(a.) A piece of music of a mournful character, to accompany funeral rites; a funeral hymn.
Example Sentences:
(1) His wink-wink, nod-nod racist slogan, “Make America great again,” together with his apocalyptic dirge of a convention, left exposed and unguarded a flank that is usually the Republicans’ specialty.
(2) In some establishments, mournful dirges played while coffins were carried through the crowds of drinkers; in others, the walls were hung with black crepe.
(3) The band appear to be playing several verses of the English dirge.
(4) There is, it seems, a political divide in CBeebies appreciation, judging by a recent Spectator article entitled “ Agitprop for Toddlers ” in which the author compared a wildlife programme on the channel, in which “a rainbow nation of children [march] around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’”, to “one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea”.
(5) As Claudius said in Hamlet: “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” Weddings, to me, feel heavy with expectation, pregnant with emotion, saturated with hope, fear and hard-to-keep promises.
(6) This dirge of a ballad is performed by a woman whose facial expression befits someone burying their pet dog.
(7) Due to an editing error, the quote, “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage”, was misattributed to Hamlet.
(8) The dirge can be kept for British sport such as the Olympics, Andy Murray doing well and the ones where you sit down."
(9) Such legislation would be a royal pain the arse in the UK, our dirge leading to a spike in suicide rates around tea-time.
(10) Today I see England as a continuum, with football yobs at one end and Eton yobs at the other, and Morrissey dirging about lost seaside resorts somewhere in the middle.
(11) "That is the mother of all dirges, but I'm not too keen on Flower of Scotland either.
(12) Across the internet, thousands of music fans looking for Thicke's raunchy, cowbell-stoked summer jam stumbled instead on a recording of Beckwith's sombre dirge , released on the 2010 CD Jalsaghar .
(13) The Danish one is a bit of a dirge and should really only be used as the closing credits of a lunchtime documentary on some shortwave radio station.
(14) FIFA games aren’t exactly known for hilarity, so these shows are a very welcome change of tone from the brain-breaking Europop dirge found in EA’s club football game year after year.
(15) Japan's is bloody miserable, to tell the truth, the sort of dirge you'd expect to hear pinging off the walls of a church in the Outer Hebridies.
(16) These are the poems: "Burbank," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "A Cooking Egg," and the posthumously published "Dirge".
(17) BECAUSE WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THE CAN-DO OPTIMISM OF THE YES CAMPAIGN UP AGAINST THE CAN’T-DO DIRGE OF THE NO CAMPAIGN THEN THEY CHOOSE YES.
(18) A Hague speech became a Foreign Office dirge, awash in wars on terror, wars on want, wars on rape and a world of “unacceptable” regimes.
(19) 9.49pm GMT “Six priests wailed an a cappella dirge as the open funeral casket was carried through the assembled throng and brought to the stage at Independence Square,” begins Shaun Walker’s (@ ShaunWalker7 ) dispatch from Kiev today: The body, wrapped in a white cloth with just the head visible, was that of just one of at least 77 people to have died this week in Kiev, but its arrival pricked thousands of eyes with tears, as the huge crowds that had gathered bowed their heads in prayer.
(20) There are certainly a good many less dirge-like than ours.
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.