Mourning is a topic upon which psychoanalysts and literary critics tend to converge. The convergence seems almost inevitable. Mourning happens – not exclusively, but crucially – in and through language; mourning may even be a constitutive feature of language, insofar as words are taken, according to the common nostalgic account, both to register and partly to make up for the loss of the things they name. From Freud's account of his grandson's attempts to master loss via the paradigmatic repetitions of the fort/da game, to Lacan's seminar on mourning in Hamlet, to Abraham and Torok's studies of melancholic incorporation as anti-metaphor, to Peter Sacks's psychogeneric reading of English elegy: to write about the “work of mourning” is to write about the mournful and melancholy words that help accomplish that work.

Latin poetry offers its share of poems which participate in the praising, blaming, complaining, repetitious remembering, and aggressive forgetting that make up mourning. Consider, for example, Horace's consolatory ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius (Carm. 1.24), a poem that implicitly measures Horace's own austere performance of grief against what Horace represents, with howsoever little emphasis, as Virgil's excessive and irrational indulgence in mourning. The question that broaches the poem, “What restraint or limit should be set on our longing for so dear a friend?” (Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus / tam cari capitis?, 1–2), is, it emerges, not just a rhetorical flourish.