An elegy is a poem of sorrow or mourning for the dead; also, a reflective poem in a solemn or sorrowful mood. The adjective ‘elegiac’ is used to describe poetry that exhibits the characteristics of an elegy.
Well-known elegies lamenting the death of a particular
person include John Milton's Lycidas (Edward King), P.B.
Shelley's Adonais (John Keats), Alfred Lord Tennyson's In
Memoriam (Arthur H. Hallam), and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Abraham Lincoln). Perhaps the most famous
elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is a
solemn, meditative poem mourning not the death of a person, but the passing of
a way of life. Closely related terms of elegy are monody, threnody, and dirge.
The main characteristics of the