Elegy

Elegy is an elaborately formal lyric poem, lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.

In ancient Greece and Rome, the term was used to refer to any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating lines of hexameter and pentameter). Thus, in Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the ‘meter’ of a poem, not to its mood or content; and included love poems too

The term ‘elegy’ was also applied to poems about change or loss, expressed in elegiac verse form, especially those written in complaints about love. The Old English poems like The Seafarer, The Wanderer etc. are examples of such elegies which brood about the transient nature of all worldly things.

Until Renaissance, the term was used in varied senses. Later, John Donne applied the term to his amorous (love) and satirical poems in heroic couplets.

However, in the 17th century, more specifically after Milton’s Lycidas (1637) the term became more specific for a formal and sustained lament in verse for the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation, while the adjective ‘elegiac’ is being used to refer to the mournful mood of such poems. Examples of such elegies include the Medieval poems like Pearl, and Chaucer’s Book of Duchess; Tennyson’s In Memoriam(1850) and W. H. Auden’s In the Memory of W. B. Yeats(1940).

Most elegies in English, specifically, after Lycidas, frequently takes the form of pastoral elegies, as is the case with Shelley’s Adonais (1821) on the death of Keats, and Arnold’s Thyrsis (1867). This tradition of pastoral elegy, is derived from Greek poems by Theocrytus and Sicilian poets during 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.

Pastoral elegies follow certain conventional features as:

1. The dead friend is represented as a shepherd (‘pastor’ is Latin for Shepherd) mourned by the natural world.
2. The speaker invokes the muses in the beginning and makes frequent reference to other mythological figures such as nymphs, who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd.
3. The poet raises questions about justice of fate or else of Providence.
4. The poem closes with a consolation.

In a broader sense, elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon the sorrows of life or its transient nature, as in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It was written in quatrains of iambic pentameter, rhyming abab. This stanza form was later called as elegiac stanza, after its use in Gray’s elegy.