An elegy is a poem of mourning. It laments someone who has died, remembers who they were and looks for a way to carry the loss, though not every elegy finds one. The word goes back to the Greek elegos, a funeral lament. Below are twelve classic elegies, each with a note on what happens to the speaker's grief, then four new ones and a short guide to writing your own; the labels mark excerpts and translations.
An elegy is not a eulogy, which is a speech. If you need words for a funeral or memorial service soon, the guide to writing a eulogy and the eulogy examples will get you there faster. A short elegy can close a eulogy or be read on its own, and the last sections of this page cover that.
| Elegy | Poet and year | Written for |
|---|---|---|
| ElegyPoem 101 | Poet and yearCatullus, first century BC | Written forHis brother |
| Elegy“On My First Son” | Poet and yearBen Jonson, 1616 | Written forHis son Benjamin, who died at seven |
| Elegy“Lycidas” | Poet and yearJohn Milton, 1638 | Written forEdward King, a Cambridge friend drowned in the Irish Sea |
| Elegy“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” | Poet and yearThomas Gray, 1751 | Written forThe unremembered villagers of a churchyard |
| ElegyAdonais | Poet and yearPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1821 | Written forJohn Keats |
| ElegyIn Memoriam A.H.H. | Poet and yearAlfred Tennyson, 1850 | Written forHis friend Arthur Henry Hallam |
| Elegy“Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”) | Poet and yearChristina Rossetti, 1862 | Written forHerself, speaking to the one she leaves |
| Elegy“O Captain! My Captain!” | Poet and yearWalt Whitman, 1865 | Written forAbraham Lincoln |
| Elegy“The bustle in a house” | Poet and yearEmily Dickinson, 1890 | Written forA household the morning after a death |
| Elegy“The Voice” | Poet and yearThomas Hardy, 1914 | Written forHis wife, Emma |
| Elegy“In Flanders Fields” | Poet and yearJohn McCrae, 1915 | Written forThe soldiers buried in Flanders |
| Elegy“Dirge Without Music” | Poet and yearEdna St. Vincent Millay, 1928 | Written forThe dead, and the refusal to be comforted |
What makes a poem an elegy
An elegy mourns. Beyond that it can take almost any shape: rhymed couplets, a rondeau, a sequence of 133 sections, a few lines of free verse. What most elegies share is a movement. The Academy of American Poets' glossary describes the traditional elegy as mirroring three stages of loss: a lament, where the speaker grieves; praise of the dead; and, finally, consolation. Milton's “Lycidas” goes through all three. Many later elegies keep the first two and question the third, and Millay's “Dirge Without Music” refuses it in its last line.
In ancient Greek and Latin, an elegy was defined by its meter rather than its mood. Any poem in elegiac couplets, a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a shorter line called a pentameter, counted as one, whether it was about love, war or a death. Catullus's poem 101 is an elegy in both senses: it is written in elegiac couplets, and it is addressed to his brother's ashes at the end of a long journey.
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
…
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
Carried through many nations and over many seas,
I come, brother, to these sorrowful rites,
to give you the last gift owed to the dead
and speak, for nothing, to your silent ash.
…
Take these, wet through with a brother's tears,
and forever, brother, hail and farewell.
The poem moves the way many later elegies do: a journey, a direct address (frater, brother, comes three times in ten lines), the admission that speaking to ashes does nothing, and a farewell anyway.
Elegy vs eulogy, epitaph and ode
Elegy and eulogy are easy to mix up because both answer a death. A eulogy is a speech: written in prose, spoken once at a funeral or memorial, mostly praise. An elegy is a poem, written to be read and reread. To keep them apart, remember that the eu- in eulogy is the Greek for good, as in euphoria: a eulogy is good words, spoken. An elegy is a lament, written.
| Kind | What it is | Form | Where you meet it |
|---|---|---|---|
| KindElegy | What it isA poem mourning someone or something lost | FormVerse, any form or length | Where you meet itCollections, readings, sometimes a service |
| KindEulogy | What it isA speech praising someone who has died | FormProse, written to be spoken | Where you meet itThe funeral or memorial service |
| KindEpitaph | What it isA few lines for a grave, or a short poem written as one | FormMuch briefer than an elegy | Where you meet itHeadstones, and the end of some elegies, like Gray's |
| KindOde | What it isA poem of praise | FormVerse, often in elaborate stanzas | Where you meet itPoems addressed to a person, an object or an idea |
| KindObituary | What it isA published notice of the death | FormProse, mostly facts | Where you meet itNewspapers and funeral home websites |
Personal elegies: Jonson, Tennyson, Hardy
The most direct elegies are for one person the poet loved, and they stay close to the facts: an age, a doorway, a dress.
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou'wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
Jonson's son Benjamin died at seven. “Child of my right hand” translates the boy's name, which in Hebrew means son of the right hand, and the poem tries one way after another to settle the grief. First the boy is a loan: seven years lent, repaid “on the just day.” Then the father breaks out (“O, could I lose all father now!”) and tries an argument instead: the boy has escaped “world's and flesh's rage” and old age, so why mourn? Then comes the epitaph he imagines, calling the boy his “best piece of poetry.” By the last couplet the grief hasn't been consoled so much as guarded: a vow never to love anything that much again.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
…
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam died in Vienna in 1833, aged 22. Tennyson worked on the poem for seventeen years and published it in 1850, without his name: 133 sections in four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter rhymed ABBA, the outer lines closing around the inner pair. Section 7 stands outside his friend's house before dawn and refuses comfort. Life begins again only “far away,” and the day breaks “blank.” The famous lines arrive twenty sections later, and even then the doubt isn't over: “Nature, red in tooth and claw” comes in section 56.
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.
Hardy's wife Emma died in November 1912, and he wrote a sequence of poems about her in the months after. This one admits the marriage had changed (“When you had changed from the one who was all to me”) and listens for the woman she was “at first, when our day was fair.” The long, lilting lines of the first three stanzas give way to short ones in the last, as if the speaker were losing his footing. Hardy kept working on it: later printings change the eleventh line to “dissolved to wan wistlessness.”
Pastoral elegies: Milton and Shelley
In a pastoral elegy the dead and the mourners become shepherds, nature mourns with them, and the poem ends by finding the dead alive in some other way. Milton used the convention for a drowned college friend, and Shelley, almost two centuries later, for John Keats.
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
…
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
…
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
…
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
Milton's Cambridge friend Edward King drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637, and the poem first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies for him. King becomes the shepherd Lycidas. The opening apologizes for writing before the poet is ready, plucking the leaves “before the mellowing year,” and the poem moves from that reluctance through anger, including an attack on the corrupt clergy of the day, to its consolation: “Weep no more, woeful shepherds.” The last two lines step outside the poem altogether, as the shepherd-poet gets up and moves on.
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh weep for Adonais, though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
…
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
Shelley renames Keats Adonais, a name that echoes Adonis, and gathers a procession of mourners as Milton did. The turn comes in stanza 39. Instead of consoling the mourners, the poem pities them: the dead poet has woken from “the dream of life,” and it is the living who are lost in “stormy visions.”
Public elegies: Gray, Whitman, McCrae
Some elegies mourn people the poet never knew, or knew only from a distance: a village of the unremembered, a president, the soldiers in a field.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:—
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown;
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
Gray mourns no one in particular. His subject is the unnamed villagers buried in a country churchyard, who never had the chance to be famous. The stanzas are four lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ABAB, and the gem-and-flower stanza makes the case that talent goes unseen for lack of opportunity. The poem ends with the epitaph of an obscure young man, often read as the speaker himself. Gray published it in 1751, after a magazine threatened to print an unauthorized copy. Its first stanza appears in the guide to literary devices in poetry as an example of end rhyme.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln appeared in his Sequel to Drum-Taps the same year. It is unusually regular for him, rhymed and swinging between long lines and short ones like a song. The ship-as-nation metaphor is unpacked in the extended metaphor guide. This last stanza holds the elegy's double feeling in two lines: the shore celebrates (“Exult O shores, and ring O bells!”) while the speaker walks “with mournful tread.” Whitman's longer elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” written in the summer of 1865, is in free verse, and its three recurring images, a lilac, a fallen western star and the song of a hermit thrush, return through the poem as motifs.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
McCrae, a Canadian doctor serving in the First World War, wrote it on May 3, 1915, after conducting the funeral of his friend Alexis Helmer, killed at the Second Battle of Ypres. It is a rondeau, a French form built on two rhymes, with the opening words returning as a short refrain. The dead speak for themselves, which turns the elegy around: instead of the living mourning the dead, the dead address the living and ask something of them.
Short elegies: Dickinson, Rossetti, Millay
Three elegies of eight to sixteen lines, each doing one thing: the first describes the morning after a death, the second asks not to be mourned, and the third refuses to be comforted.
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,—
The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.
Nothing in these eight lines describes the person who died. The elegy is in the housework: sweeping up “the heart,” putting love away like linen that won't be needed until eternity. Dickinson writes it in short meter, a hymn stanza of six, six, eight and six syllables, so the poem sounds like something sung in church while it describes sweeping a floor.
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
A self-elegy: the speaker imagines her own death and tells the person she leaves not to make a show of mourning. The endings of the two stanzas mirror each other. First the living are free to remember or forget, then the dead may do the same. The plainness is the point: no roses, no cypress, no sad songs.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Millay's poem refuses the third stage. It concedes everything a consoling elegy would say, that this is how it has always been, that the roses are fed and the blossom is fragrant, and answers each with “I know. But I do not approve.” The long lines, rhymed ABAB with some rhymes only approximate, sound like an argument that won't be closed. For a reader who isn't ready to be consoled, it can be easier to hear than a poem that promises comfort.
Modern elegies to read
Elegies kept coming after 1928, in every form. These are still in copyright, so they are named here rather than quoted:
- W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues.” It began as a song in his 1936 verse play The Ascent of F6, was revised into a short elegy published in 1938, and was read in full in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
- Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” First published in 1951, a villanelle often read as addressed to his dying father.
- Seamus Heaney, “Mid-Term Break.” From Death of a Naturalist (1966), about the death of his younger brother Christopher while Heaney was away at school.
- Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art.” A villanelle from 1976 about losing things, which works up from mislaid keys to the loss that matters.
The villanelle's two repeating lines suit grief that keeps returning, and the villanelle examples show how the form works. Among the public-domain elegies not quoted here, A. E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young” (1896) appears in the literary devices guide linked above, and three elegies in sonnet form, John Milton's “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint,” Christina Rossetti's “Remember” and Wilfred Owen's “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” are quoted in full in the sonnet examples.
Four new elegies
These were written for this page, for invented people, to show the moves above at work in plain contemporary language. Borrow the shape and fill it with your own details.
Her reading glasses, folded, on top of the radio.
A tin of buttons sorted by color, the blues worn soft.
Two library books, due back Thursday.
On the calendar by the phone, a Tuesday circled:
dentist, 10:15, in her slanting hand.
At a quarter past ten that Tuesday
we were all in her kitchen, not saying why,
as if someone ought to keep it.
An elegy as a list. Every item is something she meant to come back to, and the poem never says she died: the circled Tuesday does. The last line is the only one that admits a feeling, and it does it with an action, the family keeping her appointment.
In March he'd start them in the light,
tomatoes, in a row of cups,
and turn them as the sun came up
so every one would stand upright.
This year I bought the seeds he chose,
the same red packet, the same brand,
and pressed them in with my own hand
and turned the cups. And nothing rose
for nine days. On the tenth, a row
of pale green hooks, all bent one way.
I turn them, as he did, each day,
and lean, and straighten up, and grow.
Three quatrains in Tennyson's pattern from In Memoriam: iambic tetrameter rhymed ABBA, with one slant rhyme (cups, up). The father's habit carries the whole elegy. The sentence that breaks across the stanza gap (“And nothing rose / for nine days”) is where the grief sits, and the last line can be read two ways, because “lean, and straighten up, and grow” belongs to the speaker as much as to the seedlings.
You were always late,
running the last block with your scarf undone,
and the driver always waited,
because everyone waited for you.
I still take the 14.
I still look up at the corner by the pharmacy
where you'd come round, one arm in your coat,
waving as if the bus were yours.
It doesn't wait now.
I don't ask it to.
Free verse addressed to “you,” as Hardy's is. No word for death or grief appears, and the praise is one line long: “everyone waited for you.” The habit carries the rest. The two short lines at the end let the world go on, and the speaker doesn't ask it to stop.
For fourteen years the street could tell the time
by one gray muzzle at the front-room glass:
five o'clock, and there he was, ears up, tail going,
the whole dog listening for one car.
This week the window is only a window.
At five, the neighbor's boy looked up anyway.
An elegy for an animal works like any other: one habit, observed exactly. The ending passes the loss to someone else, a neighbor's boy who looks up out of habit, which lets the reader feel the absence without being told how to feel about it.
How to write an elegy
- Decide who it's for, and who it's spoken to
Speak to the person (“you,” as Hardy does), about them (“he,” as Tennyson does) or to the living, as McCrae's dead do. “You” is intimate and hard to sustain. “She” or “he” leaves the reader more room.
- Collect particulars, not virtues
Words like kind, generous and loved by all could describe anyone. Write down objects, habits and things the person said: a circled date, a row of seed cups on the sill, an air-blue gown. Collect ten and use three. This is show, don't tell at its most necessary.
- Let the poem move
The traditional path runs from lament through remembering to some kind of consolation. You don't have to arrive at comfort, and Millay didn't. But the poem should go somewhere: from the morning after to a year later, from the house to the garden, from “I” to “we.”
- Choose a form that suits the loss
Free verse suits a speaking voice. Rhymed quatrains give a steady, ritual feel. A sonnet can hold an argument with grief, and a villanelle a thought that keeps coming back. If you're not sure, draft in free verse first and try a form later.
- End on an image
Most of the elegies above end on something seen or heard, not on a lesson: the woman calling, the blank day, the shepherd moving on. If your last line explains what the poem meant, cover it with your thumb and read the poem again without it.
- If it will be read aloud, keep it short
A poem of twelve to twenty lines takes about a minute to read slowly. Print it in large type, read it aloud several times beforehand and ask the officiant where it fits in the service. The eulogy guide has more on reading at a funeral.
Mistakes that flatten an elegy
Most weak elegies fail the same way: they say what any card in a drugstore rack says, and so they say nothing about this person.
Particular
- She sorted her buttons by color.
- We sat in her kitchen at a quarter past ten.
- He turned the seed cups every morning.
- Rhyme only where the words you need already rhyme.
- A last line that shows what the living do now.
Generic
- She was the kindest soul we knew.
- Gone too soon, forever in our hearts.
- Words can't express how much we miss her.
- Heart and apart, above and love, chosen for the chime.
- A last line that explains the lesson of the loss.
Two quieter mistakes are worth checking for. The first is writing about your own grief so fully that the person disappears; Tennyson spends 133 sections on his sorrow, but Hallam's hand, his door and his street are in them. The second is length. An elegy for a service has to fit the room, and an elegy for a collection has to earn every stanza. Cut what repeats.
If you draft in Strokes, version history keeps every draft on your own computer, so a line you cut in a hard week is still there when you want it back.
Frequently asked questions
Does an elegy have to rhyme?
No. Classical elegies were defined by a meter, the elegiac couplet, not by rhyme. English elegies have used rhymed couplets (Jonson), quatrains (Gray, Tennyson), a rondeau (McCrae) and free verse (Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”). Use rhyme if it makes the poem feel steady, and drop it if it forces words you don't mean.
Can an elegy be about something other than a person?
Yes. Poets have written elegies for animals, places, ways of life and even their own future deaths, as Christina Rossetti does in “Song.” Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” mourns a whole village of people nobody remembers. What makes a poem an elegy is the mourning, not the subject.
Can I read an elegy at a funeral?
Yes. A short elegy, your own or a public-domain classic, can open or close a eulogy or be read on its own. Choose one that sounds like the person as well as the loss: Rossetti's “Song” suits someone who disliked fuss, and Millay's “Dirge Without Music” suits a family not ready to be comforted. Ask the officiant first, since some services have customs about what is read and when.
