Pastoral elegy

The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing the poet’s grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse, expression of the shepherd’s, or poet’s, grief, praise of the deceased, a tirade against death, a detailing of the effects of this specific death upon nature, and eventually, the poet’s simultaneous acceptance of death’s inevitability and hope for immortality. Additional features sometimes found within pastoral elegies include a procession of mourners, satirical digressions about different topics stemming from the death, and symbolism through flowers, refrains, and rhetorical questions. The pastoral elegy is typically incredibly moving and in its most classic form, it concerns itself with simple, country figures. In ordinary pastoral poems, the shepherd is the poem’s main character. In pastoral elegies, the deceased is often recast as a shepherd, despite what his role may have been in life. Further, after being recast as a shepherd, the deceased is often surrounded by classical mythology figures, such as nymphs, fauns, etc.

An elegy is a meditative lyric poem that has a very mournful and melancholy tone. It is usually written to mourn the death of a close friend or loved one, but also occasionally mourns humanity as a whole. Although this form of poetry reflects on the notion of death, it is not to be confused with a “eulogy,” which is a speech that gives tribute to a person, usually after the person has died.

Originally, in Greek and Roman poetry, an elegy was a poem written in elegiac verse, which included couplets consisting of a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line. A hexameter line contains six metrical feet while a pentameter line contains five metrical feet. Dating back to the 7th century BC, the elegy was used to write about various topics, including love, lamentation, and politics. This form of poetry was widely used by poets such as Archilochus, Mimnermus, Tytraeus, Catullus, and Ovid.

In English literature, it was not until the 16th century that the term “elegy” began to refer to the content of the poem as opposed to the metrical form of the poem. Since then, the term elegy usually refers to a meditative poem of lamentation with no set metrical form. Examples of modern elegies include Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” which reflects on the death of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", which mourns humanity as a whole. Other examples include e e cumming’s “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop’s “Hours,” A E Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and W H Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats."

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