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Definition
a mournful poem — especially lamenting for someone who died- Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
elegy = a mournful poem (full of sadness)
- This is the ending of the elegy of the 'Jeune Malade' by Andre Chenier, by Andre Chenier whose throat was cut by the ras .... by the giants of '93.Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
- This from the Requiescat of Matthew Arnold, an elegy for a woman's spirit, with its concluding line: "Tonight it doth inherit the vasty hall of Death."William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- The payback she'd thought he was due, after his math-class elegy to Josie, had burned in her chest every time she thought about it.Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes
- This boy's elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus.Virginia Woolf -- Mrs. Dalloway
- This is not John Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), not a classical elegy in which all nature weeps.Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor
- The song was both haunting and joyful, the first few notes an elegy for the fading stars.Kass Morgan -- The 100
- PART 2 ELEGY FOR LEFT HAND ALONE MID-1980s-EARLY 1990s 1 .Don DeLillo -- Underworld
- So there being no copy, but one pair of cases, and the Elegy likely to require all the letter, no one could help him.Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Here one shepherd is sighing, there another is lamenting; there love songs are heard, here despairing elegies.Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.Thomas Gray -- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
- Yes, I hold Gray's Elegy in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet, that has absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate.Virginia Woolf -- The Waves
- And there was such a solemn melody, 'Twixt doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies,— Such as old grandames, watching by the dead, Are wont to outwear the night with.Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe
- Lane and Sorenson were both in Modern European Literature 251 (open to seniors and graduate students only) and had been assigned the Fourth of Rilke's "Duino Elegies" for Monday.J.D. Salinger -- Franny and Zooey
- Another time, in a misprint he hadn't caught, Roberto's article had stated that Senator Smathers had delivered an elegy, instead of a eulogy, of Trujillo before the joint members of the United States Congress.Julia Alvarez -- In the Time of the Butterflies
- Or, he would quote a few stanzas of Gray's Elegy, using that encyclopaedia of stock melancholy with rather indefinite application: "—Await alike th' inevitable hour, The paths of glory lead but to the grave."Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- After the champagne toast on the day he took over the post, the old lion in retirement excused himself for speaking without getting up from the rocker, and he improvised a brief speech that seemed more like an elegy.Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera
- After your dire-lamenting elegies, Visit by night your lady's chamber-window With some sweet consort: to their instruments Tune a deploring dump; the night's dead silence Will well become such sweet-complaining grievance.William Shakespeare -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- He later did so, and Andrews' farewell message turned out to be the ninth stanza of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": The boasts of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour: The paths of glory lead but to the grave.Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood
- There is a man haunts the forest that abuses our young plants with carving "Rosalind" on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.William Shakespeare -- As You Like It