Elegiac

Elegiac (pronounced el-i-jahy-uhk or el-i-jahy-ak or ih-lee-jee-ak)

(1) Used in, suitable for, or resembling an elegy.

(2) Expressing sorrow or lamentation.

(3) In classical prosody, a technical classification noting a distich or couplet the first line of which is a dactylic hexameter and the second a pentameter, or a verse differing from the hexameter by suppression of the arsis or metrically unaccented part of the third and the sixth foot.

(4) An elegiac or distich verse.

(5) A poem constructed in such distichs or verses.

1575-1585: From the Middle French élégiaque, from the Latin elegīacus (poem or song of lament) and the Ancient Greek ἐλεγειακός (elegeiakós) (from the earlier eleigeia).  In ancient Greece the verse form was associated with laments and other mournful tunes.  The meaning “pertaining to an elegy or elegies” emerged in English in the 1640s while the loosened sense of “expressing sorrow, lamenting” dates from the turn of the nineteenth century.  The adjective elegiacal was first used in the 1540 as a technical term in the sense of “of meter”.  Elegiac & elegiacal are adjectives and elegiacally is an adverb.

A technical rule in poetry

In the study and practice of poetry, the elegiac is that said to be written in the form of elegiac couplets.  It’s a highly technical definition, understood and applied (critically rather than deconstructively) by a handful of specialists in the field: An elegiac couplet consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter (a stressed (or long) syllable followed by two unstressed (or short) syllables, repeated five times to create a pentameter line) followed by a line in dactylic pentameter (a hexameter with six feet).  In Text thus constructed, purists insist, each foot needs to be a dactyl (a long and two short syllables), but, since antiquity, the classical meter has always tolerated the substitution of a spondee (two long syllables) in place of a dactyl in most places; technically the first four feet can either be dactyls or spondees.  Got it?

Among critics, the dactylic hexameter is regarded as the higher form because, since antiquity, it has been the structural framework of the epic whereas the elegiac form was thought both less demanding and more popular.

Yates & Auden.

In Memory of WB Yeats by WH Auden (1939)

 

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

 

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

 

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

 

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

 

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

 

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

 

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

 

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

 

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

 

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

 

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

 

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

 

Although written by WH Auden (1907-1973) as a tribute to WB Yeats (1865–1939), the work is also something of a reflection on the nature of poetry.