Elegy is a poetic form at first used in ancient Greece. It was made to express grief about someone’s death or the death of a group of people. That’s why almost every elegy even today starts with grief – sorrow for something that even could not be death. It can be something beyond the material world for example but it has to express very deep and sad feelings – feeling of lost or denial or something that is generally depressing or simply hard to be accepted.
Usually in the second part of every elegy the very thing that the author was sad about is again expressed but in the light of ideal. Even death is idealized as a way for someone to continue. Everything in that second part keeps the spark of the positive idealism and it is usually the keeper of hope.
That hope then develops in the third part of the elegy. That makes the elegy sound optimistic but still it has to keep the sorrow deep within it like it is something that can’t be undone, something that is pushed to the very end of things, something incorrigible – like death. Perhaps this is why the elegy in ancient Greece expressed exactly the sorrow about death.
