ELEGY

ELEGY

[PASTORAL ELEGY]

[EULOGY]

(Gr. elegeia, ”lament“).

I. PASTORAL ELEGY

II. HISTORY

III. FUNCTIONS

In the modern sense of the term, the e. is a short poem, usually formal or ceremonious in tone and diction, occasioned by the death of a person. Unlike the dirge (q.v.), threnody, obsequy, and other forms of pure lament or memorial, however, and more expansive than the epitaph (q.v.), the e. frequently includes a movement from expressed sorrow toward consolation. In the larger historical perspective, however, it has been most often a poem of meditation, usually on love or death. Discussion of the origin and devel. of the e. in Western poetry is complicated by major shifts in definition and has been limited in the past by a failure to distinguish between the elegiac as a mode, or motive, and the several species of e. which fall wholly or partly within that mode (Bloomfield).

I. PASTORAL ELEGY.

One of the oldest and most influential species of the genre, the pastoral e. has sometimes been thought a subdivision of the pastoral (q.v.). Since its inception in Cl. lit., it has directed itself toward ceremonial mourning for an exemplary figure, originally associated with forces of fertility or (poetic) creativity. From Theocritus' First Idyll to Yeats's ”Shepherd and Goatherd,“ examples of the pastoral e. will be found among the various elegies listed below. Its practitioners incl. Virgil, Petrarch, Sannazaro, Marot, Spenser, Milton, Goethe, Shelley, and Arnold, among others. While the pastoral e.'s period of postclassical dominance extended from the Ren. through the 17th c., several of its conventions have informed nonpastoral elegies throughout the history of the genre. Such conventions incl. a procession of mourners, extended use of repetition and refrain (qq.v.), antiphony or competition between voices, appeals and questionings of deities and witnesses, outbreaks of anger or criticism, offerings of tribute and rewards, and the use of imagery such as water, vegetation, sources of light, and emblems of sexual power drawn from a natural world depicted as either injured victim or site of renewal.

The pastoral e. is most notably illustrated in Eng. by Spenser's ”November“ in the Shephearedes Calender, Milton's Lycidas, a monody [q.v.] on the death of Edward King, Shelley's Adonais (1821) on the death of...