In classical literature an elegy was
any poem composed of elegiac distichs , also known as elegiacs, and the
subjects were various; death, war, love and similar themes. The elegy was also
used for epitaphs and commemorative verses, and very often there was a
mourning strain in them. However, it is only since the 16th c. that
an elegy has come to mean a poem of mourning for an individual, or a lament for some tragic event. In England
there were few attempts in the 16th c. to imitate elegiacs because
the language is unsuited to prolonged series of dactylic hexameters and
pentameters. 16th c. French writers like Doublet and Ronsard had the
same problem.
Near the turn of the 16th
c., the term elegie still covered a variety of subject matter. For example,
Donne wrote Elegie. His Picture, and Elegie. On his Mistris. Later the term
came to be applied more and more to a serious meditative poem, the kind that
Coleridge was hinting at when he spoke of elegy as the form of poetry ‘natural
to a reflective mind’. English literature is especially rich in this kind of
poetry, which, at times, is closely akin to the lament and the
dirge . For instance, the OE poems The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Deor’s
Lament, several medieval yrics, Thomas Nashe’s song ‘Adieu, farewell earth’s
bliss’, Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village,
Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Young’s Night Thoughts, Keats’s
Ode to Melanoholy and Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed-
to name only a handful of the scores that exist.
