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 form of refrain (Line 1, Lines 4-5, and Line 8).

Finally, the most important element of a traditional elegy is consolation: An elegy should comfort the loved ones of the deceased. This consolation is typically achieved by an image of the subject’s ascension into heaven or transformation into a star in the sky. This is called an “apotheosis,” a Greek word meaning “making into a god,” because the dead person is lifted up into the sky. It is a comforting image: The poem’s subject may have died on earth, but they live on in heaven or as celestial body.

In “The Tradition,” however, Brown reverses the typical order of a traditional elegy. The poem starts with a focus on the heavens: Its celestial bodies are flowers named after features of the night sky. “Aster” is the Latin word for “star” (Line 1). “Star Gazer” (Line 4), the sun (Line 6), and “Cosmos” (Line 8), too, all are mentioned before the names of the deceased men in the final line. Thus, the traditional elegiac progression from the deceased to the heavens is reversed in “The Tradition”: The poem starts in the heavens, but is wrenched back down to earth. At the end of the poem, there can be no consolation, no comfort: the reader is left only with grief, horror, and trauma.