72
ELEGY
1965).
Also, Fredson Bowers,
Principles
of
Bibliographical
Description
(1949);
Philip
Gaskell,
A
New
Introduction
to
Bibliography
(1972);
G. Thomas Tanselle,
The
History
of
Books
as
a
Field
of
Study
(1981).
Elegy.
In Greek and Roman literature,
"elegy"
denoted any poem
written
in
elegiac
meter
(alternating
hexameter
ana
pentameter
lines).
The
term
was
also
used, however, to refer to the subject matter of
change
and
loss
frequently ex-
pressed
in the
elegiac
verse form,
especially
in complaints about
love.
In ac-
cordance
with
this latter
usage,
"The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," and other
poems in Old
English
on the transience of all worldly things are even now
called
elegies.
In Europe and
England
the word continued to have a variable
application through the
Renaissance.
John Donne's
elegies,
written
in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, are love poems, although they re-
late to the
sense
of
elegy
as
lament, in
that
many of
them
emphasize mutabil-
ity and
loss.
In the seventeenth century the
term
elegy
began
to be limited to
its most common present
usage:
a formal and sustained lament in verse for
the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation. Examples
are
the medieval poem
The
Pearl
and Chaucer's
Book
of
the
Duchess
(elegies
in
the mode of
dream
allegory);
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's
In
Memoriam
(1850),
on
the death of
Arthur
Hallam; and W. H. Auden's "In Memory of
W.
B.
Yeats"
(1940).
Occasionally the
term
is used in its older and broader sense, for
somber meditations on mortality such as Thomas Gray's
"Elegy
Written
in a
Country Churchyard"
(1757),
and the
Duino
Elegies
(1912-22)
of the German
poet
Rainer
Maria
Rilke
on the transience
both
of poets and of the earthly ob-
jects
they write poems about.
The
dirge
is
also
a versified expression of
grief
on the occasion of a par-
ticular person's death, but differs from the
elegy
in
that
it is short, is
less
for-
mal,
and is usually represented as a
text
to be sung; examples are
Shakespeare's
"Full Fathom Five Thy Father
Lies"
and William Collins' "A
Song
from
Shakespeare's
Cymbeline"
(1749).
Threnody
is
now used mainly as
an
equivalent for "dirge," and monody for an
elegy
or dirge which is pre-
sented
as
the utterance of
a
single
person.
John Milton
describes
his
"Lycidas"
(1638)
in the subtitle as a "monody" in which "the Author bewails a learned
Friend,"
and Matthew Arnold called his
elegy
on A. H.
Cloùgh
"Thyrsis: A
Monody" (1866).
An important subtype of the
elegy
is
the
pastoral
elegy,
which
represents
both
the
poet
and the one he
mourns—who
is usually
also
a
poet—as
shep-
herds (the Latin word for shepherd is "pastor"). This poetic form was
origi-
nated by the
Sicilian
Greek
poet
Theocritus, was continued by the Roman
Virgil,
was developed in various European countries during the
Renaissance,
and
remained current in
English
poetry throughout the nineteenth century.
Notable
English
pastoral
elegies
are Spenser's "Astrophel," on the death of
Sir
Philip Sidney,
(1595),
Milton's
"Lycidas"
(1638),
Shelley's "Adonais"
(1821),
and in the Victorian age, Arnold's "Thyrsis." The pastoral
elegists,
from the Greeks through the
Renaissance,
developed a set of elaborate
conven-
tions, which are illustrated here by reference to
"Lycidas."
In addition to the
