The Tradition

“The Tradition” can be read as an elegy, a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. Most early examples of the genre written in English named the person they were elegizing somewhere in the poem (e.g., in the title, the inscription, or the lines of the poem itself). Fittingly, “The Tradition” mourns the deaths of Black men at the hands of the police and names three murdered men: “John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown” (Line 14).

“The Tradition” also includes three additional elements of a traditional elegy. First, traditional English elegies take place in the countryside, a pastoral setting. The setting of “The Tradition” is a group of Black men watching a video tape, but the video features common pastoral images: flowers blooming and men working the earth.

Second, traditional elegies typically include an elaborate description of flowers. Sometimes these flowers are wild in nature; sometimes they are decorative elements on a laureate hearse, that is, a vehicle carrying the deceased person to their grave. Elegies also use refrains, a poetic device in which a line (or lines) are repeated. In “The Tradition,” the list of flowers establishes a connection to the traditional botanical elements in elegy, and the way the poem returns to the flowers again and again can be understood as a