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The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse ...
The elegiac couplet is presumed to be the oldest Greek form of epodic poetry (a form where a later verse is sung in response or comment to a previous one). Scholars, who even in the past did not know who created it, [3] theorize the form was originally used in Ionian dirges, with the name "elegy" derived from the Greek ε, λεγε ε, λεγε—"Woe, cry woe, cry!"
However, in 1751, Thomas Gray wrote "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". That poem inspired numerous imitators, and soon both the revived Pindaric ode and "elegy" were commonplace. Gray used the term elegy for a poem of solitude and mourning, and not just for funereal verse. He also freed the elegy from the classical elegiac meter.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
/ Still showed a quickness," but Dryden finds comfort in the fact that "maturing time / But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme." The poem is concluded with an echo of "the famous words that conclude Catullus's elegy to his brother: 'Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale' (And forever, brother, hail and farewell!)."
Holograph manuscript of Gray's "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard". The poem most likely originated in the poetry that Gray composed in 1742. William Mason, in Memoirs, discussed his friend Gray and the origins of Elegy: "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy in a Country Church-yard was begun, if not concluded, at this time [August 1742] also: Though I am aware that as it stands at ...
Hymn: a poem praising God or the divine (often sung). Lament: any poem expressing deep grief, usually at a death or some other loss. Dirge; Elegy: a poem of lament, praise, and consolation, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a particular person. Example: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. Light: whimsical poems ...
It is a long poem, 206 lines in length (207 according to some sources), that is cited as a prominent example of the elegy form and of narrative poetry. [40] In its final form, published in 1881 and republished to the present, the poem is divided into sixteen sections referred to as cantos or strophes that range in length from 5 or 6 lines to as ...