Conventions of Elegies-Nieve

Conventions and features of the Elegy


Elegies are usually defined as "a poem of serious reflection", typically a lament for the dead in Greek and Roman poetry. However it can also be defined as "a poem of mortal loss and consolation". Eulogies are most often written in formal prose. Here are a few examples of elegies:

• "Lycidas"-John Milton
• "Adonais"-Percy Shelly
• The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
• "Astrophel"-Edmund Spenser
• "In Memoriam A.H.H by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The normal expectations of the Elegy


The elements of a traditional elegy would mirror the three stages of loss moving from grief to consolation:

1. A lament, where the speaker expresses grief or sorrow.
2. Praise and admiration of the idealized dead.
3. Then finally, consolation and solace (the deceased person in question is not dead, but lives on in another world).

Other conventions include:

• The use of refrains, repeated questions, and repetitions.
• The poet's reflection on the unkindness of death, elements of resentment against a cruel fate.
• Concluding images of resurrection.

There are also some conventions that subvert the normal constituents of an elegy but these are less frequent:

• A division of mourning between several voices.
• Questions of reward, contest, and inheritance between the elegist and the subject.
• The elegist's need to draw attention to his own surviving powers.
• The elegist's reluctant submission to language and an accompanying protestation of incapacity.

Another form of an elegy is a Pastoral Elegy, these types of elegies use more pastoral context and the use of pathetic fallacy is more common, which could represent the attributions of human emotions to the world of nature. Elegies of this type may also express a sense of the natural order being disrupted by death.