The Elegy

A poem of mourning, most often for a specific death, though the term also covers a broader mode of meditative loss and reflection. The form has no fixed meter or rhyme scheme in English; what unifies it is a movement, generally from grief through consolation toward some form of acceptance or affirmation, as in John Milton's Lycidas for Edward King, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais for John Keats, and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd for Abraham Lincoln. The term descends from the elegiac couplet of Greek and Latin verse, a paired long and short line originally used for subjects well beyond mourning, including love and war; the narrower modern sense, a poem specifically of lament, developed later and is now the form's primary meaning in English.