Post Info TOPIC: Why call them "Elegies"?
Steven Rubenstein

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Why call them "Elegies"?
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Does anybody know why Donne (if that is who titled them so) called his Elegies "Elegies"? As far as I can tell, there's nothing elegiac about them. What did he (or his editors) understand an "elegy" to mean?

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Greg Kneidel

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RE: Why call them "Elegies"?
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I suppose the short answer is that Donne's _Elegies_ read like Ovid's _Amores_, which were written in an elegiac meter (alternating lines of hexameter and pentameter). I do not think there is (or I have never encountered) a clear or logical explanation for why elegy can mean both funeral poem or sex poem. I imagine the _Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_ takes a stab at it.

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Sean McDowell

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RE: Why call them "Elegies"?
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Well, there is always that association between love and death, little death and big Death.

Seriously, though, the best gloss I've found on the connection between that lamentation sort of elegy and the elegy as a love poem comes from Puttenham, who considers the elegy a sad love poem: "The third sort of sorrowing was of loues, by long lamentation in Elegie: so was their song called, and it was in a pitious maner of meetre, placing a limping Pentameter, after a lusty Exameter, which made it go dolourously more than any other meeter" (CHAP. XXIV). There you have it, "limping (and therefore sorrowful) Pentamer" and "lusty Exameter," death and love.

 



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Steven Rubenstein

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Thanks for the response. It's still hard to imagine that a poem like "Going to Bed" or "Jealosie" have any note of lamentation when they're so celebratory. (The big death/little death connection in this context seems to me a stretch.)

Does anybody know if Donne himself called these poems elegies?

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Theresa DiPasquale

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In a letter to Henry Wotton circa 1600, Donne expressed nervousness about the circulation of his writings, noting that "to my satyrs there belongs some feare and to some elegies and [paradoxes] perhaps, shame." Donne is clearly referring here to the erotic poems that were later labelled "Elegies" in the posthumous print editions of his poems. The logic of his and others' using this label is fairly simple: as Greg Kneidel points out above, the poems "read like" Ovid's Amores, which are written in elegiac meter. But it's not just that; English translations of Ovid's Amores were (as in Marlowe's translation, for example) called Elegies (on the basis of their meter). So an original English erotic poem in the Ovidian manner was also -- by extension -- an "Elegy."

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Anonymous

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RE: Why call them "Elegies"?
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In researching Ovid's influence on Renaissance Love Poetry, I came across a critic that mentioned that the idea of Elegies being sad or tragic was a 'later' idea, it originally just referred to the style of couplets in a certain metre - Ovid writes on a variety of themes and his elegies are humorous and erotic.  Later discoveries of classical elegies which had sad themes led to a definition of elegy as something with a sad theme.....

something like that perhaps :P

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