What's the difference between poem and threnody?

Poem


Definition:

  • (n.) A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; -- contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.
  • (n.) A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When she died in 1994, Hopkins-Thomas and his mother – Jessie’s niece – were gifted the masses of drawings and poems Knight had collected over the years.
  • (2) When we arrived, he would instruct us to spend the morning composing a song or a poem, or inventing a joke or a charade.
  • (3) His parting tribute to the Things Fall Apart author, said Soyinka, would be the poem he wrote to Achebe when he turned 70.
  • (4) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
  • (5) Whatever conclusion the crowd might have drawn, what's striking is that Tempest's poem couldn't be ignored: the conviction and drama of her performance forced a reaction and coloured the rest of the evening.
  • (6) One particular poem attacked by Liao, he said, is not praising a disgraced party official, but is actually satire.
  • (7) More than once, she replies to a question by wrinkling her nose and saying: “It’s all in the book.” Tempest can’t quite see why the breadth of her output – songs, poems, plays, a novel – is notable, because it’s all about writing and performance.
  • (8) There's no doubt that MacMaster expended an enormous amount of effort compiling the blog and creating Gay Girl's persona: poems, long imaginary reminiscences – even warning readers to treat some other websites "with a very large grain of salt" – but to what purpose?
  • (9) Raymond Hood – Terminal City (1929) 'Poem of towers' … Raymond Hood's 1929 drawings for the proposed Terminal City, in Chicago This never-built design for a massive new skyscraper quarter in Chicago is a vision of the modern city as a shadowed poem of towers; of glass and concrete dwarfing the people.
  • (10) His collection of poems Beware Soul Brother (1971) and the volume of short stories Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) drew on the experiences of the war.
  • (11) His charge sheet includes numerous assaults (one against a waiter who served him the wrong dish of artichokes); jail time for libelling a fellow painter, Giovanni Baglione, by posting poems around Rome accusing him of plagiarism and calling him Giovanni Coglione (“Johnny Bollocks”); affray (a police report records Caravaggio’s response when asked how he came by a wound: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs.
  • (12) Other big-name winners at the Sony awards included Sir David Attenborough, named speech broadcaster of the year, and Bono, for BBC Radio 4's Elvis By Bono, in which the U2 frontman read a self-penned poem about Elvis Presley set to archive clips and music .
  • (13) When, as a sixth-former, I sent my first, almost-publishable poems to Ross, he returned them, but not with a printed rejection slip.
  • (14) He even recited Tennyson's poem to a classroom of Russian children in Moscow, possibly a tad insensitively, given that it was about an incident in the Crimean war, though they nodded politely.
  • (15) Eliot's poem – composed in the emotional carnage of the post-second world war period – was originally entitled (borrowing, shamelessly, from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend), He Do the Police in Different Voices.
  • (16) Louise Glück’s prose-poem collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night , won for poetry.
  • (17) Although the precise etiopathogenesis of the vascular proliferations remains speculative, these lesions merit study since they constitute an easily recognizable marker of POEMS syndrome.
  • (18) The poem touches a chord, because it doesn't deal with the often incoherent motivations of those who smashed up Tottenham and elsewhere, but the feelings of the rest of us: shocked, unsettled and confused.
  • (19) Hundreds of postcards, letters and parcels arrived, carrying not only words but also books, photographs, maps, stories and poems.
  • (20) She was shortlisted for a Forward prize at the age of 30 for her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, took the TS Eliot prize with her second , a remarkable book-length poem about the river Dart, and is now, 15 years later, widely hailed as one of British poetry's finest, brightest voices.

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.