precisely because of this, it transcends the disjointed and disunited human. It comes together with the Angel, producing a spectacle in which all is transformed. The father figure appears, now alive, now dead, and sometimes occupying a shadowy realm between the two, and this leads to an extended meditation upon childhood, and the death of a child, in grim lines that hover between the acceptably metaphorical and the disconcertingly literal.

The Elegy begins with words that are angular in their syntax and fatalistic in their tone.