Elegiac Poetry
Elegy: A formal poem on the death of a particular person or on
death in general. Originally,
in Greek and Latin, it was a poem on any solemn or serious
subject.
It was applied to love poems or Complaints in Elizabethan
England. A sub-genre is the Pastoral
Elegy, as in Milton’s Lycidas.
AS Elegies include “The Wanderer,” “The
Seafarer,” “The Ruin,” “Deor,” and “The Wife’s Lament.”
“[E]ach poem at some stage contrasts the
sorrow of the present with past happiness, dwelling upon the transience of
life’s pleasures and the fallaciousness of its security. . . . [The poems] include narration in the first
person, the sense of isolation of the narrator who has lost all who are dear
to him, and the use of weather and ruins to reinforce the feelings of
decay and transitoriness” (Grose & McKenna 93)