Elegy

Elegy (Gr. elegeia), according to its derivation, signifies a song of lamentation, but the term was employed at an early period by the Greeks to designate any poem written in distichs. The alteration in elegiac verse of hexameter with pentameter helps to give to this species of poetry its character, which consists in the connection of subjective feelings and emotions with external incidents or objects. Many poems have been written in this form which are not elegies proper. Of the numerous elegies of the Greeks, few have come down to us. Among the Romans, Catullus was the first good elegiac writer; after him came Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Tibullus, in particular, brought the erotic elegy to its highest perfection. In modern times, the term elegy is applied in England to any serious piece where a tone of melancholy pervades the sentiments, as in Gray's famous Elegy, written in a Country Church-yard. It includes also such splendid tributes to the dead as the Lycidas of Milton, the Adonais of Shelley, the In Memoriam of Tennyson, and the Thyrsis of Matthew Arnold. See The Book of British Elegies, by W. F. M. Phillipps (1879).