• Français
• English

1When he was thirteen years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who had been sent to charity school at the age of eight after his father’s death, and who was always buried in books, wrote the first draft of lines which would eventually become his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”. Coleridge saw Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) as his “idol”, an adolescent poet who had taken his own life at the age of seventeen. Young Coleridge’s aspiration of becoming a poet would undoubtedly have been stimulated by this “Monody” being included in the Liber Aureus of his schoolmaster – in which his pupils’ best exercises were copied. Full of admiration for his idol, the poem “gave expression to Coleridge’s schoolboy enthusiasm for the romantic boy figure”.1 Nevertheless, it turned out to be only the beginning of a series of six revisions that he worked on at different stages in his life, reflecting his own situation and moods at the time.

2About 150 years later, James Douglas Morrison (1943-1971), a philosophically-minded film academy student, had aspirations to become a poet. These aspirations must have been stimulated when he befriended musicians with whom he could make songs and use pop music as a vehicle for his poetry. He admired the guitarist Brian Jones (1942-1969), founder of the Rolling Stones: he had a collage with images of Jones on the wall, wrote about him in his notebooks, and imitated his whispering way of speaking.2 Immersing himself in early pop culture – with its associated drug use and Bohemian lifestyle – Morrison became a pop icon himself. But then Jones, his idol, died, due to that same lifestyle. Morrison wrote a poem on this occasion, a poem in which the portraits of Jones and himself are mixed.

3Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” and Morrison’s “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased” are two central texts in the present article, which will study the concept of Romantic mourning as a melancholic, narcissistic way of mourning a deceased fellow artist. Next to Coleridge’s “Monody” I discuss Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats as another example of Romantic mourning. My thesis is that – notwithstanding stylistic differences – the process of mourning which takes place in twentieth-century popular culture is similar to that which can be observed in poetry of the Romantic age. I take Morrison’s ode to Brian Jones as an example of this. To sustain my thesis, I will also consider texts in which Patti Smith, in her turn, mourns Jim Morrison. An important characteristic of Romantic mourning is the double portrait the poet sketches of himself and the deceased for whom he writes the elegy. A psychoanalytic approach will shed some light on what happens in this kind of mourning.

Two Double Portraits

4The first published version of Coleridge’s “Monody” (1790), based on the draft of his school days, contains themes like “the beloved Poet”, Chatterton’s descent into poverty, the poet’s gloomy imagination, and a defence against critics who condemned Chatterton’s suicide. They show both Coleridge’s sympathy with Chatterton and his own concerns. Chatterton is imagined as defending the widow, the orphan, the debtor, and “Liberty”, in opposition to “Oppression”:

He listens to many a Widow’s prayers,
And many an Orphan’s thanks he hears;
He soothes to peace the care-worn breast,
He bids the Debtor’s eyes know rest,
And Liberty and Bliss behold:
And now he punishes the heart of steel,
And her own iron rod he makes Oppression feel.3

5This sketch of Chatterton could as well be one of young Coleridge. By the end of the poem, Coleridge thus prays to the spirit of Chatterton for similar poetic genius: “Grant me, like thee, the lyre to sound / Like thee, with fire divine to glow” (ll. 86-87).

6A second version of the “Monody” was printed as a complimentary preface to the 1794 edition of Chatterton’s The Rowley Poems. Only seventeen of the ninety lines of the 1790 version reappeared; the rest is rewritten or completely new. The poem had developed into an elegiac “Romantic ode”.4 The hopeful and exalted mood was complemented by melancholic passages. The palpable immediacy of the Chatterton of the 1790 version disappeared, giving way to a wondrous spirit and evanescent being. It brought the young Coleridge his first success, and set the tone for future representations of Chatterton.

7As early as the second half of 1794, Coleridge rewrote his recently published 1794 version of his “Monody” again. He had just had an inspiring summer in which he, together with his friend Robert Southey, invented the idea of the Pantisocracy – a utopian project of founding an idealistic, egalitarian colony in Pennsylvania. He had also met his future wife, Sarah Fricker. However, he had to leave the excitement of the summer behind in order to take up his studies. That is when he added a new, final, autobiographical section of thirty-six lines to the 1794 “Monody”. This revised and extended version was not printed until 1796 and therefore referred to as the 1796 version. In the autobiographical section Coleridge – who was full of melancholy, but also full of enthusiasm about the prospect of the new Pantisocracy he was going to establish – created an image of Chatterton with which he could identify once again. The added section namely imagines Chatterton joining the emigrants to a Pantisocratic-like paradise, where he would be the center around which they would gather to listen to his song:

And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive
O’er peaceful Freedom’s UNDIVIDED dale;
And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Hanging, enraptur’d, on thy stately song!5

8Chatterton in his gloomy moods as well as in these cheerful images can be seen as “none other than Coleridge himself playing with Romantic posture”.6

9Coleridge’s melancholy of those days – his longing for the bygone spring and summer – turns in the poem into a flirtation with suicide. He bids farewell to Chatterton and then, as if to stop himself, he confesses:

But dare no longer on the sad theme muse,
Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom:
For oh! big gall-drops, shook from Folly’s wing,
Have blacken’d the fair promise of my spring. (ll. 112-115)

10Coleridge was aware of the religious guilt attached to even implicitly honouring a suicide, and so he found a way out: he did not blame Chatterton but, rather, English society for neglecting the young poet. He put it this way:

Is this the land of song-ennobled line?
Is this the land, where Genius ne’er in vain
Pour’d forth his lofty strain? (ll. 23-25)

11Did young Coleridge foresee a difficult poetical career for himself? He certainly had serious financial problems by the time he published this version of the “Monody” in his Poems on Various Subjects (1796). Significantly, it was the first poem in the collection, directly following the Preface, “which justified the poems’ emotional egotism”.7 By placing this poem – in which he also identified with Chatterton’s financial concerns – first, Coleridge clearly displayed his own need for income. Paul Magnuson thus observes that the motto of the volume and the title of the poem point to the idea that the “Monody” is an expression of Coleridge’s identification with Chatterton “and a protest against society’s neglect of poets and literature, which serves Coleridge’s own search for financial support”.8 Coleridge, namely, changes Statius’ words “otia vitae” in the motto to “nos tristia vitae solamur cantu”. He thereby states that, through song, poets console themselves with a “melancholy life” instead of with a “leisured life” (as in the original quote). He wanted to avoid associations with leisured life in times when he had to find financial support. The change also refers to the melancholy poet and his sad fate, which is the subject of the volume’s first poem. The word “monody”, in the original Greek, means a lyric spoken by a single voice. Although the first version of Coleridge’s poem was formally a Pindaric ode, and the 1794 and 1796 versions most closely resemble an elegy – forms implying multiple voices – Coleridge nevertheless chose to label his poem a monody, emphasizing his own expressions of individual melancholy, his personal involvement with Chatterton’s fate.

12The year 1797 was a turning point in Coleridge’s life in which he left the poetry of his youth behind. Turning toward new visions of poetry, in collaboration with William Wordsworth, he distanced himself from the “Monody”. The alteration of the reprint of 1803 consisted in omitting sixteen lines. But in 1829, almost forty years after his first version, the poem again attracted his attention, and he thoroughly revised it. He turned it back to the eighteenth-century style again, in diction and form. Although he rewrote the first half of the poem completely, he still identified with his early idol, Chatterton, now as a man growing older and contemplating death. As Ian A. Gordon puts it, “Chatterton, who had been a symbol in turn for boyish enthusiasm and romantic dreams, now serves to echo Coleridge’s fearlessness at the approach of death”.9 Five years later, the final version of the poem was printed in the last edition of Coleridge’s poems to appear during his lifetime. Eleven lines from the 1790 version were incorporated into the 1829 version, probably by his nephew H. N. Coleridge.

13As this brief discussion of the poem’s composition history shows, central to the development of Coleridge’s “Monody” is a double portrait of the poet. Stuart Curran even speaks of a “doppelgänger”.10 This double portrait implies that Coleridge saw similarities, wilfully moulded Chatterton to his own image and deliberately imitated Chatterton.11 All three main versions of the “Monody” show images of Chatterton with which Coleridge each time identified himself, and all those images together contribute to the development of the image of the “Romantic artist”: as an outlaw and hero (1790 version); an idealistic, melancholic, neglected genius (1794/1796); as a poet not only not afraid of death but even longing for it (1829). Overall, he appropriated and reworked the image of the deceased youth, making a Romantic revision of him, the image that we still have today: Chatterton as an unacknowledged genius, living poverty-stricken, lonely, totally dedicated to poetry, succumbing to his passions. Far from the few people he loved, penniless, underfed and exhausted, he committed suicide – an act which would henceforth be associated with the Romantic artist. However, there is also evidence that suggests that Chatterton received modest compensation for his writings, held out reasonable hopes of a successful career, had friends, was involved in politics, and in fact killed himself accidentally. The myth of Chatterton’s sacrifice for poetry, nevertheless, remains stronger, in part due to its confirmation by other Romantic poets who were touched by Coleridge’s portrait of Chatterton – the archetype of the suffering Romantic poet. As Andrew Bennett observes: “It is the image of Chatterton, in particular his youth, genius and neglect at death, which was crucial to the Romantic figuration of the poet – for Keats most of all”.12

14Indeed, the common, clichéd image of John Keats (1795-1821), who died of tuberculosis when he was 25, is that of the suffering Romantic artist. Modelled on Chatterton’s image, it is most famously articulated in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792-1822) Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821). Already during his lifetime, a parallel was drawn between Chatterton and Keats by Richard Woodhouse, who in a letter of 21 October 1818 to the disappointed Keats, whose Endymion had received unfriendly reviews in the conservative literary press, advises him to ignore the criticism and not to be discouraged. He asks if Keats shall “give the land which let Chatterton & K. White die of unkindness and neglect […] no opportunity of redeeming its Character, & paying the vast debt it owes to Genius?”13 Although Keats’s letters belie the image of him as a “delicate and fragile” genius whose “susceptible mind” suffered from the “savage” literary critiques, as Shelley describes him in the Preface to his elegy,14 this portrayal would nevertheless establish the future image of Keats. Adonais finalises the Romantic attitude of granting “cultural prestige to the pathos-laden figure of the artist seen as a victim or casualty of a world hostile or indifferent to genius”.15

15Adonais, the main character of the poem, is based on the mythical Adonis and personifies Keats. But Adonais also contains references to Shelley himself. In her discussion of the poem, Madeleine Callaghan even speaks of “twin souls”.16 Shelley finds it difficult to distance himself from Keats, just as Coleridge finds it difficult to distance himself from Chatterton: they both reflect themselves onto the real-life figure they imaginatively recreated. Just as Coleridge attacked English society for its neglect of poetic genius, so in both the elegy and its Preface Shelley attacks the literary criticism against Keats’s work. Shelley claims that a negative review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review had led to an accelerated decline of Keats’s health. In the Preface he addresses the reviewer therefore as “murderer as you are”, and in stanza 36 he refers to the man as a “deaf and viperous murderer” (l. 317). However, Shelley’s anger may also stem from his own uneasy relationship with literary criticism.

16Also, at the level of Shelley’s philosophical views he and his presentation of Keats / Adonais become fused. One of these ideas concerns the eternal stars of stanza 44 which are seen as the immortal spirits of great poets in the next stanza:

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

And many more, whose names on Earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die (ll. 397-407)

17According to Shelley, Keats lives on in a kind of literary heaven where Chatterton, Sidney and Lucan welcome his spirit. Those literary heroes from the past are not forgotten: “like stars to their appointed height they climb” (l. 390) in “the firmament of time” (l. 388). The symbol with which the poem closes is “the soul of Adonais, like a star” (l. 494) shining eternal: an immortal poet-spirit giving light to the temporal. Shelley’s Romantic and semi-Neoplatonic view on poethood and on death, which dominates the last third of the elegy, is not Keats’s, but sticks nevertheless to Keats because of Shelley’s presentation of him in this poem. By explicitly mentioning Chatterton and Sidney, Shelley places Keats in a line of deceased young poet-geniuses, while also inserting himself into a tradition of English elegists, including not only Coleridge but also Edmund Spenser, who wrote “Astrophel: A Pastoral Elegy upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”. Furthermore, the references to these deceased predecessors make clear that Shelley’s “concern is with the fate of poets in a world that resists their prophecies and a nature that seems indifferent to their destruction”17 – as he, a poet himself, provides for the dead genius outcasts a well-deserved eternal shelter.

18Shelley also identifies with Keats in his death. By the end of the poem, he turns his imagery to Rome as a place where “ages, empires and religions […] lie buried in the ravage they have wrought” (ll. 426-427). But more personally, Rome is also the city where Shelley’s son, William, like Keats, is buried at the protestant cemetery. These lines are suggestive of this fact:

Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consign’d
Its charge to each […]
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become? (ll. 451-453, 458-459)

19Shelley’s mourning process is not yet over. The melancholy phrase “Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb” shows this metaphorically. But the next one is of a different order: it asks why we are afraid of death. It appeals to us, to our essential fear. Shelley, the questioner, seems to be flirting with death, as if he wants to become like Adonais, to become like his fellow poet Keats: dead.

[…] Die
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! […] (ll. 464-466)

20This is what he calls out to the reader. Shelley’s perception of death becomes one of liberation in this last part of the elegy. It frees the Poet from life, from decay, from loss: “The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, / Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality” (ll. 485-486). The kind of death Shelley sings of is the opposite of mortality – death as immortality, death as a star in the firmament, like Adonais / Keats has become: a dead poet who shines forever. Shelley, too, will become a star in that literary heaven, as he imagines it in his elegy in which he identifies with his immortal fellow poet.

Narcissistic Romantic Mourning for the Deceased Artistic Genius

21With a double portrait in a lament comes a narcissistic manner of mourning, as is suggested by Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia, in which narcissism plays an important role. In the case of mourning, Freud suggests in his essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), memories and expectations about the lost (love) object are gradually detached, the libido releases itself from it and can over time focus on a new love object. In the case of melancholia, the libido that gradually withdraws from the lost love object does not subsequently focus on a new object, but withdraws into the ego instead. “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego”, Freud writes.18 There then arises identification of the ego with the lost object. Freud links this to narcissism: “This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affections”.19 It is possible to see this narcissistic identification in Shelley’s elegy, in which Shelley identifies part of his ego with the lost object Keats.20 He cannot distance himself from Adonais / Keats: he narcissistically identifies with the lost object.

22The same goes for Coleridge. He too, does not find a new “love object”. Caught up in the mechanism of melancholia, he goes back to Chatterton again and again; he keeps on rewriting his “Monody”. Each time it brings him back to his first poetic love, the lost Chatterton, who is also an image of himself. This seems logical for both Coleridge as well as Shelley, who are themselves intertwined in their image of Chatterton and Adonais / Keats, respectively, and therefore should have to say goodbye to themselves in their lamentations if they want to get through their mourning process.

23But why do they cling to the deceased? How is it possible that they go the way of melancholia instead of that of “healthy” mourning? Chatterton was already famous when Coleridge honoured him with his first monody. Although Keats’s talent was only recognized in small circles when he died, Shelley regarded him as a genius. Linking their names – by way of their poems – to the deceased genius, Coleridge and Shelley guarantee themselves a prominent place in literary history. They immortalize themselves with their laments, because in these works, they mourn narcissistically through a double portrait; they project their mortal “I” onto the brilliant deceased fellow poet for whom they create a lasting memory in the form of their poem.

24The examples of narcissistic Romantic mourning offered by Coleridge and Shelley connect to broader Romantic ideas about artistry and commemoration. Defining the “Romantic artist”, as many critics have pointed out, is a vexed enterprise: “To the Romantic artist – by nature essentially and intimately a passionate individualist, a spontaneous creator – any norm was deeply antipathetic”.21 Romantic artists not only differed greatly from each other, but each of them also showed contradictory characteristics. However, within the particular historical context of Romanticism, the notion of the artistic genius living according to his own myth would be born, and it was around this notion that the cult of the artist would arise.

25As early as 1759, Edward Young distinguished learning from genius: learning informs, while “Genius inspires; and is itself inspired; for Genius is from Heaven, Learning from man […] Learning is borrowed knowledge; Genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own”.22 Genius, in this formulation, means divinely (heavenly) inspired and at the same time bound to the individual, expressing subjective experience. Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism (first given as lectures in 1965), identifies in France, starting with Diderot, an ode to genius in contrast to talent, rules and to the virtues of the eighteenth century.23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas of artistic genius, along with English ideas on the subject, eventually reached Goethe, who helped make them mainstream,24 just as the cult of the artist was also taking root across the European continent, ultimately and most prominently represented by Lord Byron, whose person and personality were often found even more interesting than his work. Byron was worshipped by the masses, but despised by the conservatives. With this Romantic cult of the artist would come an enormous and religious-like devotion to the artist, and an imitation of the artist by fans.

26This secular devotion for the Romantic heroes and martyrs of poetry must be seen in a context in which, in intellectual circles at least, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) caused furore. Kant showed in his Critique that it is impossible to prove God’s existence scientifically and to speak of Him on purely rational grounds. God no longer gives meaning to the world and life; man has to do that himself. After Kant and after the French Revolution, the common faith in God and the self-evident power of the churches declined. For the Romantics, “both traditional doctrines and traditional institutions were no longer sufficient. They looked to art in all its various forms to fill the transcendental gap that was opening up”.25 In this context the genius artist obtained a godlike status.

27The Enlightenment’s shift towards the secularization of Western society, including the installation of the individual artistic genius as a godlike substitute, would, along with other factors, lay the groundwork for the immense idolization of popular artists in the second half of the twentieth century.26 The death of these new artist-creators, in their turn, would lead to new expressions of melancholia, in which the mourners identify with the deceased. Just as was seen with the Romantic examples of Coleridge and Shelley, who identified with Chatterton and Keats, in pop culture similar identifications with the deceased fellow stars can be seen to occur.

Jim Morrison’s Elegy for Brian Jones

28Poets like Coleridge and Shelley infused their elegies with Romantic self-consciousness and interwove object and subject, thus practicing a narcissistic way of mourning. Elegies in twentieth-century rock music show similar characteristics. Jim Morrison, singer of The Doors, wrote an elegy for Brian Jones, the young deceased Rolling Stone. Jones had degenerated into a tragic character, addicted to alcohol and drugs, and eventually, in July 1969, he drowned in his own swimming pool. Perhaps Morrison identified with his idol and feared that the same fate awaited him. Directly after receiving the tragic news of Jones’s death, he asked Steve Harris, an executive at the record company Elektra, what would happen to The Doors if he were suddenly to die.27 Soon after, he wrote his “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased”.28 Less than three weeks after Jones’s death, The Doors played in The New Aquarius Theatre on the Sunset Strip. Upon entering, copies of Morrison’s elegy for Jones were passed out to concertgoers.

29In the opening lines of the poem, Morrison sees himself being assigned the role of Hamlet. Interestingly, he seems to attribute to Jones the role of Ophelia. This suggests – at least on a theatrical level – that Jones is a lost “love object” to Morrison:

They’ve just picked me to play
the Prince of Denmark

Poor Ophelia29

30Jones has drowned, like the young woman in Shakespeare’s play. While Ophelia’s suicide is ambiguously presented as a fatal accident to allow for a Christian funeral, speculation about whether Jones’s accident might have been murder, or perhaps suicide, had circulated from the outset. In short, both cases are characterized by confusion and doubt.

31The poem contains more images from Hamlet, mixed with references to Jones:

All those ghosts he never saw
Floating to doom
On an iron candle

Come back, brave warrior
Do the dive
On another channel (ll. 5-10)

32Hamlet promised the ghost of his late father to take revenge on his father’s murderer, but he was unable to live up to his words. When he finally came to enact his revenge, everything ended in a bloody failure. Does Morrison see similarities between Jones and Hamlet? Jones, too, made a big mess of his life, including its ending. With the words “Come back, brave warrior”, Morrison indeed seems to want to revive Jones, to let him take up his Hamlet-like role again. First, Jones is associated in the poem with Ophelia, and then with Hamlet – the role previously given to Morrison. He suggests that Jones try again, take a dive on “another channel”. Does Morrison not want to take over the role of Hamlet, as he did in the first lines? In retrospect, it is clear that he did follow in Jones’s footsteps, but Morrison could not yet have known that he would die two years later, to the day, at the same age as Jones and also in the water, though this time in a bathtub. Would he give Jones a second chance, because he – a similarly self-destructive character – saw himself confronted with his own fate?

33Be that as it may, at the textual level, there occurs a mixing of characters and identifications through theatre roles. Morrison was acquainted with scripts and acting through his cinema studies, which might explain his writing in a style characterised by shifting identities and the impersonation of different voices. He practices that in his long poem “An American Prayer” and in lyrics like “The End”, in which he quotes other voices. But in this ode, he is not exactly performing a role, or shifting roles, but rather seems to be mixing up the actors. Who should play Hamlet – Morrison or Jones? This confusion is reminiscent of, for example, the singer in the Pantisocratic-like paradise of Coleridge’s “Monody”, who might be seen as an amalgam of Chatterton and Coleridge. The identification of the poem’s writer with the deceased in whose honour the poem is written via a “role” is also present in Shelley’s elegy for Keats through the figure of Adonais, who is himself an ambiguous character, based on, among others, the mythical Adonis.

34In the next stanza, Morrison refers to Jones’s life and, more specifically, his interest in Morocco:

Hot buttered pool
Where’s Marrakesh
Under the falls
the wild storm
where savages fell out
in late afternoon
monsters of rhythm (ll. 11-17)

35Marrakesh was for Jones a paradise of relaxation, but also a base from which to set out with a tape recorder to make recordings of indigenous music.30 He shared a fascination with traditional music, and with indigenous peoples and their rituals, with Morrison, who thought he was possessed by one or more ghosts of Native Americans. No doubt Morrison could imagine Jones’s obsession with music from Joujouka and the ritual practice that goes with it. In Joujouka, Jones witnessed part of an annually performed ancient ceremony, culminating in the Bou Jeloud ritual. Bou Jeloud is likely a North African version of the Roman deity Pan, and the ritual in Joujouka is considered the equivalent of the classical Roman “Rites of Pan”.31 It is not insignificant that Morrison refers to the “Pan-ritual”, and he comes back to Pan-like metaphors at the end of his ode:

Requiem for a heavy

That smile
That porky satyr’s
leer
Has leaped upward

into the loam (ll. 68-73)

36Jones, figured here as a “porky satyr”, had been gaining weight, just like Morrison, because of his (alcohol) addiction. Half goat, half human, the satyr is cheerful and smiles but is also naughty, has a lusty, sly look, or a “leer”.

37Finally, with a goat’s jump the satyr “has leaped upward”, not immortalized in heaven – as a deceased artist turned into a transcendent star in heaven – but “into the loam”, the material of ancient Greek vases, depicting (among other things) satyrs. In that sense, the poem might remind us of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), in which the speaker urges the pipes depicted on the urn to continue playing their unheard melodies which are sweeter than the heard ones. Like the speaker of the poem who is at the mercy of imagination, we can now only fantasize about the music Jones might have made, had he lived longer. He is still now, like the quiet figures on the urn, immortalized in Keats’s poem.

38Significantly, in his ode the fan Morrison surpasses his idol Jones. With Jones’s death, the tables are turned. Although Jones himself had flirted with parallels with both Dionysus and Pan – the most famous satyr in Dionysus’s retinue – Morrison presents him in this ode as just a satyr. On the other hand, he identifies himself – supported by both acquaintances and critics32 – with Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility and the annual rebirth of nature. He does not emphasize this shifting relationship, but within the context of Morrison’s symbolic game, this turn is significant, just like the shift at the beginning of the poem where Morrison has to play the Prince of Denmark, while assigning the suggested former actor of this lead role – Jones – the role of Ophelia. Morrison succeeds Jones and wants to prevail over him. This is reminiscent of Coleridge’s and Shelley’s attitudes towards the deceased young poets they commemorate: the surviving poet takes care of the memory of the deceased one who in death gets a mouldable image.

39These power-shifts bring into contact a mix of real persons and literary and mythical characters. There is also biographical mixing. Morrison attributes characteristics and interests to Jones that also apply to himself. Besides the fascination with native peoples and their culture, and an almost obsessive identification with Pan-like figures, Morrison more or less suggests resemblances in personality. He remembers Jones thus:

You were a fighter
a damask musky muse

You were the bleached
Sun
for TV afternoon

horned-toads
maverick of a yellow spot (ll. 43-49)

40Subtly Morrison puts juxtapositions in this profile of Jones: a strong or aggressive “fighter” versus an obscuring light, “the bleached / Sun”; a soft “damask musky muse” versus the sharp “horned-toads”. This sketch points to Jones’s dark and bright side. This dual nature of Jones resembles Morrison’s own unstable nature, which combined a charming, intelligent, gentle poet-singer with an unmanageable, rude, indifferent drinker. His words could just as well be a sketch of himself, except for “the bleached / Sun / for TV afternoon”, which is suggestive of Jones’s outward appearance (namely, his light blond hair, strikingly visible, amongst his dark-haired bandmates, on the black and white TVs of the 1960s). The “horned-toad”, one of Morrison’s favourite animals,33 is offered as a symbol of Jones here. It is a “maverick of a yellow spot”, a dissident of the desert: the desert that fascinated both Jones and Morrison, whether it was in North Africa or in the American Southwest.

41The ode reveals also more existential issues Morrison ascribes to the lost Jones, while they originate from his own world of thought. These projections concern the dual nature of the artist and the Nothing(ness) of a successful rock star’s life. Morrison describes Jones’s passing as:

You’ve left your
Nothing
to compete w/
Silence (ll. 18-21)

42Jones goes from his earthly “Nothing” to a place or a state in which he has to compete with “Silence”. What can be worse for a rock star than silence? Morrison, who was intrigued by nihilism and existentialism, and who was also influenced by the Beat Generation, must have realised how difficult it is to consider oneself as “something”, to construct a stable self-image. This might be one reason why he spoke of himself in metaphors and liked to be named “Dionysus, the Lizard King, the shaman, the dark angel, Mr. Mojo Risin”.34 Behind the pop star’s various masks lies a sense of nothingness, or of the “Nothing” that “compete[s]” with the “Silence” of death. This empty image he projects onto Jones.

43Thus, Morrison, the survivor and successor, may model himself on Jones’s image, but at the same time, through a reverse procedure, he projects his own image and even his fate upon Jones, like Coleridge did upon Chatterton and Shelley upon Keats.

Patti Smith’s Elegy for Jim Morrison

44Patti Smith, in her turn, took Jim Morrison as an example to shape her image as a rebel poet, based on their mutual “hero”, the enfant terrible of nineteenth-century French poetry, Arthur Rimbaud. Morrison “led me on the path of merging poetry into rock and roll”, Smith explains in her memoir, Just Kids.35 His performance as the singer of The Doors inspired her to become a singer, too. In October 1973, Smith travelled to France on a double-pilgrimage, visiting the grave of Rimbaud and that of Morrison. In “jukebox cruci-fix” (1975), an article she wrote for the rock music magazine Creem, Smith evokes the vision she had of a Morrison-like angel during her Paris grave visit:

I came in a clearing and saw a man on a marble slab. it was Morrison and he was human. but his wings were merging with the marble. he was struggling to get free but like Prometheus freedom was beyond him. […] I finished the dream. the stone dissolved and he flew away.36

45Smith recalls also that she had the “poetic conceit that we [i.e. Smith and Morrison] would meet in some melody hovering over his grave. but there was nothing”. Yet then, suddenly,

[…] racing thru my skull were new plans new dreams voyages symphonies colors. I just wanted to get the hell outa there and go home and do my own work. to focus my floodlight on the rhythm within. I straightened my skirt and said good-bye to him. an old woman in black spoke to me in broken english. look at this grave how sad! why do you americans not honor your poets? […] I brushed the feathers off my raincoat and answered: because we don't look back.37

46The pilgrimage convinced Smith that she no longer needed to look back to her predecessors for approval. In her vision she got the push she needed – for the next phase in her mourning process – from her “lost love object” itself: the Promethean Morrison handed her his fire. This vision is the basis for the song “Break It Up”, on Horses (1975). The words “break it up” refer not just to the dream-vision of Morrison who flew away, but also to the step Smith took herself thanks to “this artistic calling”38 at Morrison’s grave. Her debut album Horses is the result of this step.

47In the song “Break It Up”, the first-person narrator initially wants to imitate the boy, who is the winged Morrison of her vision. When the boy “break[s] out of his skin”, she “crawl[s]” in: “I saw a boy break out of his skin / My heart turned over and I crawled in” (ll. 3-4).39 This is a metaphor for her far-reaching identification. Whereas later in the song she gets rid of his skin: “I tore off my clothes, I danced on my shoes / I ripped my skin open and then I broke through” (ll. 22-23). The song is not only about Smith mourning Morrison, who broke with the life to which he was chained, as an alcoholic pop star. The urge to “break it up” is also about Smith’s own release from her bondage to Morrison.

48Smith honours Morrison with these texts, while connecting herself to him in the memory of pop history. Here too, there is a power-shift: from the guiding Morrison to Smith choosing her own path. The mechanism at work is similar to that of the Romantic cases, and of the grieving Morrison himself. But Smith’s narcissistic mourning is not only what she does, it is also a theme in her article and her song. She is aware that she is not only mourning the death of an artist she admires, but that she also identifies with this deceased person. By taking the narcissistic mourning process as a theme, Smith pushes it to the surface, and there deals with it, which makes it possible for her to “break out” of a melancholic grip and leave her poetic father behind.

Conclusion

49Writing a poem can serve as the sublimation of the artist’s mourning process. This is comparable with a requiem, which George H. Pollock formulates as “an expressive, sublimated aspect of the mourning process”.40 Moreover, he argues that mourning in a requiem is essentially mourning for the loss of self, for the composer’s own demise, in the sense of anticipating one’s own death. According to Pollock, the requiem is therefore a creation by the composer to safeguard the memory of himself or herself for the future, after his or her death.

50This also applies to a poem or a song. At the beginning of a secular age in which religion could no longer guarantee a credible afterlife, the Romantic poets were the first to find new ways to safeguard the fame of deceased fellow artists, who themselves became substitutes for the divine. The Romantics did it by way of elegies in which they mourn narcissistically. Both Romantic poets and, following in their footsteps, contemporary singer-songwriters who write elegies and create an afterlife for deceased fellow artists, simultaneously ensure their own future by creating that commemorative art which is always also anticipating their own death. In so doing, the artist sublimates the fear of his or her own death and oblivion.