ELEGY
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WHAT IS ELEGY?
An elegy is a special kind of lyric. A lyric expresses the emotions of the poet and the elegy is an expression of the emotion of sorrow, woe(sadness) or despair (misery, gloom). In short, the elegy is a lament, a lyric of mourning (grief) or an utterance(expression) of personal grief and sorrow and therefore it should be characterized by absolute sincerity of emotion and expression. Simplicity, brevity (shortness, briefness) and sincerity are its characteristic features.
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In the words of Hodgson;
“In common use, it is often restricted (limited) to a lament over the dead but that is an improper (inappropriate, offensive) narrowing (reducing) of its meaning. There are laments over places, over lost love, over the past, over an individual misery or failure. There are even laments over departed animals and so forth.”
Thus, an elegy is an expression of grief. In that sense, The Burial by Sir John Moore and Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break are good examples From an expression of personal grief, the poet passes on to reflection on human life, human suffering, the shortness of human life and the futility (uselessness, ineffectiveness) of human ambition. Sometimes death is the inspiration and the theme of the poem. Sometimes it is merely the common starting point from which poems have launched verious themes. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is among the most renowned elegies in the English language. Many phrases and lines from it have become household words as it touches the hearts and enslaves (bind, enchain) the memory of all men. Before the battle of Quebec, one general recited the Elegy and declared that he would rather be the author of the poem than the conqueror (defeater, captor) of the City. The central idea of the poem is that death is inevitable (predictable, expected, usual). The rich and the poor, the great and the low all are to die one day. In other words, every human being moves on the road to Death. The thoughts and sentiments of the Elegy are universal. The theme itself is universal-death. It is a Poem, which has reached the hearts of Mankind. Other famous elegies are Matthew Arnold’s Rugby Chapel on the death of his father and on the sorry fate of humanity and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which is a collection of over a hundred lyrics lamenting the death of his college friend Arthur Hailam.
PASTORAL ELEGY
There is also pastoral elegy. It is an elegy in which the poet represents himself as a shepherd mourning the death of a fellow shepherd. Spenser’s Astrophel, Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais and Arnold’s Thyrsis and Scholar Gipsy are the most notable examples of pastoral elegy in English language.
Some of the famous elegies are:
1. Edmund Spenser’s Astrophel (1595)
2. John Milton’s Lycidas (1637)
3. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750)
4. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821)
5. Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1849)
6. William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1915”