The poem uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy, a meditative lyric genre derived from the poetic tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity. Literary scholar Harold Bloom writes that "Elegies often have been used for political purposes, as a means of healing the nation." A pastoral elegy uses rural imagery to address the poet's grief—a "poetic response to death" that seeks "to transmute the fact of death into an imaginatively acceptable form, to reaffirm what death has called into question—the integrity of the pastoral image of contentment." An elegy seeks, also, to "attempt to preserve the meaning of an individual's life as something of positive value when that life itself has ceased." A typical pastoral elegy contains several features, including "a procession of mourners, the decoration of a hearse or grave, a list of flowers, the changing of the seasons, and the association of the dead person with a star or other permanent natural object." This includes a discussion of the death, expressions of mourning, grief, anger, and consolation, and the poet's simultaneous acceptance of death's inevitability and hope for immortality.