Elegy
Quick answer: The elegy is poetry's form for mourning, from Lycidas to In Memoriam. Learn its history, its movement from grief toward consolation, and how to write one.
Grief has a form, and poetry has been refining it for centuries. An elegy is a poem of mourning: for a person, sometimes for a place, an era or a version of oneself. Unlike the sonnet or villanelle, the English elegy has no prescribed line count or rhyme scheme. What defines it is an emotional arc, the movement of a mind from raw loss toward some kind of standing-up-again.
The word began elsewhere. In ancient Greece, elegy meant anything written in elegiac couplets, love poems and war songs included. English narrowed the term to lament, and built a great tradition on it: Milton's Lycidas in 1637, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in 1751, Tennyson's book-length In Memoriam in 1850, and Whitman's lament for Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, in 1865.
Shape without rules
Scholars describe the classic elegy as moving through three phases: lament, in which loss is voiced and the world seems to mourn along; praise, in which the dead are remembered and made present; and consolation, in which the mourner finds continuance, whether in faith, nature, memory or the poem itself. Not every elegy visits all three, and modern elegists often refuse consolation entirely, but the triad remains the form's skeleton.
Formally, anything goes. Gray used rhymed ABAB quatrains in iambic pentameter, a stanza now called the elegiac stanza in his honour. Tennyson invented his own ABBA tetrameter quatrain for In Memoriam. Contemporary elegies are usually free verse. The form is a shape of feeling, not a shape of lines.
Writing an elegy of your own
Begin with the particular, not the eternal. Grief lives in specifics: the dead person's mispronunciations, their coat on the hook, the exact weather of the last ordinary day. Abstract nouns like loss, sorrow and heaven have been worn smooth by four centuries of use; one true detail outweighs a stanza of them.
Let the poem move. An elegy that ends where it began, in undifferentiated sadness, is a diary entry; the reader needs to feel the mind travel, even if it only travels from silence to speech. Address helps enormously, and many great elegies speak directly to the dead. And do not fear anger or humour. Real mourning includes both, and their presence is often what makes an elegy believable. Writory's judges score emotion alongside language, and in elegies it is always the specific, complicated feeling that scores, never the generic tear.
Range of the form, and the beginner's error
Elegy stretches beyond funerals. Poets have written elegies for languages, glaciers, marriages, childhood streets and former selves, and the ecological elegy is one of the liveliest modes in contemporary poetry. Whatever the subject, the contract is the same: something is gone, and the poem performs the work of carrying it.
The beginner's error is generality, mourning Death rather than a death. A poem that could be about anyone's grandmother moves nobody, including, in the end, its writer. Close the thesaurus, open the photograph album, and write what only you know.
What poets can take from this
- Choose three concrete memories before writing a single line.
- Try second person; addressing the dead creates instant intimacy.
- Allow anger, guilt and even comedy into the grief.
- Let the ending offer continuance, or refuse it deliberately.
- Avoid stock imagery: angels, doves and golden light have retired.
- Read Gray, Tennyson and Whitman to hear three different arcs.
Try it yourself
Write an elegy for someone or something lost, built entirely around one object they left behind, and let the object do the mourning for you.
Questions
What makes a poem an elegy?
Its occasion and arc: an elegy mourns something lost, usually a person, and typically moves through lament and remembrance toward consolation or its refusal. No specific meter, rhyme or length is required in English.
What is the difference between an elegy and a eulogy?
A eulogy is a prose speech of praise delivered at a funeral; an elegy is a poem of mourning written in the loss's aftermath. The eulogy praises, while the elegy grieves, remembers and searches.
Does an elegy have to be about death?
No. Poets write elegies for vanished places, ended relationships and former selves. Death is the traditional centre, but the form covers any irreversible loss.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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