In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father (“Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia“) and one for his mother (“Mysl’ o tebe udaliaetsia …“). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.