Elegy — Definition, Structure, and Examples
What is an elegy?
An elegy is a poetic form wherein the speaker expresses grief or sadness due to a loss. The poet focuses on sorrow and lamentation, and some elegies include the concepts of redemption and solace. Typical elegies are written in quatrains in iambic pentameter with an ABAB rhyme scheme.
Themes vary across cultures and languages, but in English literature, since about the 16th century, elegies have been solely about lamentation and loss.
An elegy is different from a eulogy, a speech praising someone’s achievements, usually given at funerals.
Famous elegies include “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” by W.H. Auden, and “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman.
Elegy structure
While the structure of an elegy can vary from one poet to the next, many incorporate the following characteristics:
Most poets structure their elegies using quatrains, which are four-line stanzas. Some elegies use a sequence of elegiac couplets, two lines of verse that contain an end rhyme.
Ancient Greeks used elegiac couplets with alternating lines written in pentameter and hexameter. Traditionally in English, elegies are written in iambic pentameter, which consists of five metric feet with a pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables (da DUM). Each metric foot consists of two syllables (da DUM), so each line contains ten syllables.
Elegies typically follow an ABAB rhyme scheme, an alternating rhyming pattern where the end of lines one and three and lines two and four rhyme.
The content of elegies has shifted over time and language.
Ancient Greek elegies addressed ideas regarding death, love, and war.
Roman elegies written in Latin also focused on death, love, and war; however, their works included mythological themes.
English poets revived the elegiac form of poetry with an emphasis mainly on the death of loved ones. English poets structured their elegies to contain a shift from grief to one of three other states: solace, refusal of solace, or more intense grief.
Elegy examples
The following poems are written in the elegiac verse form:
“Requiescat” by Oscar Wilde
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
“On My First Son” by Ben Jonson
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
“To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.