By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. 
 “It  may  treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for  itself ; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will fell regret for the past or desire for future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.” ( Samuel Taylor Coleridge , 1833) 
 “The objects, the images, clouds, rain, darkness, the wide flat road, exist not as stage-dressing, as atmospheric props for a display of the writer’s chagrin, but as a constellation intrinsically and inevitably related to the inherent mood.” ( Hugh Kenner ) 
 “Cathay is in many ways a deeply  Tennysonian  volume in its matter, its colour, its emotion. But its versification, melody, use of image and directness of language are indeed very different. This difference presents itself primarily as a difference in the "nature”, in the actual landscape.“ ( Michael Alexander ) 
 “Pound’s elegy differs from Tennysonian elegiac mood on the reader’s more or less subjective identification and often exhibits a progressive, tacit conflation between lyrical mood, and ostensibly dramatized occasion for speech and the reader’s emotional response.” ( Elegy and Personae in Ezra Pound’s Cathay , Ming Xie)