An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, most often a lament for the dead. It moves from grief toward some form of consolation or acceptance.

Classical elegies followed specific metrical conventions; the English tradition is more flexible in form but consistent in occasion and tone. Milton’s “Lycidas,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” are landmark examples. The elegy typically praises the deceased, expresses the speaker’s sorrow, and seeks a larger perspective—religious, philosophical, or natural—that can contain the loss.

Not every sad poem is an elegy. The genre implies a formal act of mourning and an attempt to make sense of mortality. Contemporary elegies may question the possibility of consolation while still working within the tradition of public and private grief. The best elegies give shape to feelings that otherwise threaten to overwhelm.

A poem that turns loss into measured speech and seeks a way to live with absence is an elegy.