… the five of you who know that the next line is “I knew him, Horatio” not “I knew him well” are feeling pretty smug right now, aren’t you?
Laugh while you can, because this month’s poetry slam is no joking matter. Like Hamlet, we’re going to elegize. eulogize? eleganate? Whatever “write an elegy” is.
Seriously, that was the last joke in this post.
I mean it.
With All Hallows’ Eve approaching, we’re focusing on endings this month, and grief, and death. If you felt cheated that you couldn’t work in a death in this month’s micro, here’s your chance.
So what’s an elegy?
Taken from the ancient Greek, an elegy is traditionally a funeral song, mourning the death of a person or group. Modernly, elegies have been used to describe not just people but seasons, nations, and even more abstract concepts. But the heart of the elegy is this: something (usually a life but not always) has ended and is gone.
The three stages of elegy
As you may have guessed from the clever title for this section, an elegy is a poem in three parts. Conveniently for you, however, these parts don’t have to match up with lines, stanzas, or, you know, basically anything in the poem. They’re moods, and they just have to be identifiable and in order. They don’t even have to be the same length as each other! One might be most of the poem long, and the other two might be single lines! Or they can all match. It’s entirely up to you.
Let’s check them out:
- Grief. The narrator of the elegy (that’s you, usually, although if you’re writing from the standpoint of a fictional character that’s fine, too) expresses their sorrow about the loss of the beloved object. That’s object in the narrative sense, although it can be the loss of a physical object as long as it’s really gone, like a broken vase or Broken Walkin Peep, a wind-up toy I left at the river when I was really little and who is definitely gone for good. Still sad about that. But a “beloved object” can also be a way of life, a season, or a person.
- Praise. The narrator explains what was so great about the beloved object. This makes the loss meaningful. For example, Broken Walkin Peep was absolutely irreplaceable. We’d found him, which meant my parents couldn’t just go buy another one, and there was no reason for him to still work. He should have been absolutely useless; his springs were sprung and he’d been abandoned. But once in a while he’d obey the call of clockwork and hop awkwardly around, shutting me up for hours while I waited for it to happen again (maybe the narrator of this elegy is one of my parents).
- Solace. At the end of the elegy, the narrator should be comforted by something, whether it’s the hope of being reunited in the afterlife, a silver lining to the cloud of grief, or a new home rising in the ashes of the old. (This is where my BWP poem breaks down because, see above, still just sad. Although I guess I could write a children’s book about his adventures afterward?)
The stages of your elegy do have to occur in this order, but like I said, there are really no other requirements for length or form. If you want to make a 12-line poem with each stage getting 4 lines, you totally can, but you don’t have to.
Wait, that’s it?
Pretty much.
You can make it harder on yourself by adding requirements like another poetic form, or meter, or rhyme. And you’re absolutely welcome to write an elegiac villanelle if you like! But at its heart, all that’s really necessary for an elegy is those three stages.
See you on the grid!
