What are the basic features of an elegy?
The term elegy derives from Greek word elegos (Latin: elegus) which means a song of bereavement. It was typically accompanied by the music of a flute (aulos) in antiquity. The adjectival form of the word is "elegiac." The typical meter of the elegy in antiquity was the elegiac couplet consisting of one line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of dactylic pentameter, and any poem in this form could be called an elegy. Coleridge attempted an English equivalent of the meter in the following couplet:
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column:
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
In English, an elegy remains a poem of bereavement, normally mourning the death of a person, although sometimes a more generalized lamentation. The meter of the poem may vary. Among the most famous elegies in English are Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."
An elegy is a reflective poem, usually one lamenting a deceased person or a former way of life. While there are no hard, formal rules about how an elegy must sound or be written, they do tend to share a few key features.
Firstly, such a poem will always mourn the loss of a person or way of life, emphasizing why the loss affects the speaker so much. The poem will usually mix both grief and admiration. Secondly, the structure usually follows like so: the poet introduces who or what has been lost, celebrates the positive qualities of the deceased, and then ends the poem expressing their sorrow over this loss.
One example of elegy is the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wanderer," where the speaker mourns both his people and his former life. His tribe has been killed and he is left alone to wander the wilderness, more than likely to eventually be killed or die of exposure himself. The poem begins with the wanderer stating what and who he has lost, then proceeds to his happy memories of fellowship with his fellow-warriors and his king before ending the poem with an appeal to put one's trust in God to bear grief.
References
What is an elegy?
An elegy is a poem which shows serious reflection on the part of the speaker and typically laments the loss of a loved one. The elegy was popular in Anglo-Saxon literature and the most popular to the elegiac poems were "The Seafarer", "The Wanderer", and "The Wife's Lament".
These poems were also considered lyrical in the fact that they denoted the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker and spoke about the events in the speaker's life.
In "The Seafarer", the speaker is saddened by the fact that he has suffered pain and loss upon the "sea-lanes" (a kenning for the ocean). The speaker is saddened by the fact that all around him seems lost and he cannot find a place for himself.
The days of glory have decayed/ the earth has spilled its splendour/ there are no captains now, no kings/ gold givers such as once there were/ the lords who lived to purchase fame/ and utmost laud among their peers.
This stanza details the loss the seafarer has suffered. For him, there is no one left. This is the epitome of the elegy.
An elegy is a poem that is usually concerned with the death of someone or, more generally, with the passing of time and the melancholy that this awareness produces in human beings. These two dimensions (a more personal one referring to a specific death and a more general reflection not linked to a specific death) are inextricably intertwined in the development of the genre. Coleridge was probably the poet who gave the most general definition of the term saying that it is "the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind".
Initially, in its Greek and Latin form, elegies did not specifically refer to poems with such content, but identified a precise meter. The modern meaning of elegy started to be applied during the Renaissance. John Donne, for example, used it both for a group of diverse satirical and erotic poems as well as for his "A Funerall Elegie" which clearly links the term to the mourning tradition. Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), on the death of Edward King, is generally seen as providing the blueprint for the modern form of the genre and for its combination with a pastoral setting peopled by shepherds, nymphs and satyrs. Shelley's "Adonais" (1821) and Arnold's "Thyrsis" (1867) follow this tradition, while Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is a reflection on a specific death (Arthur Hallam's), but does not share the pastoral setting. On the contrary, Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750) is not linked on a specific death and established the prototype for general poetic reflections on the passing of time.
What are the features of a pastoral elegy?
A pastoral elegy is a hybrid form combining the conventions of the pastoral with those of the elegy. A pastoral is a work set in an idealized version of the countryside, populated by shepherds, shepherdesses, happy farmers, and benign nature, in which people getting lost in the forest and spending nights outside wearing city clothes never get hypothermia or even insect bites. The pastoral portrays its imagined countryside as a place of prelapsarian innocence, far removed from the vices of the cities.
An elegy is a funeral song or lamentation for the death of a beloved or admired person.
Thus a pastoral elegy is a lamentation for the death of a person (real or fictional) who rather than being described realistically is imagined within an idealized pastoral environment.
Some famous examples of the pastoral elegy in English are is Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”, Milton’s “Lycidas”, Shelley’s “Adonais”, and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867)
References