elegy

1. A poem composed in elegiac couplets.
2. 1. A poem or song composed especially as a lament for a deceased person.
   2. Something resembling such a poem or song.
3. Music. A composition that is melancholy or pensive in tone.

[French élégie, from Latin elegīa, from Greek elegeia, from pl. of elegeion, elegiac distich, from elegos, song, mournful song.]

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A vocal or instrumental piece lamenting someone's death. The earliest type is the medieval Planctus; later ones include the vocal Déploration and Nenia and the instrumental Tombeau, Dump and Apothéose. Many Baroque laments (see Lamento) are elegiac in tone; numerous other works, including some from Stravinsky's late years, are elegies in all but name.

elegy, 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 BC, 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.

elegy, in Greek and Latin literature, any poem written in elegiacs (also called elegiac couplets), that is, in alternate lines of hexameter and pentameter (see METRE, GREEK 4). The ultimate derivation of the name is uncertain, but it was perhaps connected with a word for ‘flute’, an instrument which seems originally to have accompanied its recitation (compare LYRIC). In antiquity the elegiac metre was considered to be primarily the metre of lament, but it was used for a variety of poems, and the earliest lines we possess, written in Greece at the end of the eighth century BC, bear no resemblance to lament. Elegiac poetry was the medium for expressing personal sentiments (as distinct from narrative): for description, for exhortation to war or to virtue, for reflection on a variety of subjects, serious and frivolous, for epitaphs and laments, and for love-poems. The use of elegiacs for inscriptions to commemorate the dead seems to have become popular in the middle of the sixth century BC and persisted throughout antiquity; those attributed to Simonides are the most famous (see EPIGRAM). Among the principal early elegiac poets of Greece were Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Solon, Phocylides, Callinus, and Theognis. Love poems in elegiacs are said to have been first written by Mimnermus; they may have been a development from the cheerful sympotic elegies such as were written by Archilochus. The Hellenistic poets in particular used this form for love poetry, and also introduced a number of metrical refinements.

The history of Latin elegy begins in the first century BC when it was developed at Rome under Greek influence chiefly as a medium for love poetry. The Romans gave elegy a new direction by using it for a cycle of short poems centred on the poet's relationship with a single mistress. Almost every individual feature of Latin love-elegy is derived from Greek models, but the whole effect is of something completely original. The principal Roman poets were Cornelius Gallus, whose work has not survived, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Ovid also refined the already strict metrical rules for Latin elegiac still further, and extended the range of subjects to be treated in this metre. After Ovid, the metre was used chiefly for short occasional poems and for epigrams. Martial is the most famous practitioner of the epigram and he sometimes rivals Ovid in metrical virtuosity.

Only in comparatively modern times, since the sixteenth century, has the term elegy come to denote specifically a poem of lament for an individual or a poem of serious, meditative tone. Several famous elegies in English literature are written using the conventions of pastoral (see BUCOLIC), one of the earliest being Edmund Spenser's Astrophel, on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1586). The origin of the pastoral lament or elegy is to be found in Theocritus' first Idyll; this poem, however, being written in hexameters and not in elegiacs, is not, in classical terms, an elegy.

A form of poetry that mourns the loss of someone who has died or something that has deteriorated. A notable example is the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray. (Compare eulogy.)

A melancholy piece.

A poem of lament, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a particular person; also, a meditative poem in plaintive or sorrowful mood.

n.

A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection. The most famous English example begins somewhat like this:

    The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
        The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
    The wise man homeward plods; I only stay
        To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.

Tutor's tip: The composer wrote an "elegy" (a poem or a musical composition, usually sad and mournful) to be performed right after the "eulogy" (a funeral oration) at the funeral.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - elegi, klagesang

Nederlands (Dutch)
melancholisch, elegie (dichtvorm), klaagdicht (met name voor een dode), klaagzang, nostalgisch/ melancholisch gedicht of muziekstuk

Français (French)
n. - élégie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Elegie, Klagelied

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ελεγεία, ελεγείο

Italiano (Italian)
elegia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - elegia (f)

Русский (Russian)
элегия, надгробная речь

Español (Spanish)
n. - elegía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - elegi

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
哀歌, 挽歌

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 哀歌, 挽歌

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 슬픈 노래, 애가

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 悲歌, 哀歌, 哀歌調の詩

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) قصيدة رثاء‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קינה‬

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