Definition and Examples of Elegy – Literary Terms

what is elegy, elegy meaning, elegy definition, elegy vs eulogy

Definition and Examples of Elegy – Literary Terms

Elegy:   

A poem of sorrow or mourning for the dead; also a reflective poem in a solemn or sorrowful MOOD. The adjective elegiac is used to describe POETRY that exhibits the characteristics of an elegy.

Well-known elegies lamenting the death of a particular person include John Milton's Lycidas (Edward King), Percy Shelley's Adonais (John Keats), Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam (Arthur H. Hallam), and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Abraham Lincoln). Perhaps the most famous elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is a solemn, meditative poem mourning, not the
death of a person, but the passing of a way of life. Closely related terms are monody, threnody, and dirge.

See also:

EULOGY. 

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