An elegy is a poem written in memory of someone or something that usually ends with consolation. Adam Vines’s “Lures” is an elegy that not only adapts to the traditional concept, but adds a modern spin to its form. The speaker is mourning the death of a childhood friend by reminiscing on past memories. Within the poem there are drifts from past to present and future to separate how the speaker feels about each part of his life without his friend in reference to time. Adam Vines's "Lures" embraces the traditional elegy with the mourning of a loss, but it departs from tradition with its low diction, diverse tense, and language.
Traditionally, an elegy uses high diction but “Lures” differs from commonality with its low diction. The poem does not use words that couldn’t be commonly used by a first grader, but there …show more content…
In lines eight through eleven, “Today…the Mayan end….country boy in Brooklyn for the week, will hail a cab for the first time”, this literally means that the speaker is hailing a cab for the time. However, the figurative meaning is that it may be the end but there is also a new beginning. Whenever a door closes another one opens and the future continues to build. The speaker uses the phrase “dawn to dusk”, which could literally meaning from the beginning of their days in the empty pond to end of it. Figuratively, he could mean from the beginning to when it gets gloomy and death reaches them, they will always be together. In the last few lines of the poem the speaker uses the phrase “our mothers’ and fathers’ voices calling us home not too far behind or ahead”, which can have a literal and figurative meaning. The speaker could be talking about the literal houses which they used live in or he could be using home as a figurative meaning for heaven. He could also be saying that children shouldn’t die before their