The poem is obviously about a student who dies on horseback, and the teacher is the speaker of the poem. A theme of the poem is birds. Not just birds, but plain gray birds, if ever such a thing existed. Obviously, Jane was not the most attractive girl in class, if a teacher had such thoughts, but the qualities of Jane that the teacher speaks of would assume that he really liked her and her manners, as a teacher or parent. probably could be. It seems that Roethke walked the fine line between student and teacher. It also appears that Roethke was testing the limits of what constitutes an acceptable relationship between a student and a teacher. It seems that the professor had romantic thoughts about Jane, but never acted on those thoughts. This appears thus in lines nineteen and twenty of the poem. They read: “On this damp grave I speak the words of my love” and “I, without right in this matter” (Elegy for Jane). It seems that this love was innocent but misplaced, due to the student-teacher relationship and also Jane's age, more likely than not. The twentieth line shows that the professor had made peace, not only with Jane's death, but also with the fact that dead or alive, he could never truly, physically, love