ARMYTAGE.NET

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

In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the metre of a poem (alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as elegiac distichs), not to its mood or content: love poems were often included. Likewise, John Donne applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in heroic couplets.

But since Milton's 'Lycidas' (1637), the term in English has usually denoted a lament (although Milton called his poem a 'monody'), while the adjective 'elegiac' has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems.

Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using pastoral conventions are Shelley's 'Adonais' (1821) on the death of Keats, and Arnold's 'Thyrsis' (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce, evolved a very elaborate series of conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world; pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the muses invoked by the elegist.

Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses (in the modern sense) on his friend Arthur Hallam, while Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' (1865) commemorates a public figure-Abraham Lincoln-rather than a friend; Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939) does the same. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows, as in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751), or in Rilke's Duino Elegies ( 1912 - 22 ).

The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming abab, named after its use in Gray's Elegy. In an extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy. See also dirge, graveyard poetry, monody, threnody. For a fuller account, consult Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (1985).

From Chris Baldick. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms(2008)