ELEGY 397
(); K. Strecker, “Leoninische Hexameter und speare, Two Gentlemen of Verona) can be recommended Pentameter in . Jahrhundert,” Neues Archiv für ältere to a would-be seducer. T is composite understanding deutsche Geschichtskunde (); C. M. Bowra, Early of the genre, however, is never fully worked out and Greek Elegists, d ed. (); P. F r i e d l ä n d e r , Epigram- gradually fades. mata: Greek Inscriptions in Verse from the Beginnings to T e most important cl. models for the later devel. of the Persian Wars ( ); M. Platnauer, Latin Elegiac Verse elegy are *pastoral: the lament for Daphnis (who died (); L. P. Wilkinson, Golden Latin Artistry ( ); of love) by T eocritus, the elegy for Adonis attributed T. G. Rosenmeyer, “Elegiac and Elegos,” California to Bion, the elegy on Bion attributed to Moschus, and Studies in Classical Antiquity (); D. Ross, Style another lament for Daphnis in the fi fth *eclogue of and Tradition in Catullus ( ); M. L. West, Studies in Virgil. All are stylized and mythic, with hints of ritual; Greek Elegy and Iambus ( ); A.W.H. Adkins, Poetic the fi rst three are punctuated by incantatory *refrains. Craft in the Early Greek Elegists ( ); R. M. Marina T e elegies on Daphnis are staged performances within Sáez, La métrica de los epigramas de Marcial (). an otherwise casual setting. Nonhuman elements of the T.V.F. BROGAN; A. T. COLE pastoral world are enlisted in the mourning: nymphs, satyrs, the landscape itself. In Virgil, the song of grief is E L E G I A C S T A N Z A, elegiac quatrain, heroic qua- paired with one celebrating the dead man’s apotheosis; train. In Eng., the iambic pentameter quatrain rhymed the poem is usually read as an *allegory on the death abab. While it had been frequently employed without and deifi cation of Julius Caesar. Virgil’s poem becomes elegiac feeling or intention by other poets, e.g., Shake- particularly infl uential and adaptable. In the th c., speare in his sonnets and John Dryden in his Annus Paschasius Radbertus composes an imitation in which Mirabilis, t h e t e r m elegiac stanza was apparently made the nuns Galathea and Phyllis sing of a deceased shep- popular by its use in T omas Gray’s “ Elegy Written herd monk as a fi gure for Christ. At the prompting in a Country Churchyard” (), though, in fact, the of humanism, Ren. poets experiment with the pastoral association of the *quatrain with *elegy in Eng. ap- elegy and use it for a range of personal, political, and pears at least as early as James Hammond’s Love Ele- symbolic reference. Few collections of pastorals in the gies ( ) and was employed “almost invariably” for Ren. are without at least one elegy, and there are im- elegiac verse for about a century thereafter (Bate)—cf. portant stand-alone examples, such as Clément Marot’s William Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by “Eglogue” on the death of Louise of Savoy (). John Peele Castle.” Milton composes two full-fl edged pastoral elegies: Epi- W. J. Bate, T e Stylistic Development of Keats (). taphium Damonis in Lat., on a close friend (), and T.V.F. BROGAN; S. F. FOGLE “Lycidas” in Eng., on a schoolmate (). T e latter is widely regarded as Milton’s fi rst major poetic achieve- E L E G Y ment and the most successful vernacular instance of the genre. It was, nevertheless, sharply criticized in the I. History next century by Samuel Johnson for its artifi ciality; he II. Criticism speaks for a growing disenchantment with the genre. I. History . In mod. usage, an elegy is a poem of loss or Major poets, however, can return to it in full dress: mourning. T e term is Gr., its initial signifi cance met- P. B. Shelley in “Adonais” () on the shockingly rical: elegeia designates a poem in elegiac *couplets. In early death of John Keats, W. B. Yeats in “Shepherd antiquity, the meter is used for a range of subjects and and Goatherd” () on an unnamed shepherd who styles, incl. the kind of combative, promiscuous love “died in the great war beyond the sea.” T e presence presented in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and of the genre can also be felt in less-adorned poems, in Ovid. T e popularity and prestige of what is still called the general sense that the countryside is the right place Roman love elegy make elegy a loose synonym for “love for elegiac feeling (T omas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a poem” in early mod. usage, though the cl. exemplars Country Churchyard,” ) or in the arch affi rmation are not generally “elegiac” in what becomes the domi- of natural sympathy with which W. H. Auden opens nant sense of the term. T e meter, however, was also his elegy on Yeats (). popular for *epitaphs, both literal and literary; all the Pastoral, however, is only a specialized trad. within Roman elegists also wrote elegies in the mod. sense, and the wider fi eld of poetic treatments of death and loss. in antiquity, the metrical term also becomes a synonym Such poems (which may or may not call themselves for *“lament.” Neo-Lat. poets from the th-c. on com- elegies) show an immense diversity, within which fi li- pose new works in elegiac couplets, and attempts are ations can be complex. Some important examples are made to transfer the meter to the vernaculars. Among really sui generis ; among the few unforgettable Eng. the most successful is J. W. Goethe’s, incl. a collection poems of the fi rst decade of the th c. is John Skelton’s of Römische Elegien ( ), scandalously sensual love Philip Sparrow, , unpredictable lines on the death poems, defi antly unmournful. Some critics (such as of a young girl’s pet bird. T e object in question is usu- J. C. Scaliger in the th c.) try to theorize a common ally another person, often specifi cally identifi ed: an im- ground between Roman love elegy and lament for the portant public fi gure or someone with a close personal dead (both involve *complaints); the popularity of *Pe- connection to the poet, such as a spouse, lover, parent, trarchism in the Ren. strengthens a feeling that absence child, or friend. Elegies on other poets are particularly and frustration are central themes in *love poetry; common; elegies for oneself are at least as old as Ovid’s and along these lines, “dire-lamenting elegies” (Shake- exile poems. Elegies for groups or classes of people (esp.
This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:20:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 398 ELEGY those killed in war) date back to the Greeks but be- acterize the genre; that its mode is primarily *lyric, come a particular feature of the th c. (such as Anna with certain characteristic generic markers (*apostro- Akhmatova’s Requiem ( , pub. ) on the “name- phe, exclamation, *pathetic fallacy, epideixis, pastoral less friends” lost in the Stalinist terror of –). topoi, *allusion, *epitaph); and that its indigenous Poems can present themselves as epitaphs or as contain- moods are sorrow, shock, rage, longing, melancholy, ing epitaphs, sometimes addressing a visitor to the cem- and resolution—often in quick succession. Most etery ( siste viator ). Even in times that value poetic artifi ce literary historians have understood elegy as closely at its most elaborate, poems of personal grief—such as linked to the hist., theory, and decorum of cultural Henry King’s “Exequy” on the dead wife he calls “his practices of mourning. Pigman’s Grief and Renaissance matchless never to be forgotten friend” ()—can be Elegy a n d S a c k s ’ s T e English Elegy are two particularly strikingly direct in their eff ect. In th-c. writing, the infl uential studies, both pub. in , that continue appetite for directness becomes conspicuous, at times to set questions and topics for later scholars. While brutal (“he’s dead / the old bastard”; W. C. Williams, studies vary in the extent of their embrace of psycho- “Death” []). It is, however, an equally famous re- analysis or cultural hist., they concur in describing the source of elegies to proceed by complicated indirection. elegy as, in Pigman’s phrase, “a process of mourning.” In Chaucer’s T e Book of the Duchess ( c a . ), occa- Pigman identifi es a shift in Reformation views and sioned by the death of his patron’s wife, the dreaming practices of mourning with consequences for elegy; narrator cannot acknowledge that occasion until the Sacks sees the conventions of the genre from Edmund last of the poem’s , lines, long after the reader has Spenser to Yeats as answerable to psychological needs. divined it. T e mourning in Keats’s ode “To Autumn” Later critics weigh in with some mix of social hist., () is almost entirely subliminal and inexplicit, but psychology, and aesthetic analysis. Ramazani registers strong enough to make three stanzas of seasonal descrip- a protest by mod. elegy against normative cultural tion one of the touchstone lyrics in the lang. models of mourning; Zeiger, Kennedy, and others Some important elegies are expansive in their reach. explore the importance of elegy as a resource for trau- In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- matic collective grief over breast cancer, AIDS, and ing” (), a child (as in Philip Sparrow reacting to the events of September , ; Spargo explores the the death of a bird) hears from the sea a message of psychological dimension of the form with philosophi- “Death, death, death, death, death” that is also the start cal attention. of a visionary poetic calling. Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimitière Other puzzles invite attention. Why, if elegy is “a marin” () sets an individual attempt at spiritual process of mourning,” are so many elegies lyrics with and intellectual transcendence amid the felt presence little narrative or processional content? Standard defi - of the dead in a seaside graveyard at noon (its text is nitions of elegy can strain against the temporality of appropriated by Krzysztof Penderecki for “Dies irae” lyric. Elegy’s recourse to emotion seems incompletely [], an oratorio on Auschwitz). Perhaps the most explained by psychological or social models of grief distinguished th-c. poems to call themselves elegies or even by a notion of the poem as expressive. T e are R. M. Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (written –), emotions represented by the poem and the emotional which move between a sense of insuffi ciency and loss experience that the poem off ers to the reader are dis- basic to human consciousness—“And so we live, and tinct; their trajectories need not coincide. T ey can, are always taking leave”—and a higher order of aware- of course—as when, in a practice shared by other ness among beings whom the poet calls “Angels.” contemp. readers, Queen Victoria and George Eliot annotated the text of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Me- II. Criticism . Critical thought about elegy has been an moriam ( ) so that it referred to their own lost loves. attempt to come to grips with this diversity, sometimes Such evidence suggests that elegy is a kind of manual inadvertently amplifying it. Despite, e.g., current ac- or liturgy for personal use; this function of the genre knowledgment that they have little claim to the term, encouraged criteria such as *sincerity or Johnson’s “pas- a number of poignant OE poems have for years sion” to dominate critical evaluation of it. Yet such been called elegies in a move so closely associated with criteria seem ill suited to the power of poems such as a sense of their value that the designation is unlikely to “Lycidas, ” Spenser’s “Daphnaida,” Whitman’s “When change. T e prestige and longevity of the genre have Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and Auden’s “In increased its variety, and it has often splintered and Memory of Sigmund Freud,” which lament the deaths become unrecognizable to itself; an important “school of persons who were not, in the standard sense of the of elegy,” for instance, in early th-c. Rus. poetry pro- term, “mourned” by the authors. Neither do current duced poems that share emotional intimacy and style theories about the genre’s purposes, collective or pri- but little topical focus. A mountain setting is required vate, account for the numerous elegies of animals, ob- by the trad. of cl. Ger. elegy identifi ed in Ziolkowski’s jects, and so forth or for the peculiar ludic uses of the study of Friedrich Schiller’s originary “Der Spazier- form by poets like Skelton, Emily Dickinson, Robert gang” (). Yet wherever we draw the boundaries of Burns, and the anonymous author of “Groanes from kind, some version of elegy is pervasively written about Newgate, or, An elegy upon Edvvard Dun, Esq. the cit- in every lang. ies common hangman, who dyed naturally in his bed Critics writing in Eng. seem to agree that the topics the th of September, .” of loss and death and the speech act of lament char- T e publication of elegy awaits further study. Chau-
This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:20:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ELISION 399 cer’s ms. Book of the Duchess is thought to have been Collectively, these are sometimes called, on the produced for and performed at anniversary memorial analogy of rhet., the “metric fi gures” (Elwert); Johann events continuing long after the death of the duchess. Susenbrotus, e.g., gives a taxonomy, calling the types of With the advent of print, volumes of elegy were col- elision metaplasms , i.e., the class of fi gures for adding or lected and printed to honor particular deaths (such subtracting a letter or syllable. Elision of whole words as the famous volumes for Philip Sidney and the one or phrases is *ellipsis . Probably at least some of the older containing “Lycidas” ). Print also facilitated the volu- terminology is confused, and certainly many prosodists minous appearance of elegy in broadside, and in the over the centuries have failed to grasp that the reduc- th c., the form developed what now seems like an tive processes at work here are normal linguistic ones, incongruous affi nity for *acrostics and *anagrams. not “poetical” devices peculiar to metrical verse. T e Cavitch () describes the publication of elegy in shortening of words and smoothing out of the alterna- early New En gland with a traveler’s report that there tion of vowels and consonants are both common pro- was not “one Country House in fi fty which has not cesses in speech. T e opposite of elision is * hiatus . its Walls garnished with half a Score of these Sort of In Gr., elision, variable in prose but more regular Poems.” T e changing forms of publication suggest a in poetry, is indicated by an apostrophe (’) to mark diff erent hist. of elegy from what crit. might lead us to the disappearance of the elided vowel (generally short expect and also disabuse us of the sense that that hist. alpha , epsilon, a n d omikron as well as the diphthong has reached any kind of conclusion. ai occasionally in Homer and in comedy); but when See BLUES , CORONACH, DIRGE, ELEGIAC DISTICH, elision occurs in Gr. compound words, the apostro- ELEGIAC STANZA, ENDECHA, EPICEDIUM, GRAVEYARD phe is not used. In Lat., a fi nal vowel or a vowel fol- POETRY, MONODY . lowed by fi nal m was not omitted from the written E. Z. Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pasto- lang.; but as a rule, it was ignored metrically when the ral Elegy Convention from T eocritus to Milton ( ); next word in the same measure began with a vowel, T. Ziolkowski, T e Classical German Elegy – diphthong, or the aspirate h. In the mod. vernaculars, (); G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renais- the apostrophe was retained to indicate graphically sance Elegy ( ); P. Sacks, T e English Elegy ( ); certain types of elision, but outside these, there is a C. M. Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric ( ); D. larger case of words that have syllabically alternate Kay, Melodious Tears: T e English Funeral Elegy from forms in ordinary speech, e.g., heaven , which some Spenser to Milton ( ); J. Ramazani, Poetry of Mourn- speakers pronounce as a disyllable, some as a mono- ing : T e Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (); syllable. T is syllabic variance is, of course, useful to E. Schor, Bearing the Dead: T e British Culture of poets who write in syllable-counting meters; thus, Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria ( ); Sipe shows that in the overwhelming number of cases, W. D. Shaw, Elegy and Paradox ( ); M. F. Zeiger, Shakespeare chooses the one or other form of such Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing words, which she terms “doublets,” so as to conform Shapes of Elegy ( ); M. Homans, Royal Representa- to the meter. tions: Queen Victoria and British Culture – T ere is some presumption that the number of syl- (); J. Hammond, T e American Puritan Elegy lables in the word that fi ts the *scansion of the line (); M. Cavitch, “Interiority and Artifact: Death will be the number uttered in *performance (reading and Self-Inscription in T omas Smith’s Self-Portrait ,” aloud) of the line. Robert Bridges, however, who has Early American Literature (); R. C. Spargo, T e one of the seminal mod. discussions, uses the term eli- Ethics of Mourning ( ); M. Cavitch, American Elegy sion in a special sense, to denote syllables that should be (); D. Kennedy, Elegy ( ); T e Oxford Hand- elided for purposes of scansion but not in pronuncia- book of the Elegy , ed. K. A. Weisman (). tion, a theory that divides scansion from performance. G. BRADEN; E. FOWLER Ramsey has termed this “semi-elision,” in his crit. of Bridges’s position. T e problem of poets’ alteration of E L I S I O N (Lat., “striking out”; Gr., synaloepha ). In the syllabic structure of their lang. for metrical pur- *prosody, the general term for several devices of con- poses is far more complex than is usually assumed; traction whereby two syllables are reduced to one. T e indeed, the very problem of determining what was Gr. term *synaloepha nowadays tends to be restricted to ordinary speech practice at various times in the past only one form; other terms formerly used for elision in itself is very diffi cult. Most of the hist. of Eng. metrical cl. prosody include crasis and synizesis . T e forms of theory from ca. to could be framed in terms elision are: () *aphaeresis : dropping of a word-initial of dispute about elision, i.e., syllabic regularity. syllable (vowel); () *syncope : dropping of a word- T. S. Omond and W. T omas, “Milton and Syl- internal syllable; () *apocope : dropping of a word-fi nal labism,” MLR – (–); Bridges; Omond; W. J. syllable (vowel); () * synaeresis : coalescing of two vow- Bate, T e Stylistic Development of Keats ( ); P. Fus- els within a word; and () synaloepha : coalescing of two sell Jr., “T e T eory of Poetic Contractions,” T eory vowels across a word boundary, i.e., ending one word of Prosody in th-Century England ( ); A. C. Par- and beginning the next. (T e corresponding terms for tridge, Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan addition of a syllable to the beginning, middle, or end Drama ( ); Chatman ; R. O. Evans, Milton’s Eli- of a word are prosthesis , * epenthesis, and proparalepsis , sions ( ); J. Soubiran, L’elision dans la poésie latine respectively.) (); D. L. Sipe, Shakespeare’s Metrics ( ); Allen;
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