(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.
Threnody
Definition:
(n.) A song of lamentation; a threnode.
Example Sentences:
(1) 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.
(2) And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia .
(3) Polymorphia and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima were written by Penderecki in the early 60s.
(4) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
(5) Even if you hear Penderecki's pieces on their own, away from the films, it's easy to understand the appeal of music such as Polymorphia or his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima .
(6) But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there.
(7) There's another side to the liberation in Penderecki's music: the visual impact of his scores, the physical material musicians use to play pieces such as Fluorescences or the Threnody.
(8) Greenwood's 48 Responses to Polymorphia is, as its title suggests, an orchestral "remix" of the earlier work, while Popcorn Superhet Receiver was inspired by Threnody.