Elegy

Elegy was originally used for a type of poetic metre (Elegiac metre), but is also used for a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegos, a reflection on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally. In addition, an elegy (sometimes spelled elegíe) may be a type of musical work, usually in a sad and somber attitude. Not to be confused with a eulogy. Some notable elegies include:

• The Elegies of Propertius
• Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
• Edmund Spenser's Astrophel
• John Milton's Lycidas
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonaïs
• William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis
• Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
• Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam
• Chidiock Tichborne's Elegy
• Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer
• Charlotte Turner Smith's Elegiac Poems

Musical Elegies:

• Élégie, Op. 24, Gabriel Fauré
• Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus

See also

• elegiac couplet