Literature
Elegiac Couplet
An elegiac couplet is a poetic form consisting of two lines of verse, typically written in dactylic hexameter and used in ancient Greek and Latin poetry. It is often employed to express themes of mourning, loss, or reflection. The form is characterized by its emotional and melancholic tone, making it a popular choice for elegies and reflective poetry.
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4 Key excerpts on "Elegiac Couplet"
eBook - PDF- Ellen Oliensis(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
20 The popularity of the Elegiac Couplet surely derives in part from these formal traits, which make it a minimal unit of ideal closure. 21 And yet despite this tightly closed and elegantly self-reflexive structure, the distinctive feature of the elegiac pentameter might equally well be identified as a formal commitment to starting anew. After all, this is a line made up of two hexameter beginnings: a line that twice deprives the hexameter of its familiar closural cadence. 22 (This tendency to restart also shapes the opening sequence of the Amores: a prefatory epigram followed by an elegiac aetiology followed by Naso’s “naïve” discovery that he is in love.) This is an effect that is difficult to capture in English translation because English verse, being stress-based, militates against that 19 Discontinuity as the hallmark of the Elegiac Couplet, as against epic continuity: Morgan (2010) 347–52. 20 I owe this observation to John Henderson. 21 The self-containment of the unit is respected in practice by the widespread avoidance of enjamb- ment between couplets, an avoidance especially pronounced in Naso’s couplets: Morgan (2010) 347–8. 22 So Thorsen (2013c) 369, observing that of the “three hexameters” that “arguably start within the span of the Elegiac Couplet,” only the first “is brought to its hexametrical finish, while the subsequent hemistichs . . . refuse to roll onto their closure,” producing an impression of “abruptness and incompletion.” 156 Loving Writing non-coincidence of ictus and accent that characterizes the middle of the hexameter and marks its very middlingness, but here is my awkward attempt: Weápons and báttles royál | in dígnified meásures convénient Í was compósing, with thé || théme in accórd with metér.
eBook - PDFEnglish Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century
Laws in Mourning
- A. Brady(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
6 The epic connotations of hexameter made the elegiac distich appropriate for serious topics and 'passionate meditations' (both on love and on death)_? It could also suggest the dynamics of public performance, giving the impression 'that the poet, 12 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century like the old minstrel, is addressing a circle of listeners'. 8 However, in the early modern period this sociability tended to be produced by tone, content and context rather than by metre. Funerary elegies were not conventionally associated with a particular metre; as a genre they were more frequently identified by their content, as when Philip Sidney listed 'the lamenting Elegiack' among his eight types of poetry. 9 When Sidney himself died, his elegists employed a variety of metres to honour Sidney's own versatile prosody in the Arcadia. In the seventeenth century, however, most elegies were written in rhyming couplets. 10 The hobbled distich did not translate well to English. Puttenham described it as 'pitious', 'placing a limping Pentameter, after a lusty Exameter, which made it go dolourously'; 11 Ben Jonson translating Horace's 'versibus impariter iunctis' called the Elegiac Couplet 'Verse unequall match'd', in which first sowre Laments, After, mens Wishes, crown'd in their events, Were also clos'd. 12 Jonson, who identifies 'sowre Laments' as the original topic for the elegiac metre, attempted a few Ovidian elegies, but for the most part avoided the genre. Both in form and in content, the elegy jarred with his laureate reputation -would Jonson write 'An elegie? no, muse; yt askes a straine I to loose, and Cap'ring, for thy stricter veyne.' 13 1.2 The roots of elegy in epideictic As a genre largely determined by its content, elegy could draw on the compositional principles of the prose genres, especially epideictic.
- Heather James(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Dactylic hexameter belongs to heroic epic and looks for its fulfillment in tales of “the deeds of kings and captains, and the sorrows of war” (res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella, 73). 33 But the pentameter line of the elegiac distich, which has no corresponding ambition or capacity, frustrates its yoke mate. As Puttenham put it, elegy places a “limping Pentameter, after a lusty Exameter, which made it go dolourously more then any other meter.” 34 The pentameter line wants nothing to do with “the noble actes and valiant exploits of puissaunt Captaines, expert souldiers, wise men, with the famous reportes of auncient times” celebrated in dactylic hexameter. 35 The disparity between meters amounts to a dispute about genre, gender, and ideology. The dispute even has a legal dimension, which Horace awakens in his epistle on the poetic arts. For Horace, the operative word in elegy is querimonia, which was archaic in the literary circles of his day. The word belonged to law: querimonia was the standard word for complaint in the courts of law all the way down to the Justinian Code. 36 Ovid develops his case for the complaint of elegy against epic in relation to Horace’s legal metaphor, which takes the form of a paternity suit. Whereas everyone knows that Homer bequeathed the meter best suited to epic narration, no one knows who first joined the dactylic hexameter and the pentameter. “Dapper elegy,” in Ben Jonson’s urbane translation of Horace, has been in the courts ever since: to find out 68 Loving Ovid who the man should be, That first sent forth the dapper Elegie, All the Grammarians strive; and yet in Court Before the Iudge, it hangs, and waites report. 37 In Ovid’s work, the genealogical concerns of the critics are supremely unimportant. So far as he was concerned, elegy was lucky, since its uncer- tain paternity made for an appealing exemption from filial respect and duties.
eBook - ePubThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Fourth Edition
- Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Winters, “The Heroic Couplet and Its Recent Revivals,” In Defense of Reason (1943); W. C. Brown, The Triumph of Form (1948); W. K. Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason,” The Verbal Icon (1954); J. H. Adler, The Reach of Art (1964); J. A. Jones, Pope’s Couplet Art (1969); W. B. Piper, The Heroic Couplet (1969); G. T. Amis, “The Structure of the Augustan Couplet,” Genre 9 (1976); H. Carruth, “Three Notes on the Versewriting of Alexander Pope,” Michigan Quarterly Review 15 (1976); An Heroic Couplet Anthology, ed. W. B. Piper (1977); Thompson; Brogan, 389 ff.; P. Deane, At Home in Time: Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Verse (1994); T. Steele, “‘The Bravest Sort of Verses’: The Heroic Couplet,” Finch and Varnes; D. Caplan, Questions of Possibility (2005), ch. 4. W. B. P IPER ; S. C USHMAN HEROIC VERSE, heroic meter, heroic poetry. The term came to be used for *epic in the Middle Ages and after. Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae (7th c. CE) defines heroic poetry (carmen heroicum) as being so named “because in it the affairs and deeds of brave men are narrated (for heroes are spoken of as men practically supernatural and worthy of Heaven on account of their wisdom and bravery); and this meter precedes others in status.” In the Ren., Marco Girolamo Vida proclaims the subject of his De arte poetica (On Poetic Art, 1527) to be heroic poetry, though, in fact, it consists mainly of practical advice for poets derived from Horace and Quintilian. Torquato Tasso in his Discorsi del poema eroico (Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 1594) advocated a more romantic conception of epic but also insisted on accurate depiction of historical reality; he also wrote “heroic sonnets” celebrating great men and events of the past. John Dryden opens the Preface to his trans
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