[ad. Fr. élégie, ad. L. elegīa, ad. Gr. ἐλεγεία, f. ἔλεγος a mournful poem.]
1. A song of lamentation, esp. a funeral song or lament for the dead.
1514. Barclay, Cyt. & Uplondyshm., Introd. 69. I tell mine elegy.
1594. Drayton, Idea, 749. My Lives complaint in dolefull Elegies.
1649. Jer. Taylor, Gt. Exemp., I. ix. 140. The Church’s song is most of it Elegy.
1750. Gray, Elegy, xxi. Their name, their years … The place of fame and elegy supply.
1762. Goldsm., Nash, 180. The public papers were filled with elegies. Ibid. (title), Elegy of a Mad Dog.
1812. Scott, Rokeby, V. xvii. Thy strings mine elegy shall thrill, My Harp alone.
1871. R. Ellis, Catullus, lxv. 12/73. Death’s dark elegy.
2. Vaguely used in wider sense, app. originally including all the species of poetry for which Gr. and Lat. poets adopted the elegiac metre. See also quots. 1755 and 1833.
1600. Shaks., A. Y. L., III. ii. 379. There is a man … hangs … Elegies on brambles … defying the name of Rosalinde.
1716–8. Lady M. W. Montague, Lett., I. xxxiv. 120. A subject affording many poetical turns … in an heroic elegy.
1755. Johnson, Elegy, a short poem without points or turns.
a. 1763. Shenstone, Wks. & Lett. (1768), I. 17. They gave the name of elegy to their pleasantries as well as lamentations.
1833. Coleridge, Table-T., 23 Oct. Elegy … may treat of any subject, but … of no subject for itself … always and exclusively with reference to the poet.
1859. Kingsley, Burns, Misc. I. 379. The poet descends from the … dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and reflective one of elegy.
3. a. Poetry, or a poem, written in elegiac metre. † b. [after Gr. ἐλεγεῖον] An elegiac distich (obs.).
1589. Puttenham, Eng. Poesie (Arb.), 64. Long lamentation in Elegie.
1794. T. Taylor, Pausanias’ Greece, II. 369. An elegy on one of these bases … signifies that the statue … was that of Philopœmen.
1839. Thirlwall, Greece, II. 126. The elegy, which [Mimnermus] adopted as the organ of his voluptuous melancholy … had been invented by another Ionian poet, Callinus.
1862. Merivale, Rom. Emp. (1871), V. xli. 124. Ovid was the successor in elegy of Propertius and Tibullus.
