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Updated: June 14, 2025
I must add too, that without some understanding of these same ballads, we shall never arrive at a critical appreciation of Shakespeare. For the English drama springs from an intermarriage between this same ballad poetry, the poetry of incidents, and that subjective elegiac poetry which deals with the feelings and consciousnesses of man.
"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac poetry.
Their third is, how much it abuseth men's wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love; for indeed that is the principal, if not the only abuse I can hear alleged. They say the comedies rather teach than reprehend amorous conceits. They say the lyric is larded with passionate sonnets. The elegiac weeps the want of his mistress.
What most annoyed the Syracusans was their being insulted and mocked by the tyrants; as, for example, by Mamercus, who valued himself much upon his gift for writing poems and tragedies, and took occasion, when coming to present the gods with the bucklers of the hired soldiers whom he had killed, to make a boast of his victory in an insulting elegiac inscription: These shields, with purple, gold, and ivory wrought, Were won by us that but with poor ones fought.
We have elegiac stanzas by her on the death of two of her husbands and of one of her sons, but none on the death of her father: although this form of tribute to the departed, by those skilled in such compositions, seems to have been as usual as the ordinary prayers for the dead. At length, in the 37th year of his reign, and the 68th of his age, King Flan was at the end of his sorrows.
The absurdities of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity.
To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves.
"I saw that he was very much embarrassed," replied Lady Mary, who for an elegiac figure had a surprising reserve of human nature. "It was too soon to be personal with a poor man who has been out of the world so long. But I think he enjoyed himself after the first embarrassment wore off. I feel surer still," with an exalted expression turned suddenly upon Lord Hunsdon, "that we shall rescue him.
"Mournful is the news to the Gael!" exclaims the elegiac Bard! "Red wine is spilled into the valley! Erin's monarch has died!" And the lament contrasts his stately form as "he rode the white stallion," with the striking reverse when, "his only horse this day" that is the bier on which his body was borne to the churchyard "is drawn behind two oxen."
He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. The bell rang. She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman came in. She let him wait awhile then went to him with an elegiac manner. She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He said: "I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you till I learned that all the people were safe. I motored up to see the ruins. Some ruins! Like to see'em?"
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