ELEGY STRUCTURE OF A WEEPING SINGER (Poetic Form)

ELEGY STRUCTURE  OF A WEEPING SINGER (Poetic Form)

A “Weeping singer” as an elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the dead of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy; the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.

The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace. This three stages can be seen in W.H. Auden’s classic “in memory of W.B Yeats”, written for the Irish master, which includes these stanzas;

“With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the desert of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise”.

Other well-known elegies includes “Fugue of Death” by paul celan, written for victim of the holocaust, and “O Captain! My Captain!” by wait Whitman, written for president Lincoin.

Many modern elegy have been written not out of a sense of personal grief, but rather a broad felling of loss and metaphysical sadness. A famous is the mournful series of ten poems in Duino elegies, by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The first poem begins;

“If I cried out who will hear me up there

Among the angeli orders!

And suppose one suddenly took me to his heart

I would shrivel”

Other works that can be considered elegiac in the broader sense are James Merrill’s monumental the changing at sandover, Robert Lowell’s “For the union Dead”. Seamus Heaney’s the Haw Lantern, and the work of Czeslaw Milosz, which often laments the modern cruelties he witnessed in Europe. In conclusion, the person that is “weeping singer” is a personal – poet. It is the speaking or talking to you from the main facts.

 Examples of poems as a weeping singer in elegy form:

“Another elegy” written by Jericho Brown, “To an athlete Dying Young” written by A.E. Housman.