Elegy

The word elegy (pronounced ELL-er-dji, IPA: /'ɛ lɪ dʒɪ/) is used in two quite different ways: its meaning in the context of English literature is not the same as its meaning in the context of Greek and Latin literature. (You may want to clarify a confusion that has been made between elegy and eulogy.)

Nowadays the word elegy refers to a type of lyric poetry which has a distinctive content or subject matter. An elegy is a poem which laments the death of a specific person or, more generally, reflects on death itself or on some other matter which is a cause of sorrow or sadness. Among the best known elegies in English Lycidas by John Milton (1608-1674) mourns the death of the poet's friend Edward King, who drowned at sea; Elegy written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) reflects on the obscure lives of those buried in a country graveyard and looks forward to the poet's own death; In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) is a response to the premature death of the poet's friend Arthur Henry Hallam; and Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is a meditation on the Irishmen and women who died in the 1916 Easter rising against British rule in Ireland.

Gray's Elegy is written in what have come to be called elegiac stanzas - elegiac (pronounced ell-er-DJEYE-ik, IPA: /,ɛ lɪ 'dʒaɪ ək/) is the adjective from elegy. An elegiac stanza is a quatrain (i.e., a stanza of four lines), with each line an iambic pentameter and alternate lines rhyming (i.e., the rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b). Here, as an example, is the opening stanza of the poem:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Many elegies have been written in elegiac stanzas - though by no means all elegies adopt this verse form, and in fact none of the other elegies previously mentioned are written in elegiac stanzas. Needless to add, a poem may be written in elegiac stanzas without being an elegy: it may not have the subject matter distinctive of an elegy.

The word elegy comes originally from the Greek word elegos (ἔλεγος), which means a song accompanied by a flute. In ancient Greece these songs were written in a distinctive metre: they consisted of couplets, of which the first line was a dactylic hexameter and the second a dactylic pentameter - so the couplet would scan:

— ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — —

— ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — || — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | —.

The Greek word for a couplet which follows this metrical scheme is elegeion (ἐλεγεῖον), and the plural elegeia (ἐλεγεῖα), i.e., a number of elegiac couplets, is the usual word for a poem written in this metre. The elegeia or elegy (as elegeia is usually translated) did not have a distinctive content or subject matter: for example, the earliest Greek elegies were drinking songs, songs rousing soldiers to battle, and songs recounting historical events; and many of the elegies of Roman poets such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid were love poems: it was only relatively late in antiquity that elegies tended to have a plaintive or sorrowful character. In the context of Greek and Latin literature, then, what makes a poem an elegy is not its content but its form, i.e., its being written in elegiac couplets.