In 1997, John performed a rewritten version of the song, “Goodbye England’s Rose,” as a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales.
For example, check out this poem from about 1884:
Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore –
After hearing of the death of Helen Hunt Jackson, Dickinson sent the same poem to Colonel Higginson, but she changed it to read like this:
Not knowing when Herself may come
I open every Door,
Or has she Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore-
The complete letter to Higginson can be found HERE.
BTW, this particular letter is dated “Spring 1886,” and in it Dickinson states, “I have been very ill, Dear friend, since November, bereft of Book and Thought, by the Doctor's reproof, but begin to roam in my Room now - ”
Dickinson did send two more letters to Higginson – one in late April 1886 and one in early May 1886 – and then she died on May 15, 1886.
More on all of this – variations with her poems, her last letter to Higginson, and more – tomorrow and beyond.
Oh, by the way, before I close, I will say that I came across an unfamiliar word when I looked up info on Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” Wikipedia describes it as a “threnody-style ballad.”
Threnody? I can’t say as I’ve ever come across that word.
Evidently, a threnody is a wailing ode or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person. The term originates from the Greek word θρηνῳδία (threnoidia), from θρῆνος (threnos, "wailing") and ᾠδή (oide, "ode"); oddly, enough, though the OED site states, “The earliest known use of the verb threnody is in the 1890s. OED's only evidence for threnody is from 1893, in the writing of Grant Allen, writer on science and novelist.” How weird is that?
And it gets weirder. Stay tuned!
I just realized that in my statement above -- about OED's info on the word "threnody" -- I was looking at the entry of "threnody" as a VERB -- not a NOUN.
Sooo...I re-searched the word and found the entry as a NOUN:
"The earliest known use of the noun threnody is in the mid 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for threnody is from 1634, in the writing of Thomas Herbert, traveller and government official."
Okay -- that makes more sense!