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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
His poetry achieves a sense of cohesive structure and beauty through the internal patterns of sound, diction, specific word choice, and effect of association. [50] The poem uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy, a meditative lyric genre derived from the poetic tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity.
The characteristics and style of Graveyard poetry is not unique to them, and the same themes and tone are found in ballads and odes. Many of the Graveyard School poets were, like Thomas Parnell , Christian clergymen, and as such they often wrote didactic poetry, combining aesthetics with religious and moral instruction. [ 3 ]
"Break, Break, Break" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson written during early 1835 and published in 1842. The poem is an elegy that describes Tennyson's feelings of loss after Arthur Henry Hallam died and his feelings of isolation while at Mablethorpe , Lincolnshire.
"Lycidas" (/ ˈ l ɪ s ɪ d ə s /) is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, Justa Edouardo King Naufrago , dedicated to the memory of Edward King , a friend of Milton at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637.