Poem: Elegy

 Original Scope

• It is originated from Greece
• It refers to war songs, love poems, political verses, lamentations for the dead, as subjects in earlier stage.
• The Greeks judged this composition by its form not by its subject matter. So, it was written in elegiac measure, a couplet composed of a dactylic hexameter followed by dactylic pentameter.

Modern composition

• In modern usage, it is the theme that matters not the metre. 
• The theme must be mournful or sadly reflective, may be a lamentation for the dead.
• It is written as a tribute to something loved and lost. 
• In many poems , the personal loss have been written in very simple language, usually aims at an effect of dignity and solemnity without a sense of strain or artificiality.  Example: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and the form he adapted is quatrains in iambic pentameter. 

Other features

• Milton laments the degradation of poetry and religion in Lycidas,an Elegy on the death of a "learned friend", Edward King, whom he sincerely mourned.
• Tennyson philosophies on the puzzles of life and destiny in In Memoriam, an Elegy on the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam.
• Matthew Arnold pauses to reflect on "the course of the life of mortal men on the earth" in Rugby Chapel, an elegiac poem on his visit to his father's grave fifteen years after his death.
• Shelley's Adonais, an Elegy on the death of Keats, the transition from mourning to consolation and then to triumph occurs long before the close. 

The Pastoral Elegy

• During the Renaissance a new kind of Elegy was introduced into English poetry. It followed a convention by which the poet represented himself as a shepherd bewailing the loss of a companion. 
• The manner of speech and the setting were borrowed from rustic life and whatever the poet had to say or describe was phrased accordingly.
• It was followed in modern times too. Milton's Lycidas and Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis are both pastoral elegies, employing pastoral images and sentiments. 
• The form arose among the Sicilian Greeks, originating probably with Theocritus whose Idylls and Epigrams are the earliest poems know to us which are written in the pastoral manner.
• It was perfected later by the Latin poet Virgil, whose Eclogues and Georgics are noted for their vivid treatment of the scenes and labours of the countryside.
• Other Examples are from Spencer's Shepherd's Calendar and Astrophel , a pastoral lamenting his patron and intimate friend Sir Philip Sydney.

Activity:

What is Elegy? Explain with suitable examples.