Author(s): Merve GÃNDAY*
As a poetic genre rooted in old times, ‘elegy’ has always been regarded as a means for the consolation of a mourner overcome with grief. In this way, it has been associated with an Arcadian sense of relief and purity pervading through a world far from the traumatizing realities of suffering, disappointment, hopelessness, or melancholia which are all felt at the death of a beloved person. However, as illustrated by the comparison of Milton and Hardy, it is revealed that elegy cannot be assigned a static meaning as providing relief because it has been transformed from a genre providing remedy for the mourner to a genre shaped by unsolvable questions and an irremediable suffering, as a result of which showing what a huge gap there is between the 17th century elegy and the 20th century elegy. In the light of this, the study analyzes Milton’s renaissance elegy “Lycidas” (1637) and Hardy’s two 20th century elegies, “God’s Funeral” (1908-1910) and “The Darkling Thrush” (1900) and argues that although both of them are labeled as elegies, they differ from each other with the change in their meanings and atmospheres, thus portraying the twentieth century man’s psychological crisis resulting from the loss of meaning and his difference from a mourner easily consoled by the relieving atmosphere of nature as shown in Milton’s traditional form of 17th century elegy.
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