Elegy is a poem that usually reflects upon death—often the death of a friend. A well-known elegy in the English language is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (1865), by the American poet Walt Whitman, is another. Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) is a series of elegies in which the poet reconciles himself to the loss of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
Loading the player...In Memoriam by Lord Tennyson
Pastoral elegies present the departed friend and the mourning poet as shepherds. Examples of pastoral elegies in English literature include Edmund Spenser’s “Astrophel” (1595), on Sir Philip Sidney’s death; John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), on Edward King’s death; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), on John Keats’s death; and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867), on Arthur Hugh Clough’s death.
The ancient Greeks used the term elegy to refer to a poem’s form rather than to its subject matter. This form, called a distic, consisted of two-line units. The first line had six metrical feet (hexameter) and was followed by a line of five metrical feet (pentameter). Most ancient Greek and Roman elegies deal with war and love, rather than with death. Elegies of the Roman poet Ovid, for example, are chiefly love poems.
All the poets mentioned in this article have a separate biography in World Book.
