Elegy – from A Handbook to Literature

A sustained and formal poem setting forth meditations on death or another solemn theme.  The meditation often is occasioned by the death of a particular person, but it may be a generalized observation of the expression of a solemn mood.

Common in both Latin and Greek literatures, the elegy originally signified almost any type of meditation, whether the reflective element concerned death, love, or war, or merely the presentation of information.  In classical writing the elegy was more distinguishable by its use of the elegiac meter than by subject matter.  The Elizabethans used the term for love poems, particularly complaints.  Up through the end of the 17^th century, elegy could mean both a love poem and a poem of mourning.  Thereafter, the poem of mourning became virtually the only meaning.

Notable English elegies include the Old English poem “The Wanderer,” The Pearl, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Donne’s “Elegies,” Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and John Berryman’s “Formal Elegy.”

These poems indicate the variety of method, mood, and subject encompassed by elegy.  A specialized form of elegy, popular with English poets, is the Pastoral Elegy, of which Milton’s “Lycidas” is an outstanding example.

ELEGIAC STANZA

The Iambic Pentameter Quatrains, rhyming – abab.

The name comes from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which is in this stanza.

Although such a quatrain, rhyming – abab – and called the Heroic Quatrain, was a stanza of long standing before Gray used it, in the last half of the 18^th and the 19^th centuries it was usually employed, after Gray’s example, in expressing sorrow or lamentation.