English Elegies Research Articles

Sentimental Genres: The “Old English Elegy” and the Poetics of Nostalgia

ABSTRACT This study interrogates the scholarly construct known as the “Old English elegy.” This artificially formulated genre, which combines elements from eighteenth-century Classical German Elegy and nineteenth-century English nationalist nostalgia, comprises an unstable textual canon bringing together a modern perception of shared emotional, psychological, and affective discourses. To demonstrate how the pervasive influence of Romantic poetics and ethnonationalist anxieties underlies the inception and development of the discourse of “Old English elegy,” this study traces their influence across anthologies and critical editions of Old English poetry from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Close reading of a series of thematic and syntactic parallels across Old English texts further illustrates the arbitrary nature of the genre and evidences the need for a new critical terminology that acknowledges the horizontal intertextuality of Old English poetics.

A Tale of Two Halls: An Exploration of the Natural World in The Wife's Lament

Abstract: Past interpretations of The Wife's Lament focus primarily on the intangibles within the poem—speech, emotion, and symbolism—to the neglect of the physical details of the natural world the Wife inhabits. One overlooked detail, in particular, is the inclusion of the oak tree that the Wife sits beneath. This paper explores the Wife's relationship to nature and how it differs dramatically from those depictions found elsewhere in the genre of Old English elegy, paying specific attention to the presence of the oak tree. The presentation of the Wife's relationship to the natural world encourages a reading of the text in which she effectively grows her grief into power, in thematic divergence from the other elegiac voices, such as those within The Seafarer and The Wanderer . In tracing the poem's narrative as well as historical evidence for the reputation and use of oak trees in the early English centuries, I show that the poem reveals a more progressive vision of female autonomy and agency, as the oak tree establishes the Wife as something akin to a lord in her own home, setting the stage for the final tension between her own hall of earth and her husband's hall of stone. In the end, the Wife emerges as a ruler in her own right under her oak tree, and from her tragic tale emerges one of the most powerful—in speech, in action, and in place—female figures in Old English literature.

‘And You Shall Know That I am the Lord’: The Wanderer and the Book of Ezekiel

AbstractThe ruined-city motif in the Old English poem The Wanderer (lines 73–87) has long been read as a reflex of traditional Germanic diction, and as a symbol of material transience. In line with more recent biblical readings of the poem, this paper identifies a number of analogues and possible sources for both the excidio urbis image and other images of transience, in the biblical Book of Ezekiel. Among these correspondences between The Wanderer and the prophetic biblical narrative are references to scavenging animals, traditionally read as Germanic ‘beasts of battle’ when encountered in the Old English elegies. Reading this passage alongside Gregory the Great’s Homilies on Ezekiel further illuminates how the poem’s structure and changing use of tense corresponds with contemporary thought on the revelatory processes of prophecy. It is here proposed that the Old English poet has chosen to use images and devices which resonate with both biblical and traditional vernacular poetic diction.

The Haunted Island: Medieval History and the Old English Elegies in Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-race (1962)

Abstract This article explores the relationship between Tide-race, a 1962 memoir by the Welsh poet and artist Brenda Chamberlain, and medieval culture and literature on Ynys Enlli. Written in the decades after the Second World War when Chamberlain had left mainland Wales, Tide-race is a memoir of the artist’s time on Enlli living with its small community of fishermen and farmers. In contrast to other works of twentieth-century island literature, I argue, Chamberlain rejected dominant, medieval patriarchal histories of Enlli, refusing to read the island as a male monastic site, or as a Welsh nationalist or cultural space. Tide-race is a medieval modern text that is deeply ambivalent about what medieval culture means for modern conceptions of identity, specifically Welshness and womanhood. Chamberlain’s late modernist work has been neglected because of her status as a Welsh woman writer working outside of the centres of modernism, and she has never been considered in the context of Medievalism Studies. By bringing archival material from the Brenda Chamberlain papers at the National Library of Wales together with the published memoir, this article brings to light an unremarked upon interest in Old English literature and traces the development of Chamberlain’s medievalism in the post-war period. Although her use of the Old English elegies—The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament—has remained unnoticed by Chamberlain’s critics, these early medieval poems are translated and adapted in her prose in ways that allow her to exorcize old grudges and challenge masculine ideals.

Exiles: Medieval Experiences of Isolation

For most people alive today, the COVID-19 pandemic was our first experience of widespread isolation. However, among medieval cultures, with low population density and limited urbanisation, isolation, especially through exile, was common as a political expedient or even, as now, as a method of controlling the spread of illness. This is reflected across myriad aspects of medieval culture, from pilgrim badges to legal codes. Stories and tropes of isolation are common in medieval literature. From the immrama which often include depictions of the isolation of voyages, to images of homesickness in romances or Crusade narratives to descriptions of isolation in exile in Old English elegies and Old Norse sagas. In many instances, the literature reveals a greater fear of loneliness than death, so much so that isolation was used both as a form of punishment considered as severe as mutilation in some parts of medieval Europe, and as an important religious practice, since many people willingly distanced themselves from society in pursuit of salvation through hardship. This introductory essay introduces a dossier on medieval experiences of isolation.

PREGLED MOGUĆIH TUMAČENjA I PREVODNIH REŠENjA STAROENGLESKE ELEGIJE „ŽENINA TUGOVANKA”

The paper offers a translation of the Old English elegy ‘The Wife’s Lament’ or ‘The Wife’s Complaint’ into Serbian, as well as the explanations of translation solutions based on different interpretations of the poem, which arose from grammatical ambiguities of the Old English language and the composition of the elegy. Given the inevitable speculation that the inter- pretation of such a poem entails, the paper also attempts to move away from the speculation about the concrete events in the poem and focuses on the stylistic and formal aspects of the elegy and the atmosphere it produces, as well as the ideological significance of revisiting a piece of literature such as ‘The Wife’s Lament’ in contemporary literary research. This elegy is a rare example of Old English poetry in which a female voice speaks of human suffering and the transience of earthly things, which raises the question of a ‘female’ standpoint as well as the sexuality and spiritual nature of women, which certain critics see as extremely important and insufficiently emphasized in the overall study of the Old English literature. Regardless of the number of possible translations and thus more interpretive options, the touching lyricism that permeates ‘The Wife’s Lament’ is a strong critique of a heroic society in which a deprived woman manages to articulate her rebellion as a muffled voice of an antihero and outcast from a warrior community. In such circumstances, the essentially passive Anglo-Saxon woman in captivity affirms her own personality, thoughts and feelings with her uninhibited speech.

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes Joseph Heininger (bio) To say death is regrettable is only saying something about death, but to communicate that feeling is saying something about life. bernard o’donoghue In a remarkable gift of literary and cultural enrichment, many Irish poets have written elegies and elegiac poems for Seamus Heaney. His death on August 30, 2013, in Dublin was mourned throughout the world, and in response, Irish poets have written memorable elegies. Rather than adhere closely to elegy’s traditional conventions, however, Irish poets have reshaped the genre’s forms and techniques so that greater breadth, depth, and thematic reach distinguish their elegies. Among these poets are Michael Longley, Kerry Hardie, Theo Dorgan, Eamon Grennan, Paddy Bushe, Mark Roper, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sean Lysaght, and Leontia Flynn. I have selected their elegies because they offer significant perspectives on the art of contemporary Irish elegists. Each poet memorializes Seamus Heaney by remaking elegiac conventions in innovative and varied ways. Outstanding elegies have also been written by Michael Coady, John F. Deane, Katie Donovan, Thomas McCarthy, Ignatius McGovern, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, among others. Before examining some of the Irish elegies, I shall discuss the critical contexts for my inquiry. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks points out the traditional subjects and forms for elegy: wanting to deny the fact of death; praise for the person’s attributes and virtues; pastoral or antipastoral imagery; personal lament and spoken loss; communal mourning and rituals of lamentation; and use of the pathetic fallacy.1 The contributors to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics also state: “Traditionally, the functions of the elegy were three, to lament, praise, and console. All are responses to the experience of loss: lament, by expressing grief and deprivation; praise, by idealizing the deceased and preserving her or [End Page 105] his memory among the living; and consolation, by finding solace in meditation on natural continuances or on moral, metaphysical, and religious values.”2 Historically, after John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” the English elegy may or may not address whether hope or consolation can be found amidst grief and shaken faith, or lost faith. This difficulty in finding any kind of consolation or hope is also true of the contemporary Irish elegy. The traditional elegiac conventions are incorporated in many Irish elegies but with an emphasis on Irish features, genealogies, and idioms. Whether in Irish or English, Irish elegies demonstrate elegy’s importance in expressing what Eavan Boland and Mark Strand designate as a “cultural grief ” together with private grief: “In the traditional elegy, the grief the poet expresses is rarely a private one. More often, it is a cultural grief. . . . That the elegy speaks to this, that it locates the cultural customs of death in whichever society it occurs, adds greatly to its power.”3 In his influential study of Heaney’s elegies, Jahan Ramazani positions the work of several Irish poets: “While questioning, analyzing, and even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney—together with such Irish contemporaries as John Montague, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—energetically reclaims them for our time.”4 I endorse the idea that “the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on the one hand, and private feeling on the other.” I do not agree, however, with the contention that Heaney and his contemporaries attack and subvert elegy’s conventions and subgenres; this critical position overstates the case. Peter Sacks concludes his study with a discussion of W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” He places Yeats within the English tradition, yet his study also prompts the question whether Yeats’s elegy belongs instead to an Irish tradition of cultural elegy and lamentation. Yeats invokes John Synge and George Pollexfen as Irish exemplars akin to Robert Gregory, and hews to English tradition by holding up the image of Robert Gregory to his Renaissance likeness, Sir Philip Sidney: “our Sidney and our perfect man.” Yeats’s poem accommodates personal lamentation and cultural elegy, and this joint impetus shows the excellence of the modern Irish elegy...

ЛИНГВОСТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА КОНТЕКСТНО-ВАРИАТИВНОГО ЧЛЕНЕНИЯ ТЕКСТА ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОЭМЫ "МОРЕСТРАННИК"

The article is concerned with the analysis of the linguostylistic means used to effect contextual segmentation of the Old English elegy The Seafarer. It is hypothesized that discourse types of the poem including narration with some elements of description, reasoning and implicit dialogue are the key means to convey the author’s main idea. The focus of the study is on the use of the principal lexical and grammatical markers indicating the change of discourse types: personal pronouns of the 1st and 3rd person, finite verb forms and connotationally diversified vocabulary. In the narrative part, the emphasis is made on the extensive use of pronominal and verb forms of the 1st person singular as well as on the prevalence of emotive lexical units with negative meaning. Reasoning was discovered to be characterized by the domination of the 3rd person forms and balanced use of lexical units with negative and positive semantics. Implicit dialogue was found to be notably rich in pronominal forms of the 1st person plural and causative modality expressed by lexical and grammatical means. We conclude that the poem under study features a triform composition built by various linguistic means on the grammatical, lexical and stylistic levels.

“The Daring Pen of Sorrow”: elegies on the death of Thomas Murray (1564-1623)

ABSTRACTBritish Library MS Harl. 3910 includes a hitherto unexamined sequence of anonymous English and Latin funeral elegies on Thomas Murray (1564–1623), former royal tutor and secretary. His death, which coincided with Prince Charles’ trip to court the Spanish Infanta, prompted his poetic mourners to consider the exceptional political circumstances of the time, in particular lamenting the loss of a staunchly Protestant courtier like Murray who might have protected Charles in Catholic Spain. While satiric ballads and libels about the Spanish Match were widespread at the time and have attracted considerable scholarly attention, the Murray elegies offer a more probing and sophisticated poetic exploration of the fraught national situation. They combine satire with praise of an ideal courtier, and strikingly reconfigure the usual political paradigm by presenting Murray as the dominant “maker” and “ruler” of his royal master/student. Annotated diplomatic transcriptions of the elegies are included in the Transcription section.

A Thematic Approach to Old English Elegies

A Thematic Approach to Old English Elegies

A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women’s Letters

ABSTRACTThe letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers’ traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women’s letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.

In Defence of the Textual Integrity of the Old English Resignation

Abstract Bliss & Frantzen’s (1976) paper against the previously assumed textual integrity of Resignation has been a watershed in research upon the poem. Nearly all subsequent studies and editions have followed their theory, the sole dissenting view being expressed by Klinck (1987, 1992). The present paper offers fresh evidence for the textual unity of the poem. First examined are codicological issues, whether the state of the manuscript suggests that a folio might be missing. Next analysed are the spellings of Resignation and its phonology, here the paper discusses peculiarities which both differentiate Resignation from its manuscript context and connect the two hypothetical parts of the text. Then the paper looks at the assumed cut-off point at l.69 to see if it may provide any evidence for textual discontinuity. Finally the whole Resignation, seen as a coherent poem, is placed in the history of Old English literature, with special attention being paid to the traditions of devotional texts and the Old English elegies.

Intertextuality of Deor

The Deor is a poem found in the Exeter Book and included in the Old English elegies. The main purpose of this contribution is to highlight the possible intertextual links of the poem. After an outline of the old English elegies and a brief review of the most significant passages from the elegies, this short poem will be analyzed stanza by stanza. An attempt will be made to demonstrate that the various interpretations of the text depend on particular keywords that require that the readers to share the same time and space coordinates as the author. The personal names are the most important clues for interpretation. The problem is that they have been emended differently according to the editors and that the reader is supposed to know the referent hinted by those particular names. Key words: Old English elegies, Exeter Book, Deor, intertextuality.

City of the living dead: The Old English Andreas as urban horror narrative

Wild and unforgiving natural landscapes are well known to be the haunts of monsters in Old English poetry, even by those who have not read much Anglo-Saxon literature. Less well known is the urban landscape of the Vercelli Book’s Andreas, in which a crumbling city, carved in stone, plays host to the Satan-worshipping cannibal Mermedonians. This article argues that the Andreas poet, who drew on the monsters of Beowulf and their ilk when he translated his Latin narrative into English, also made significant use of poetic descriptions of urban landscapes. The ruinous presence of these – a ubiquitous feature of the landscape in early medieval England – had already left an enduring mark on Old English elegy. When the Andreas poet rehoused his monsters in one of these places, he not only created one of the most powerful settings in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, but also, inadvertently, the first surviving urban horror story in English literature.

ANTONINA HARBUS. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry.

The introductory chapter of this book outlines recent applications of cognitive science to literary studies, with sections on cognitive science itself, cognitive poetics, cognitive cultural studies, conceptual metaphor, the embodied mind, together with a brief overview of how the study proposes to bring these to a reading of Old English poetry. Successive chapters present these differing cognitive theories in greater detail before they are applied to various Old English poems (or sections of them): cognitive theory of metaphor is used to interpret images of the wandering mind in The Wanderer and the mind imaged as enclosure in Soul and Body II (chapter 2); cognitive notions of conceptual blending are applied to The Dream of the Rood, Riddle 43 and part of The Battle of Maldon (chapter 3); ‘Text World Theory’ is brought into relation with Wulf and Eadwacer and sections of Beowulf and Genesis B (chapter 4); ideas of cognition or Theory of Mind are illustrated by reference to The Dream of the Rood, Beowulf and Elene (chapter 5). The final two chapters, conversely, ‘set out to demonstrate the contribution that can be made by Anglo-Saxon Studies … to Cognitive Science itself’ (p. 130): notions of the self and of identity trigger a discussion of The Wife’s Lament and other Old English elegies (chapter 6), and, finally, some recent psychological ideas about the emotions are given a historical context with further discussion of Wulf and Eadwacer and of Beowulf. There is a short conclusion (with paragraphs summing up each of the chapters), an extensive bibliography, and a rather brief index.

Pastoral Elegy in the 1820s:The Shepherd's Calendar

‘Adonais’ is often discussed in relation to other poems by Shelley or to other English elegies. This essay suggests that it may also illuminate other writings from the 1820s, by emphasising the traditional association of elegy with the pastoral mode. Both John Clare and James Hogg published collections entitled The Shepherd's Calendar in the 1820s and, though very different from ‘Adonais’, each can fruitfully be read as new versions of pastoral elegy. Although neither Clare's poems nor Hogg's prose stories commemorate the loss of an individual poet, both have strongly elegiac elements and explore questions often regarded as defining characteristics of the elegy, including the workings of memory and melancholy, inheritance and legacy, loss and renewal, the nature of poetry and responsibilities of the poet. The essay focuses on the poet-shepherds of the 1820s, who inherited the pastoral innovations of the later eighteenth century and contributed to the Romantic transformation of the ancient mode. Far from representing the tail-end of tradition, Hogg and Clare were following the examples of their predecessors by demonstrating the recuperative powers intrinsic to true pastoral. The Shepherds Calendars of the 1820s offer an alternative version of pastoral to Shelley's self-conscious neoclassical, post-Miltonic elegy. They adopt Gray's extension of the country elegy to an entire community and draw energy from Burns and Wordsworth, who adopted plainer language and local settings for their influential Romantic versions of pastoral. Hogg's stories drew on his local environment, but far from presenting a sentimental idyll, they exposed the presence of death in the sheep-farming communities of the Scottish Borders, even as they celebrated the distinctive way of life and thriving oral culture. Clare's poems similarly celebrate the rural world of his native Northamptonshire, but his vivid poems are intensified by a recurrent sense of loss and irreversible change. Both poet-shepherds offer a lament for a world under threat from modernity but, in doing so, they develop exciting new literary styles which are perfectly suited to the demands of a modern, predominantly urban reading public. The essay concludes with brief reference to the infusion of pastoral into the Victorian novel and the early work of one of the most significant heirs to Romantic pastoral, Thomas Hardy.

Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”

history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels.--John D. Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age (1) It is a commonplace that Arnold is an elegiac poet, but not everyone would agree on what is meant by this phrase. --A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason (2) What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. Thyrsis is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais. is Thyrsis a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that Lycidas and Adonais are? Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies, he wrote. One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manque in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.' (3) Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes Thyrsis from ScholarGipsy, to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: Scholar-Gipsy, he says, is primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas ['Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed (p. 250). David Riede discusses Thyrsis along with Scholar-Gipsy under the heading Pastoral and Elegy, (4) and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the long ancestral of pastoral elegy: As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus. (5) This unproblematic classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote. often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader performs-and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it, says Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading. But some preliminary generic judgment is always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never interpret outside generic structures: 'reading'--even reading of a first paragraph-is always 'reading as.' (6) No poem, least of all one assumed to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands entirely outside generic structures, and so when we read Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions, the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually, since no work exists outside generic conventions. So the question Thyrsis presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually-there is no choice other than to do so-but rather what poems constitute the most relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way: what kind of poem is Thyrsis and in what generic tradition(s) does it participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral elegy (with Lycidas as its most influential English representative) and with the broader pastoral tradition that Scholar-Gipsy participates in, I propose to argue that the exclusive classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the lyric genre that M. …

A CHRISTOLOGICAL READING OFTHE RUIN

The foremost goal of this work is to put forward a Christological interpretation of The Ruin, an old English poem found in the Exeter Book that has been catalogued by critics among the Old English Elegies. Comparisons with the Bible will uphold my design, which pivots on the image of Christ as a cornerstone. I shall undertake an allegorical reading, thus I recall that ambiguity and mystery are present in the etymology of the term allegory, which is roughly glossed from the Greek 'other' and e 'speaking'. More specifically, the term occurs in the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner 1989) as extended metaphor. The author might wish to disguise the meaning of his text thus challenging the reader to disclo se it. I hereby accept this challenge.

Religious Change and the Renaissance Elegy

AbstractStudy of the Renaissance English elegy can be enhanced by considering both the medieval antecedents of the genre and the shifts in religious thought and practice brought about by the Protestant Reformation and by examining continuities as well as changes. Medieval English elegies, drawing on Catholic traditions, commonly registered a sense that living and dead persons can interact with one another. In later years, Protestant reformers would claim that purgatory and the cult of saints impugned the sovereignty of God and that the Bible offered no evidence for the Roman understanding of works as a means to salvation. Therefore, a fully purified faith could find no place for purgatory, the intercession of saints, or prayers for the dead. These attacks on traditional religion would shape poetic responses to death and mourning, including Henry King's “An Exequy” and Milton's Lycidas. (S.W.)

Angleška elegija in njene antične korenine

V antiki je bila ‘elegija’ vsaka nekoliko daljša pesem, zložena v elegičnem distihu, tematsko pa je – zlasti v stari Grčiji – lahko obravnavala pestro paleto govorčevih čustev in mnenj. Nasprotno se je v angleški poeziji razvila nova podzvrst, ‘pogrebna elegija’, tako da se je pojem elegije počasi zožil na pesem, ki izraža tožbo ali vsaj kaže resen, zamišljen ton. Drug pomemben odklon angleške elegije od njene antične predhodnice je njena poljubna oblika. Odločilni kriterij ‘elegičnosti’ se je tako prenesel z oblike na vsebino, predvsem pa na razpoloženje.