elegy, meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a public personage or of a friend or loved one; by extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of human mortality. In classical literature an elegy was simply any poem written in the elegiac metre (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter) and was not restricted as to subject. Though some classical elegies were laments, many others were love poems. In some modern literatures, such as German, in which the classical elegiac metre has been adapted to the language, the term elegy refers to this metre, rather than to the poem’s content. Thus, Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous "Duineser Elegien" (Duino Elegies) are not laments; they deal with the poet’s search for spiritual values in an alien universe. But in English literature since the 16th century, an elegy has come to mean a poem of lamentation. It may be written in any metre the poet chooses.
A distinct kind of elegy is the pastoral elegy, which borrows the classical convention of representing its subject as an idealized shepherd in an idealized pastoral background and follows a rather formal pattern. It begins with an expression of grief and an invocation to the Muse to aid the poet in expressing his suffering. It usually contains a funeral procession, a description of sympathetic mourning throughout nature, and musings on the unkindness of death. It ends with acceptance, often a very affirmative justification, of nature’s law. The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy is John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638), written on the death of Edward King, a college friend. Other notable pastoral elegies are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), on the death of the poet John Keats, and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Other elegies observe no set patterns or conventions. In the 18th century the English “graveyard school” of poets wrote generalized reflections on death and immortality, combining gloomy, sometimes ghoulish imagery of human impermanence with philosophical speculation.
Representative works are Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45) and Robert Blair’s Grave (1743), but the best known of these poems is Thomas Gray’s more tastefully subdued creation “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), which pays tribute to the generations of humble and unknown villagers buried in a church cemetery. In the United States, a counterpart to the graveyard mode is found in William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1817). A wholly new treatment of the conventional pathetic fallacy of attributing grief to nature is achieved in Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865–66).
In modern poetry the elegy remains a frequent and important poetic statement. Its range and variation can be seen in such poems as A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” E.E. Cummings’s “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop’s “Hours” (on F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.”
(From Encyclopaedia Britannica)
2. Forms and Devices
Adonais is a pastoral elegy, a highly stylized composition adhering to rules, or conventions, that hark back at least two thousand years to such Greek poets as Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion. Shelley had in fact translated into English Bion’s Lament for Adonis and Moschus’s Lament for Bion; he would have been familiar with the form, even had he never studied those classical sources, through the seventeenth century English masterpiece, John Milton’s “Lycidas.”
In general, the pastoral deals with an idyllic imaginative landscape where it is always May and the pastures and hills are always green. Despite renowned uses of pastoral conventions in poems from the late sixteenth century such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” by Shelley’s own time the pastoral mode had fallen into disuse among serious English poets. Some of this development was attributable to changing social conditions; pasture lands had been fenced off, and the Industrial Revolution was making England a less bucolic nation. The eighteenth century critic Samuel Johnson had also poked fun at the pastoral’s sanitized view of the lives of shepherds, pointing out that they generally smelled quite bad; in 1798, William Wordsworth had pointedly subtitled "Michael" (published in 1800), his realistic narrative of an elderly shepherd struggling to make ends meet, “a pastoral,” as if to sound the death knell, in English poetry, of this long-standing literary tradition.
Indeed, it may seem strange that Shelley should choose to lament Keats’s death in such an artificial and constrained format as the pastoral requires. If his feelings of grief were genuine, one might ask, why not have expressed them in plain, or at least far less contrived terms. The pastoral allows the poet to exercise, nevertheless, the option of poeticizing the event. From that perspective, Shelley, who was quite capable of using a wide range of poetic styles and expression, was first of all doing his fellow poet a high honor by eulogizing him in a structure unique to poetic discourse.
Also, Keats’s own poetry often harked back to pastoral themes if not actual modes. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is only one outstanding example, and all of Keats’s poetry is rich in an appreciation of life’s simple pleasures and beauties—and of the pain that their loss can cause.
Shelley adheres to all the traditional formal pastoral constraints—and more—in producing his elegy. In keeping with the tradition, he does not identify the characters by their actual names, but by their shepherd names or by characteristics typical of natural rather than social environs. Since the tradition is Greek, he harks back to classical myth and imagery. Keats’s poetic efforts, as noted previously, are his flocks. The procession of mourners is appropriately arrayed in flowers and other vestiges of spring; even in the depths of his grief, the poet never fails to remind the reader that it is in fact the springtime of the year.
(From enotes)
3. Shelley and Keats
Shelley was introduced to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816 by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, who was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley. Shelley's huge admiration of Keats was not entirely reciprocated. Keats had reservations about Shelley's dissolute behaviour, and found some of Shelley's advice patronising (the suggestion, for example, that Keats should not publish his early work). It is also possible that Keats resented Hunt's transferred allegiance. Despite this, the two poets exchanged letters when Shelley and his wife moved to Italy. When Keats fell ill, the Shelleys invited him to stay with them in Pisa but Keats elected to travel with Severn. Despite this rebuff, Shelley's affection for Keats remained undimmed until his death in 1822 when a copy of Keats' works was found in a pocket on his drowned body. Shelley said of Keats, after inviting him to stay with him in Pisa after Keats fell ill: "I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure."[4]
Shelley regarded Adonais as the "least imperfect" of his works.
4. Rolling Stones reading Adonais
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones read a part of Adonais on the Brian Jones memorial concert at London's Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. Jones, founder and guitarist of the Stones, had drowned July 3, 1969 in his swimming pool. Before an audience estimated at 250,000 to 300,000, Jagger read the following verses from Adonais
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. — We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
elegy, meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a public personage or of a friend or loved one; by extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of human mortality. In classical literature an elegy was simply any poem written in the elegiac metre (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter) and was not restricted as to subject. Though some classical elegies were laments, many others were love poems. In some modern literatures, such as German, in which the classical elegiac metre has been adapted to the language, the term elegy refers to this metre, rather than to the poem’s content. Thus, Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous "Duineser Elegien" (Duino Elegies) are not laments; they deal with the poet’s search for spiritual values in an alien universe. But in English literature since the 16th century, an elegy has come to mean a poem of lamentation. It may be written in any metre the poet chooses.
A distinct kind of elegy is the pastoral elegy, which borrows the classical convention of representing its subject as an idealized shepherd in an idealized pastoral background and follows a rather formal pattern. It begins with an expression of grief and an invocation to the Muse to aid the poet in expressing his suffering. It usually contains a funeral procession, a description of sympathetic mourning throughout nature, and musings on the unkindness of death. It ends with acceptance, often a very affirmative justification, of nature’s law. The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy is John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638), written on the death of Edward King, a college friend. Other notable pastoral elegies are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), on the death of the poet John Keats, and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Other elegies observe no set patterns or conventions. In the 18th century the English “graveyard school” of poets wrote generalized reflections on death and immortality, combining gloomy, sometimes ghoulish imagery of human impermanence with philosophical speculation.
Representative works are Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45) and Robert Blair’s Grave (1743), but the best known of these poems is Thomas Gray’s more tastefully subdued creation “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), which pays tribute to the generations of humble and unknown villagers buried in a church cemetery. In the United States, a counterpart to the graveyard mode is found in William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1817). A wholly new treatment of the conventional pathetic fallacy of attributing grief to nature is achieved in Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865–66).
In modern poetry the elegy remains a frequent and important poetic statement. Its range and variation can be seen in such poems as A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” E.E. Cummings’s “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop’s “Hours” (on F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.”
(From Encyclopaedia Britannica)
2. Forms and Devices
Adonais is a pastoral elegy, a highly stylized composition adhering to rules, or conventions, that hark back at least two thousand years to such Greek poets as Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion. Shelley had in fact translated into English Bion’s Lament for Adonis and Moschus’s Lament for Bion; he would have been familiar with the form, even had he never studied those classical sources, through the seventeenth century English masterpiece, John Milton’s “Lycidas.”
In general, the pastoral deals with an idyllic imaginative landscape where it is always May and the pastures and hills are always green. Despite renowned uses of pastoral conventions in poems from the late sixteenth century such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” by Shelley’s own time the pastoral mode had fallen into disuse among serious English poets. Some of this development was attributable to changing social conditions; pasture lands had been fenced off, and the Industrial Revolution was making England a less bucolic nation. The eighteenth century critic Samuel Johnson had also poked fun at the pastoral’s sanitized view of the lives of shepherds, pointing out that they generally smelled quite bad; in 1798, William Wordsworth had pointedly subtitled "Michael" (published in 1800), his realistic narrative of an elderly shepherd struggling to make ends meet, “a pastoral,” as if to sound the death knell, in English poetry, of this long-standing literary tradition.
Indeed, it may seem strange that Shelley should choose to lament Keats’s death in such an artificial and constrained format as the pastoral requires. If his feelings of grief were genuine, one might ask, why not have expressed them in plain, or at least far less contrived terms. The pastoral allows the poet to exercise, nevertheless, the option of poeticizing the event. From that perspective, Shelley, who was quite capable of using a wide range of poetic styles and expression, was first of all doing his fellow poet a high honor by eulogizing him in a structure unique to poetic discourse.
Also, Keats’s own poetry often harked back to pastoral themes if not actual modes. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is only one outstanding example, and all of Keats’s poetry is rich in an appreciation of life’s simple pleasures and beauties—and of the pain that their loss can cause.
Shelley adheres to all the traditional formal pastoral constraints—and more—in producing his elegy. In keeping with the tradition, he does not identify the characters by their actual names, but by their shepherd names or by characteristics typical of natural rather than social environs. Since the tradition is Greek, he harks back to classical myth and imagery. Keats’s poetic efforts, as noted previously, are his flocks. The procession of mourners is appropriately arrayed in flowers and other vestiges of spring; even in the depths of his grief, the poet never fails to remind the reader that it is in fact the springtime of the year.
(From enotes)
3. Shelley and Keats
Shelley was introduced to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816 by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, who was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley. Shelley's huge admiration of Keats was not entirely reciprocated. Keats had reservations about Shelley's dissolute behaviour, and found some of Shelley's advice patronising (the suggestion, for example, that Keats should not publish his early work). It is also possible that Keats resented Hunt's transferred allegiance. Despite this, the two poets exchanged letters when Shelley and his wife moved to Italy. When Keats fell ill, the Shelleys invited him to stay with them in Pisa but Keats elected to travel with Severn. Despite this rebuff, Shelley's affection for Keats remained undimmed until his death in 1822 when a copy of Keats' works was found in a pocket on his drowned body. Shelley said of Keats, after inviting him to stay with him in Pisa after Keats fell ill: "I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure."[4]
Shelley regarded Adonais as the "least imperfect" of his works.
4. Rolling Stones reading Adonais
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones read a part of Adonais on the Brian Jones memorial concert at London's Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. Jones, founder and guitarist of the Stones, had drowned July 3, 1969 in his swimming pool. Before an audience estimated at 250,000 to 300,000, Jagger read the following verses from Adonais
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. — We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
