(a.) Belonging to elegy, or written in elegiacs; plaintive; expressing sorrow or lamentation; as, an elegiac lay; elegiac strains.
(a.) Used in elegies; as, elegiac verse; the elegiac distich or couplet, consisting of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter.
(n.) Elegiac verse.
Example Sentences:
(1) The novel's "elegiac strain lifts a personal story into a more intriguing one .
(2) He has taken various elements of the war, and translated their brutality into elegiac works, as with Freedom Qashoush Symphony, a delicate song which starts with rattled off gunfire, the symphony culminates in an urgent instrumental cry of freedom, inspired by Ibrahim al-Qashoush, an early symbol of rebel martyrdom.
(3) But recounting the story of one of the key experiences of European integration, the painter and decorator sounded elegiac, as if describing not current realities but those of a lamented past.
(4) The book partakes of the elegiac long before, even, the wrenching and brief final chapter, which in that distinctive calm prose acknowledges pain, the death that is coming, the fears of that death, and the therapeutic nature of what we have just read.
(5) Though the first Orange prize was not awarded until 1996, when the Canadian poet Anne Michaels won it for her elegiac Holocaust novel Fugitive Pieces , the founding committee celebrated its 20th birthday this year.
(6) A lament for the failed ideals of a group of 1960s Cambridge graduates who all too quickly swap their literary dreams for coffee table books and hack journalism, the play was an elegiac threnody for soiled friendship and a descent from intellectual rigour and seriousness to philistinism.
(7) Parking is near the elegiac ruins of Tintern Abbey, and from there one embarks upon a digestible but heart thumping climb up to the Devil's Pulpit, a rocky outcrop, affording fantastic views, where the evil doer himself supposedly used to preach temptation to the industrious monks scurrying below.
(8) The main thing that struck a chord was not the profligacy of supermarkets but the elegiac decay of the bagged salad: more than two-thirds of it thrown out, half by customers, half by stores.
(9) This footage of the remaining “red cars” (as the Pacific Electric’s fleet was commonly known) strikes an elegiac tone, especially to modern Angelenos.
(10) – elegiac, melodic, free from lyrics about shopping.
(11) Glue recycles some elements of Thorne’s past triumphs: the on-point indie soundtrack, the elegiac “last gang in town” feel, the tabloid-troubling teenage misdemeanours.
(12) For a poet to choose to document the moment of loss after finishing a novel may hint at mock-elegiac intentions.
(13) The elegiac mood around Mandela suggested that South Africans still find it easier to remember the long walk to freedom than to embark on a new journey.
(14) We in Afghanistan are suffering from the ugly side of globalisation, whether it is drugs, whether it is criminal networks or terrorism.” It is Cameron’s eighth trip as prime minister, and has an elegiac quality, even though it is a conflict he inherited and never wholly embraced.
(15) This corner of Berlin, remembered to such elegiac effect in Bowie's new work, is brighter, more prosperous and more efficient.
(16) Anderson told Screen International that it charts a watershed moment, narcotics-wise: “It’s that idea that when you’re smoking weed everything is OK, but as soon as heroin comes in everything is changed and everything is fucked, and that’s sad.” It’s more troubled and elegiac than Pynchon’s novel even , with less daffy musical interludes, more insistent harking-back to a lost Californian utopia – expressed through Doc’s search for his vanished “old lady” Shasta Fay Hepworth.
(17) In other ways excellent, the New York Times' piece had an elegiac tone, conveyed by the headline How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work .
(18) Rowan Williams , the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an elegiac, filmic farewell to the building – "a purpose-built factory for prayer" – and his job, is seen wandering through the enormous space from attics to crypts, turning the whole space into a valedictory sermon.
(19) Radiohead's much-trumpeted new single, their first in four years, a beautiful, intricately-wrought mesh of complex time signatures, keening vocals, elegiac strings and subtly disturbing audio effects called Pyramid Song, has been beaten to number one by Do You Really Like It?, by DJ Pied Piper and the Master of Ceremonies - perhaps the most unrepentantly stupid dance record since Jive Bunny hung up his tracksuit.
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.