(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.
Epitaph
Definition:
(n.) An inscription on, or at, a tomb, or a grave, in memory or commendation of the one buried there; a sepulchral inscription.
(n.) A brief writing formed as if to be inscribed on a monument, as that concerning Alexander: "Sufficit huic tumulus, cui non sufficeret orbis."
(v. t.) To commemorate by an epitaph.
(v. i.) To write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.
Example Sentences:
(1) It is hard to think of a better provisional epitaph than that supplied in the midst of his later troubles by Martin Palouš, one of the first signatories of Charter 77: "Havel was the man who was able to stage this miracle play.
(2) Perhaps the most flattering epitaph for Ronnie Biggs, who has died aged 84, was written for him many years ago by the unlikely figure of the former commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sir Robert Mark .
(3) And a telling line said by one character about Gustave's desire to recreate a bygone era could almost be Anderson's own epitaph: "His world had vanished long before he entered it.
(4) And then he came up with a flat rejection of any attempt to make sense of a 55-year long recording career that had transformed rock, and a line that could stand as his epitaph: "I am what I am, it is what it is.
(5) Uncritically decoding Benefits Street epitomises these dubious qualities, and perhaps this warning could stand as Hall's epitaph.
(6) The poem is structured like a lament, the soldiers' epitaphs interspersed with direct translations of Homer's extended similes, each of which is transcribed, lullingly, twice over.
(7) A few weeks ago our conversation came around to the question of epitaphs.
(8) And his epitaph: “I wouldn’t roll over and I didn’t go quietly.” • Still, Farage’s star continues its rise, as does that of former Guardianista Natalie Bennett .
(9) There are good reasons to be sceptical of the epitaphic impulse to declare “the end of nature”.
(10) Example and epitaph: "It is harder for many people to believe that God loves them than to believe that he exists."
(11) The inscription on Paracelsus' epitaph in the cemetery of Saint Sebastian in Salzburg is critically reviewed with regard to an allusion to Job, Chapter 19.
(12) • Journey into Fear, Uncommon Danger, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy are all published by Penguin Modern Classics at £8.99 each.
(13) Do these people know what they're doing – they are inscribing Chinua's epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations.
(14) The Scottish National party has already described the oil grab as Alexander's political epitaph, but what will worry him more is the lack of support from key cabinet allies and normally loyal Scottish Liberal Democrat MPs, such as Malcolm Bruce.
(15) I knew I had to rethink everything.” Joining the Royal Court in 1957, he made his London directing debut with NF Simpson ’s A Resounding Tinkle, and scored an early success with John Osborne ’s Epitaph for George Dillon, which transferred to Broadway.
(16) I don’t want my political epitaph to read that I just balanced the books and cleared up the mess I inherited.
(17) Worse still, it concluded, if Europe failed to surmount its economic crisis the prize would be a “risible memory, or worse, an epitaph for what Europe could have been, should have been.” 11.33am BST Aid donations My colleague Mark Tran, the Guardian's Global Development correspondent, has sent this as a counterpoint to the detractors: Something positive to say about the EU.
(18) One day, if they write an epitaph for me, I hope it will not say I was a triple-amputee, instead just say that Giles Duley was a photographer.
(19) From behind the keys of his supercharged typewriter, Ambler produced an astonishing four more novels in the next three years: Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear.
(20) "Then I went out on Sunday and got the Observer and there was their epitaph … I went to a friend's house and rang a friend and we were both crying on the phone saying 'what a dreadful, dreadful waste, what a dreadful thing'."