Elegy - Literary Terms
Elegy - Literary Terms
The conception of elegy has undergone charge throughout centuries. In Greek and Roman literatures the elegy was any poem composed in a special elegiac meter (alternating dactylic hexameter and pentameter lines). In England, until the 17th century and even later, the term was often applied to any poem of solemn meditation. In present critical usage, an elegy is a formal and sustained poem of lament for the death of a person of particular importance for the poet. Sometimes the term is more broadly used for meditative poems, such as Gray's “Elegy Written in a country Churchyard”, which deal generally with the passing of men and the things they value.
An elegy is different from a dirge, though a dirge also expresses grief on the occasion of death. Compared to an elegy, a dirge is. short, less formal, and is usually represented as a text to be sung Threnody is now used mainly as an equivalent for dirge, and monody for an elegy or dirge which is presented as the utterance of a single person. For example, Milton describes his "Lycidas” as a monody.
An important species of the elegy is pastoral elegy. It represents both the mourner and the one he mourns as shepherds
Tennyson's "In Memoriam", and Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” are examples of elegies lamenting the death of a particular person. And Milton's "Lycidas”, Shelley's “Adonais”, and Arnold's “Thyrsis” are the most notable of English pastoral elegies.
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