What's the difference between ballad and elegy?

Ballad


Definition:

  • (n.) A popular kind of narrative poem, adapted for recitation or singing; as, the ballad of Chevy Chase; esp., a sentimental or romantic poem in short stanzas.
  • (v. i.) To make or sing ballads.
  • (v. t.) To make mention of in ballads.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Celtic fans still regularly belt out The Ballad of Willie Maley," writes Mark Sheffield.
  • (2) His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s.
  • (3) The band wanted to talk about their adventurous musical policy more than their lyrics (they mix brassy banda styles with accordion-based norteno ballads) but agreed that narcocorrido was crucial for their success.
  • (4) On at least one occasion he was persuaded to pick up a gusle , the single-stringed fiddle of the region, and perform an epic Serb ballad under a framed portrait of himself at the height of his power.
  • (5) "I feel like I could bring out a ballad next or I could bring out a techno song.
  • (6) Leaving a Murdoch-dominated media landscape with shows where, each week, shrieking irradiated cannibals sing power ballads as they compete for the right to die?
  • (7) After The Ballad was published in 1986, I spent two years in my room.
  • (8) Instead, Miliband's choices were often full of personal meaning, such as Paul Robeson's rendition of leftwing anthem The Ballad of Joe Hill, which he selected in memory of his father Ralph.
  • (9) I popped in for a nightcap but end up staying for two hours, serenaded by locals murdering everything from Japanese power ballads to cheesy Brazilian pop and Bohemian Rhapsody.
  • (10) Polydor signed her in 2009 and she might easily have released a debut album of unadorned guitar ballads, the sort of stuff she'd been touring around London pubs and bars.
  • (11) Rock's lingua franca remains the post-Oasis, post-Radiohead big stadium ballad, replete with keep-your-chin-up lyrics, usually suggesting you "hold on".
  • (12) Yet one one of the most moving moments of the night came when the choir from Parrs Wood High School in south Manchester duetted with Grande on her ballad, My Everything .
  • (13) His dad had liked Paul Robeson, hence Ballad of Joe Hill; the South African national anthem reminded him of an inspiring South Africanhe had known who was murdered by the secret police.
  • (14) The norteño band Los Tigres del Norte cancelled a planned appearance at an awards ceremony at a government-owned auditorium in October after organisers allegedly asked them not to perform a drug ballad.
  • (15) Jon Morter, 35, a part-time rock DJ and logistics expert from South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, decided it would be a bit of a giggle to start a campaign to encourage people to buy a record with pretty much the opposite vibe to the X Factor winner's ballad.
  • (16) It also inspired a Johnny Cash hit, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, with lyrics touching on a bitter legacy that is the source of many of the reservation’s problems to this day: The water grew Ira’s people’s crops ’Til the white man stole the water rights And the sparklin’ water stopped.
  • (17) Despite the jail's grim exterior, the regime is fairly liberal and inmates earn extra cash by selling food, handicrafts - and drug ballads.
  • (18) The trailer is book-ended by Tyson quoting Oscar Wilde's The Ballad Of Reading Gaol: Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!
  • (19) Official Charts Company data shows Noel Gallagher’s band High Flying Birds had both the best-selling vinyl single and album in the first three months of the year, with Ballad Of The Mighty I and Chasing Yesterday , respectively.
  • (20) After university in Cambridge, he toured revolutionary Europe and then set up home briefly in the West Country with his sister Dorothy, where he met Coleridge, his collaborator on their early popular volume, the Lyrical Ballads .

Elegy


Definition:

  • (n.) A mournful or plaintive poem; a funereal song; a poem of lamentation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
  • (2) More recently, Iain Sinclair, in his novel Dining on Stones, an elegy to the A13, describes it as: "A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multi-coloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice."
  • (3) You can contribute questions, comments, predictions, thoughts, premature elegies, over-the-top obituaries or hushed theories about what David Stern has told tonight's officials by emailing them to hunter.felt.freelance@guardiannews.com or tweeting them to @HunterFelt .
  • (4) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
  • (5) And yet, the result is exactly the same: a face that is not so much a face but rather a sad elegy for what might have been.
  • (6) The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone.
  • (7) The Last Ship is "an elegy for and a celebration of the working-class life of the Newcastle shipyards," according to the Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustis, who says it is "shaping up to be a masterpiece".
  • (8) "The mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable," said Michael Wood, reviewing American Pastoral in the New York Times , "and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated."
  • (9) At the centre of the book is a series of intertwined relationships: there are love poems, poems that explore relationships between languages – versions of CP Cavafy from the Greek, poems in Scots, reworkings of New Testament verse – poems about people he knew, such as an elegy for poet Mick Imlah with whom Crawford co-edited an anthology of Scottish verse, as well as poems about the relationship between history and values.
  • (10) There's a famous passage in John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which retired agent Connie Sachs drifts into a drunken elegy for the young men of the 1950s, the lost souls who fetched up in Smiley's Circus.
  • (11) The Fix reads only like bitterness, an unconscious elegy to shame; add Iain Duncan Smith's coerced AA meetings, and fair treatment for addicts feels, as ever, far away.
  • (12) When "Sapho to Philaenis" is set in the context of Donne's other love elegies in verse as productions by a young intellectual moving in sophisticated London circles and writing for a coterie audience, lesbianism looks like a master trope for positively resolving a dilemma that confounded Montaigne and many other authors of the age.
  • (13) Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence uses Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) to create a haunting elegy for lost youth, with outstanding roles for its leads Edward Watson and Marcelino Sambé.
  • (14) But with Ukip, it is not just an elegy for a mythical age, but also a call to action.
  • (15) But when, after a troubled hiatus, he returned to complete the manuscript in 1883, what had begun as a reminiscent celebration became a darker elegy for a lost world.
  • (16) The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver, Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain in a perennial American elegy.
  • (17) Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85 Read more I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats: The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
  • (18) Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies.
  • (19) Lipton is a Willy Loman for the 21st century, whose song is an elegy for the passing of an American dream – one that told successive generations that, so long as they worked hard and played by the rules, they'd be better off than their parents.
  • (20) The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression.