It has been suggested that Elegaic and Elegiac couplet be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

The term "elegy" was originally used for a type of poetic meter (Elegiac metre), but is also used for a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegos, a reflection on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally - which is a form of lyric poetry. An elegy can also reflect on something which seems strange or mysterious to the author. In addition, an elegy (sometimes spelled elegíe) may be a type of musical work, usually in a sad and somber attitude. It is not to be confused with a eulogy.

Literary elegies

• Propertius' Elegies (author lived ca. 50 BCE – ca. 15 BCE)
• Jan Kochanowski's Laments (1580)
• Chidiock Tichborne's Elegy (1586)
• Edmund Spenser's Astrophel (1595)
• Ben Jonson's On My First Sonne (1616)
• John Milton's Lycidas (1637)
• Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750)
• Charlotte Turner Smith's Elegiac Poems (1784)
• William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis (1817)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonaïs (1821)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Marienbad Elegy (1823)
• Evgeny Baratynsky's Autumn (1837)
• Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)
• Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1865)
• Louis Gallet's Elégie (author lived 1835–98)
• William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916" (1916)
• Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (1922)
• Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Kamau Brathwaite's Kumina (author born 1930)

Musical elegies

• Aika (Elegy), Ken Hirai
• Death Hath Deprived Me, Thomas Weelkes on the death of Thomas Morley
• December Elegy, Tristania
• Elegia from the Adiemus Project, Karl Jenkins
• Élégie, in memory of Dennis Brain, Poulenc
• Élégie, Gabriel Fauré
• Élégie, Op. 3, No. 1, Sergei Rachmaninoff
• Élégie, ballet by George Balanchine to Igor Stravinsky's eponymous solo for viola
• Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens
• Elegy, Lacuna Coil
• Elegy, Alan Rawsthorne
• Elegy, Leaves' Eyes
• Elegy for Elsabet, The Weakerthans
• Elegy for Gump Worsley, The Weakerthans
• Elegy, for orchestra, John Corigliano
• Fire and Rain, James Taylor
• For A Dancer, Jackson Browne
• Goodbye My Lover, James Blunt
• Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus
• Lacrimosa, Regina Spektor
• Mort tu as navré de ton dart, Johannes Ockeghem on the death of Gilles Binchois
• Nymphes des bois, Josquin des Prez on the death of Johannes Ockeghem
• Elegy, Jethro Tull
• Tol'ko On Ne Vernulsya iz Boya (But He Didn't Return from Battle), Vladimir Vysotsky
• Ye Sacred Muses, William Byrd on the death of Thomas Tallis
• An American Elegy, Frank Ticheli
• Elegi, Lars Winnerbäck
• Elégie, Jules Massenet, based on the text by Louis Gallet
• Élégie, Movement 3, Serenade, Tchaikovsky
• Elegy, Frail Words Collapse, As I Lay Dying
• Elegy, Inspection 12
• Even Braver, Even Stronger (An American Elegy), Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band
• Red (Elegy), Dave Carter
• God's Son, Nas
• Elegy in D, (for Contrabass), Giovanni Bottesini

elegy for simon corl, botanist

• Elegy of Emptiness, a song in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• Is an Elegy, Youngblood Brass Band

Elegy in Painting

• Elegy to the Spanish Republic, Robert Motherwell
• Elegía, William Adolphe Bouguereau

Elegy in Films

• Elegy (film) is a 2008 drama directed by Spanish director Isabel Coixet and based on a Phillip Roth novel, The Dying Animal.

Further reading

Cavitch, Max (2007). American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 081664893X. 

Ramazani, Jahan (1994). Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy fom Hardy to Heaney. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226703401. 

Sacks, Peter (1987). The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801834716.