elegiac stanza In poetry, a quatrain in iambic pentameter with alternate lines rhyming.
Trapp says little about the metrical conventions of the elegy, which in Greek poetry consists of alternating hexameters and pentameters called the "elegiac distich." Before Hammond, it was conventional in English to write elegies in heroic couplets, such as Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," in order to imitate the formality of the original prosody; Hammond's Love Elegies, however, introduced the iambic pentameter quatrain (abab) that came to be known first as "Hammond's metre" and then as the
elegiac stanza or elegiac quatrain.
Other corrective examples are more discernibly imitative: Henry Jones's The Rlelief or Day Thoughts (1754) parodies the enthusiastic register of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-45), replete with rhetorical questions and exclamation marks; John Cunningham's "The Contemplatist: A Night-Piece" (1762), while only slightly less subdued, uneasily adopts Gray's
elegiac stanzas in its attempt to counter the "rancour" of the raven and other "angry elements" of the graveyard setting (181).
His epitaph hailed him as "a pattern of christian virtues, and a model of the pastoral character," and an anonymous poetaster spun 88 lines of doggerel in his honor, "
Elegiac Stanzas." Moreover, Channing used Abbot's pious demise to champion the liberal cause in his polemical essay, "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," first printed as an article in the November and December 1819 issue of the Unitarian Christian Disciple, then as a pamphlet.
Although the title and sub-title of "Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, Who Died at Florence, 1861" create the expectation of a conventional pastoral elegy, the poem (as Giannone perceived) deviates noticeably from the classical paradigm exemplified by "Lycidas." It might just as appropriately have been titled, in imitation of Wordsworth or Shelley, "
Elegiac Stanzas Written in the Cumner Hills." For what had intervened between the classically inspired "Lycidas" and Arnold's mid-Victorian elegy is, of course, Romanticism, which changed forever the landscape of English poetry.
sequence of "
elegiac stanzas." Models of the elegiac poem
In his essay "
Elegiac Stanzas," Stanley Plumly discusses how Wordsworth "circles" his subject, dramatizing the mind's struggle against despair until it rescues itself through a process of self knowledge.
"
Elegiac Stanzas" exemplifies the second ("solitary
Among his better - known shorter works are " Alice Fell, " " Michael, " Simon Lee, the Lucy poems, "Resolution and Independence, " " The Solitary Reaper, " " Peter Bell, " " The Idiot Boy, " " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, " "
Elegiac Stanzas, " Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room, " The World Is Too Much with Us, " " Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, " and Ode: Intimations of Immortality.