Chapter II

The Elegy, Its Definitions, Conventions and Modern Tendencies

In the previous chapter a reference has been made to Sharon M.

Bailey's statement, which refers to Requiem as an "elegy for Russia".

It is with the description of the poem as an elegy that one comes face to

face with the problem that is at the centre of any serious evaluation of

Requiem as a poem of mourning since there is no direct incident of

death involved. The presence of some fundamental elegiac conventions

in the poem such as "the pathetic fallacy, which is intimately tied to the

theme of the universality of death, the progression from grief to

consolation, and the ultimate resolution of the work of mourning" ',

provides all the more reason to attempt a study of the poem, as an

elegy. But before any in depth analysis can be made of the poem, it is

necessary to first enter into a discussion of the nature of the elegy, its

various conventions and modifications. This chapter, therefore, will

discuss the Elegy its definitions, conventions, and modern

tendencies and also a few samples of the different types of elegies.

This will serve as an introductory discussion leading to the next

chapter, which proposes to critically analyse Requiem as an elegy.

According to critics of the genre, "There are two possible

definitions of the elegy...: one in its traditional sense and the other in
 28

its broader, unconventional sense". The word elegy is derived from

the Greek elegeia, which means lament. "In the traditional meaning,

the elegy refers to an elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the

death of a friend or public figure. It is characterised by a powerful

intertwining of emotion and rhetoric, of loss and figuration, and above

all by the movement from mourning to consolation. In literature dirge,

threnody, monody and lament are variations of almost the same theme.

They are generally shorter versions of the elegy". It may be noted,

however, that during the time of the early Greek and Latin writers the

definition of the elegy also included "any type of serious, subjective

meditation on the part of the poet, whether this reflective element was

concerned with death, love, war or merely the presentation of

information".'* Peter Sacks, a renowned critic of the elegy, fiirther

enumerates on the subject saying that the conventional elegy includes

"exhortary martial epigrams, political philosophy, commemorative

lines, or even amatory complaints".^ In England also the elegy has been

employed by various poets not only for lamenting or commemorating

the dead but in a variety of subjects. Such elegies include John

Donne's Elegies and Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess. But after the

sixteenth century, the term elegy carried with it the definition of a

poem that speaks thematically of mortal loss and consolation and this

is the form of the conventional elegy that has survived till today.
 29

A definite form of the conventional elegy adopted from the

Sicilian Greek poets Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, and popular

among English poets is the pastoral elegy of which Milton's Lvcidas

stands out as a prime example. The pastoral elegy is also written "in

dignified, serious language, and taking as its theme the expression of

grief at the loss of a friend or important person". ^ It employs a set of

conventions introduced by Greek and Sicilian poets and developed at

the hands of elegists, from Theocritus to Spenser and Milton. They

may be listed as under:

the representation of the dead friend as a shepherd to be mourned by the

natural world, or pastoral contextualisation with its apostrophe and pathetic

fallacy; the myth of the vegetation deity; the use of repetitions and refrains;

the reiterated questioning and the outbreak of vengeful anger or

denunciation; the procession of mourners; the passage from grief to

consolation and the traditional images of resurrection, transfiguration,

stellification and deification. Additional conventions can also be seen in the

use of the images of flowers and light, the eclogic division within or

between mourning voices, the question of contests, rewards, and

inheritance, and the unusual degree of self-consciousness regarding the

actual performance of mourning. This last feature relates to the need of the

elegist to draw attention to his own surviving powers with a view to

consoling himself'

The first among the conventions listed above is the representation of a

dead friend as a shepherd. This convention is derived from the Greek

 30

eclogue, which among many of its varieties also served as a dirge

lamenting a dead shepherd. Usually the lamentation is performed by

another fellow shepherd in a natural and rustic environment. This

natural environment not only serves as a background but also plays an

important part in the shepherd's mourning and this leads to one of the

major conventions of the elegy. This convention is that of the pathetic

fallacy.

This convention is derived from the rituals associated with the

vegetation god. The personification of the vegetation god in these

I

rituals as human or human-divine helps man to see his own image in

nature and at the same tune identify that image with its regenerative

powers. On the other hand, as man identifies his image with the natural

world, he also imposes his will on it so that a reversal of roles may take

place whereby there is a reverse of man's submission to nature and its

changing, seasons. Sacks explicates that "instead of grieving over the

inhuman operation of nature or time, a setting and process on which he

is unavoidably dependent, man creates a fiction whereby nature and its

changes, the occasions of his grief, appear to depend on him. The

withering vegetation is now no more the cause of human grief but

rather the mourner or even the effect of a human-divine loss". ^ ,

The convention of displaying anger or bitterness against nature

and change subsequently results from the convention of pathetic

 31

fallacy. Following man's attempt in reflecting his grief in the withering

of nature, the display of anger may also be studied as a representation

of his attempted mastery and vengeance against nature and change.

Sacks states that "by the sacrifice or mimed death of the

personification of nature, man causes nature's death, or at least brings

on her deathlike mourning".^ In this manner, man attempts to either

direct nature to lament or curses it. Subsequently a relationship is

drawn between elegiac cursing and grief, a relation found in most

traditional elegies like Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais".

The matter of vengeance and cursing consequently leads to

another elegiac convention, that of questioning. This convention,

which is at times private and at times sharply interrogative, has been

used throughout the history of the elegy. Its functions is to "set free the

energy locked in grief and rage and to organize its movement in the

form of a question that is not merely an expression of ignorance but a

voicing of protest".' When the question is addressed to someone

repeatedly, the convention turns into a therapeutic ritual, in which the

mourner shifts the attention away from the object of loss or himself to

the world outside and stops him from becoming completely ensnared

in melancholia.

Apart from preventing the mourner from drowning

himselfherself in sorrow, the convention of repetitive questioning

 32

performs other functions as well. Firstly, it creates a sense of continuity

as opposed to the discontinuity of death. Secondly, it acts as a

protective shield against the unsettling shock of death. Thirdly, it

creates a rhythm of lament with the repetitions of the words and

refrains in order to keep the grief under control while keeping that

expression in motion. Fourthly, it confronts the mind with the fact of

death so as to achieve recognition of this fact and also to distance the

mourner from the dead. Lastly, it invokes the spirit of the dead by

repeating its name so that it almost replaces the dead and generates a

sense of consolation. It may be noted that this act of repeated

questioning either comes from one mourning voice or a division of this

voice into many voices.

. This division of the mourning voice makes up yet another

important convention of the elegy. This division may be in the form of

a distinction between mourners or it can be a division within the

mourner itself The purpose of such divisions in the mourning voice is

to show the splitting, and self-suppression insilde the mourner that

accompanies the first experience of loss. It also does the work of

dramatisation where the mourners infiise ceremony to the rites and also

reveal their work as survivors. Lastly, this division of voices acts as a

confrontational device for the purpose of recognition of the loss by the

mourner.
 33

Another important convention is the movement of the elegy as it

follows the ancient rites, which is seen as the passage through grief and

darkness to consolation and renewal. The movement from grief and

despair to consolation and renewal not only "mimed the death and

return of the vegetation god but also represents the initiate's descent to

and ascent from a crisis of mysterious revelation". More often than

not, this revelation is seen in the resurrection, stellification or

deification of the dead of which Milton's "Lycidas" serves as an ideal

example. Another point to be added in connection with the movement

from loss to consolation is that the movement is always accompanied

with an altered sense of perception for the lost object. In the Greek

myth of Apollo and Daphne, for instance, Apollo, having insulted

Cupid, was cursed with an unrequited love for Daphne. In her flight

from Apollo, Daphne flees to the banks of the river where she begged

her father, Peneus, for release. When Apollo grabbed her, she turned

into a laurel tree. However, the fransformation of Daphne from nymph

to a laurel plant did not serve any good to Apollo because even as he is

able to finally hold the tree, "even the wood shrank from his kisses". '^

It was until when Apollo found the significance of the laurel wreath in:

"With thee shall Roman generals wreathe their heads..." *^ that the tree

became a consoling substitute for Daphne and only then was he able to

accept his loss.

 34

The convention of the elegiac mythology is closely associated

with the rites of the return of the vegetation god and its concept of

immortality. It affirms man's resurrection and establishes his

immortality through the rebirth of nature. Nature's regenerative powers

and the principle of recurrent fertility become representations of this

immortality. Sacks observes that "the vegetation god is, after all, the

predecessor of almost every elegized subject and provides a

fundamental trope by which mortals create their images of

immortality". ^'^ The myth of Dionysus, son of Zeus, is an example of

such myths of immortality. Dionysus was killed by the Titans who

dismembered him and devoured him. In revenge Zeus destroyed the

Titans and out of the soot of their remains, mankind was bom. Sacks

explains that the birth of mankind in such a manner invested in him the

element of ingested divinity. Legend has it that Dionysus' heart was

hidden in a fruit basket and the survival of his heart enabled his rebirth

through the union of Zeus and Semele, a mortal.

The image of light is also an important convention used in

elegies.' Several layers of "meaning have been attached to it. The

foremost is its significance as a source of energy that conquers

darkness and outlasts mortal man. As Achilles mourned the death of

Patroclus, his wrath produces "Around his Brows a golden Cloud she

spread/ A Stream of Glory flam'd above his Head". '^ Other variations
 35

of this image have been used by Milton and other conventional

elegists.

The concept of poetic inheritance is one more addition to the list

of elegiac conventions. There has always been a close relation between

mourning and the act of inheritance throughout history. Margaret

Alexiou, a critic on ancient Greek ritual laments, elaborates that among

the Greeks unless one mourns he is prevented from inheriting.

Inheritance also warrants a display or demonstration of greater strength

and closeness by the heir to the dead than his rivals and that he should

wrest his inheritance from the dead.

Apart from the conventions listed above the construction of the

conventional elegy centres on the elementary images of weaving. This

is done in order to create a 'fabric' that takes the place of the void. In

"Lycidas" Camus dons a meticulously embroidered hem "inwrought

. with figures dim". Termyson, in In Memoriam. compares himself to a

blind man winding the curls of children's hair, or is seen playing with

threads. The process of weaving, according to Peter Sacks, is related

with the intention "of weaving a consolation" (PI9), which is usually

accomplished at the close of an elegy. He fiirther adds that the task of

the actual weaving of burial clothes and shrouds emphasise that

mourning is a ritualistic and psychological action and not only a

pastoral contextualisation.
 36

A few samples of the conventional pastoral elegy are "Lament

for Bion" attributed to Moschus, Bion's "Lament for Adonis" and

Theocritus' "First Idyll". In England among the major ones are

Spenser's "The Shepheardes Calender", John Donne's "Elegies",

Milton's "Lycidas", P. B. Shelley's "Adonais", and Lord Alfred

Tennyson's "In Memoriam". Among these "Lycidas" is considered to

be the most renowned because of its close resemblance to classical

elegies and its elaborate use of the pastoral conventions and should be

examined more closely in connection with the conventions. James

Holly Hanford in his essay The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas,

observes that Milton had been influenced by Theocritus' poem. These

lines in "Lycidas", "Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless

deep / Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?" seem to have been

taken right out of Theocritus' poem as Thyrsis sings:

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song.

Thyrsis of Etna am I, and this is the voice of Thyrsis. Where, ah!

Where were ye when Daphnis was languishing;...

' Hanford remarks that "Milton was familiar with it at first hand

and consciously adopted it as one of the classical models for

Lycidas"}^ Another source of influence is the tenth eclogue of Virgil.

Milton adopts his style of calling upon "various beings [to] come one

after another to add their part to the lament". Moschus' Lament for
Bion is also considered to be yet another source of influence for its use

of the pastoral convention of pathetic fallacy, in which nature

participates in the poet's grief In fact "Lycidas" uses many of the

conventions associated with the pastoral elegy. Firstly, Milton's poem

is occasioned by the death of his peer in Cambridge, Edward King and

fiilfils the basic characteristic of a traditional elegy, that is, a poem

lamenting the death of a friend or public figure. Moreover, the poet

makes use of the figure of the shepherd to represent the dead friend.

This further establishes the poem as a pastoral elegy. C. T. Thomas

observes that pastoral poetry "was used in the Renaissance to tell the

story of young poets and scholars disguised as shepherds".

Some of the other conventions found inherent in Milton's

"Lycidas" are the procession of mourners, the movement from despair

to hope and resurrection, the questioning of the nymphs, and the

convention of elegiac mythology with allusions to the myths of

Orpheus and Hyacmthus and the images of flowers. Another important

feature found in "Lycidas" is the presence of allegorical didacticism.

This feature is derived from Boccaccio, Petrarch and Spenser who used

the pastoral elegy to express their political and religious views as well

as the personal aspirations of the poet himself. The long section in

"Lycidas" where Milton attacks the corrupt practises of the clergy is an

example of such didacticism. Another section talks about fame and

 38

alludes to the poet's own poetic aspirations. Such adaptations of

pastoral conventions from both classical and Renaissance elegists by

Milton places "Lycidas" among the most prominent traditional elegies

in literature.

These conventions, however, have evolved throughout the

history of literature and have undergone extensive modifications over

the centuries at the hands of elegists writing through the generations.

The genre itself has undergone many revisions and has taken on new

forms and possibilities. In the unconventional sense, for instance, the

elegy has broadened its scope and "may refer to a poem of serious

reflection on a solemn subject or the tragic aspects of life". In order

to add on to the meaning of this definition, it may be necessary to

include S. P. Sen Gupta's view, who while quoting another critic has

drawn a line of distinction between the 'elegiac' and the 'elegy'. The

elegiac, he observes, "is an extended version of the elegy and refers to

poems having a deep pervasive tone of melancholy reflection on life's

transience and its sorrows".'^ These enumerations come out clearly in

Sharon M. Bailey's statement that, "while an elegy may be (and

usually is) occasioned by death, it is more accurately defmqd as a poem

about loss". Hence, it may be noted that the unconventional elegy

has shifted its focus away from death, towards loss and melancholy.
 39

A few examples of the unconventional elegy as identified by

critics like M. H. Abrams are, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written Ln a

Country Churchyard", Mathew Arnold's "Memorial Verses" and

"Scholar-Gipsy", and Maria Rainer Rilke's "Duino Elegies". These

elegies "may be said to occupy a position somewhere between the

traditional and the modem elegy [as] their movement is always from

praise to lament and then, to an attempt at consolation" by replacing

sorrow with the hope of renewal although the attempt is not always

completely successful. It is, therefore, understood that while the

unconventional elegy still makes use of various conventions of the

traditional elegy it does not always adhere to them entirely.

Such variation from the traditional conventions is seen in the

choice of themes, which these poets employ. For instance, Gray's

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" mourns the passing away of

the -forefathers into obscurity and the possible early death of the poet

himself. Sen Gupta is also of the opinion that Arnold's "The Scholar

Gipsy" and "Memorial Verses" are elegies but do not lament the death

of an individual. He further explains that the tone of the poems is

elegiac whereby the poet grieves over a decadent age, the death of

religious faith and of treasured values of life. Similar adaptation in

theme is also noticed in the elegies of RiUce whose "Duino Elegies"

emerge from a grieving over a "profracted personal crisis".

 40

These elegies are also unresolved in the act of mourning, which

is seen in their resentful anger against the living. Gray shows his anger

by a denouncement of his times. Arnold on the other hand directs his

anger towards the destruction of man's intuitive powers by a

materialistic society. Even their consolations, although not anti-

consolatory, are inconclusive and insufficient. Arnold tries to find

some consolation in the resigned acceptance of harsh realities and Gray

hopes to find it in the lap of the common mother and the bosom of his

father, who is God. These consolations, although seemingly comforting

in nature, do not actually point towards any form of regeneration or

transcendence, which leaves one to believe that the mourner is still

enmeshed in his own grief. But then Zahan Ramazani, an authority on

the modem elegy, is of the opinion that "consolation may no longer be

an important "criterion by which to judge" the elegy, since many of the

weakest are merely consolatory and many of the strongest...are poems

less of solace than melancholia, less of resolution than of protracted

strife". ^^

To elaborate on the nature of the unconventional elegy, a brief

discussion of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" will be

done. As mentioned earlier, this poem does not mourn the death of any

particular person. However, after critically assessing the poem, Sacks

agrees that "Gray's poem is, of course a poem of mourning [and it]
 41

mourns a particular death over and above those of the obscure

villagers". It is important to understand that "particular death" here

refers to the poet's vision of his own death, "a projection that includes

a local swain's account of the poet's life and burial, together with a

presentation of the epitaph written by the poet himself .^"^

The poem itself opens with the poet's "solitary courting of

prophetic vision" of a rustic landscape at dusk and progresses into a

reflection of the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" and their traditional

pastoral life, away from the "ignoble strife" of a rich materialistic

society. In contemplating the passing of the age, the poet is roused with

moral ideas about "the way in which the villagers are deprived of the

opportunity of greatness; and by contrast, with the crimes inextricably

involved in success as the 'thoughtless world' knows it, from which

the villagers are protected". As a result, the poet confrasts the life of

the poor and the rich, their virtues and their vices and forbids the

mockery of their simple rustic lives as wealth, power and arrogance

beconie useless because in the end "The paths of glory lead but to the

grave". From here the poem then turns to a contemplation of life and

death and "a preoccupation with the desire to be remembered after

death, a concern which draws together both rich and poor, making the

splendid monuments and the "frail memorial" pathetic".

 42

Lament in the poem arises from the poet's sensibilities about the

loss of a way of life, which the forefathers would not be able to

experience anymore since they are "forever laid" in the country

churchyard and which the poet will not be able to see anymore because

they remain in obscurity only in the "short and simple annals of the

poor". While grieving over the loss of pastoral life, the poet finds

consolation in the very obscurity that his forefathers have been left to

repose. According to Hough, a renowned critic, obscurity has its own

advantages, in which "the narrow lot of the villagers circumscribed not

only potential virtues, but also potential crimes forbade them the

brutality of a conqueror or the venality of a court poet". Hence, the

poet finds consolation for the "madding crowd's ignoble strife" ki the

obscure life of the villagers. In a way this also acts.as a defence .against

the alteration to life caused by death. Sacks elaborates on this by

saying that "Gray marshals a defence of obscurity at large [by]

revealing it as the necessary condition of the dead. His praise seems to

extend, therefore, to those who live in such a way obscure and silent

as to suffer the least alteration by death. Hence, too, "they kept the

noiseless tenor of their way".^*^

As to the poet's own "sense of waste and frustration, which no

longer appears as personal uiadequacy, but as part of what must

inevitably happen in all human life and all nature", ^' the reflection of
 43

his personal anguish his death and the waste that his poetic talent

will succumb to as an inevitable natural event enables him "to bear

his own disappointments by seeing them in the wider setting of which

they are a part". However, this effort in looking for consolation in the

poet's own protracted anguish is not complete since humans will still

have to resign themselves to the possibility of waste and death. The

real consolation comes with a realisation that the final solution to such

uiequities and problems lay outside the realm of human contemplation.

According to Gray himself, this force is God who, alone makes the

final judgement and who can also make right all the wrong, either

committed by humans or a result of natural injustice. Subsequently, the

poet wishes to be left tn peace on the lap of mother earth and in the

hands of his God as the Epitaph writes:

No fiuther seek his merits to disclose.

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

("Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard")

It is also in the epitaph that Gray's desire to be remembered is fulfilled.

But the final resolution does not rest so much in erecting a tombstone

as in the script inscribed on it. This means that for the poet language is

the only guarantee of remembrance and one that can assure the
 44

immortality of his identity. From the above discussion it may be

reiterated that the poem, although lacking the characteristic of a

traditional elegy, is primarily elegiac in nature as it mourns the death of

an age and the poet's own sense of waste and death. The poem,

however, has adapted well to the conventions of pastoral imagery, the

deliberation on grief and the movement from such grief to consolation

and remembrance, in spite of its marked departure from the traditional

elegy in its freatment of the theme.

The movement of the unconventional elegy away from its

predecessor has broadened the scope for fiirther modifications, which

in turn constitute the modem tendencies that Ramazani talks about in

his book. Poetry of Mourning: The Modem Elegy from Hardy to

Heaney. In this book, Ramazani defines the scope of the modem elegy

that it "permeates a wide range of poems about war, love, race gender,

meditation, the self, the family, and the poet". He elaborates that "the

poetry of mourning for the dead assumes in the modem period an

extraordinary diversity and range, incorporating more anger and

scepticism, more conflict and anxiety than ever before". (POM p. 1) As

a result, one major distinction between the modern elegists and their

predecessors is that they "tend to enact the work not of normative but

of 'melancholic' mourning - a term I adapt from Freud to distinguish

mouming that is unresolved, violent, and ambivalent". (POM p. 4)

 45

They attack the dead and the self, their work and tradition and they

discard such traditional ideas of consolation as rebirth of the dead in

nature, in God, or in poetry itself He further adds, "...modem elegists

'practise losing farther, losing faster', so that the 'One Art' of the

modem elegy is not transcendence or redemption of loss but

immersion in it". (POM p. 4)

However, despite the marked change in the mood of the modern

elegist; Ramazani notices the use of a number of "ancient elegiac

tropes, stmctures, and even consolations" in modem elegies. At the

same time, this incorporation of traditional conventions into the

modem context of the elegy is not without any conscious effort at

sifting, or violating its norms and even at times trespassing its limits. In

the words of Ramazani:

They conjoin the elegiac with the anti-elegiac, at once appropriating

and resisting the traditional psychology, structure, and imagery of the

genre. The apparent oxymoronic term "modern elegy" suggests both the

negation of received codes ('modem') and their perpetuation ('elegy') - a

synthesis of modernity and inheritance that is especially jfruitiul for the

poets like Hardy, Stevens, Hughes, and Plath, who neither rehash nor

neglect literary traditions. (POM p. 12)

The modem elegists not only rebel against set norms of the

traditional elegy but simultaneously regain them through rebellion.

Hence, "the modem elegy more radically violates previous generic

 46

norms than did earlier phases of elegy: it becomes anti-consolatory and

anti-encomiastic, anti-Romantic and anti-Victorian, anti-conventional

and sometimes even anti-literary". (POM pp. 1-2)

Thus it has been seen that the elegy as a genre has not remained

static but has evolved with the times, has broadened its range and even

changed the contours of its movement, which had traditionally

progressed from praise, to lament and consolation. These evolutions

should prove useful in examining Requiem as an elegy.

 47

Endnotes

See Sharon M. Bailey, "An Elegy for Russia: Akhmatova's Requiem", The

Slavic and East European Journal Vol. 43, No. 2 (1999) 325.

^ See Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, "Hiraeth, Soso Tham and the Elegiac

Tradition", Hiraeth and the Poetry of Soso Tham (A Study of Tham's Major Poem,

Ki Sngi Ba Rim U Hynniew Trep and Related Poems), diss., North-Eastem Hill

University, 2005, 32. The dissertation has based this definition on the following

books:

a. Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 66-7.

b. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms 7* Edition (New Delhi:

Harcourt India Private Limited, 1999) 72-3.

c. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy Studies in the Genre from Spenser to

Yeats (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1985) 1-37.

d. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modem Elegy from Hardy to

Heaney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) ix-xv, 1-31.

e. S. P. Sen Gupta, ed., Mathew Arnold Selected Poems (Bombay: Orient

Longman Limited, 1979) 1-6.

^ See Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, "Hiraeth, Soso Tham and the Elegiac

Tradition", Hiraeth and the Poetry of Soso Tham (A Study of Tham's Major Poem,

Ki Sngi Ba Rim U Hynniew Trep and Related Poems), diss., North-Eastem Hill

University, 2005. 2.

'* See C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 4"' Edition (IndianapoUs:

Bobbs-Merrill Educational PubUshing, 1980) 151.

 48

^ See 2c above.

^ See 4 above. 321.

'' See 3 above.

^ See 2c above. 20-1.

'ibid. 21.

' Ibid. 22.

^'Ibid. 20.
12 From Ovid's Metamorphoses as appeared in Sacks'. 4.

'^ Ibid.

'" See 2c above. 26-7.

'^ See Homer, Iliad trans., Alexander Pope, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed.

John Butt, Vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) 334.

^^ See James Holly Hanford, "The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas", PMLA

Vol. 25, No. 3(1910)408.

^' See C. T. Thomas ed., "Lycidas and Pastoral Elegy", Lycidas (Mumbai: Orient

Longman Ltd., 1975)39.

'* See 3 above. 3.

'' Ibid.

^ See 1 above. 328.

^' See 3 above.

^^ See 2d above. 226.

^^ See Sacks, "Jonson, Dryden, and Gray". Details as 2c above. 133.

^' Ibid.

^^ See Graham Hough, "Gray", The Romantic Poets (n.s.: Hutchinson University

Library, n.d.) 9-24.

 49

^^ See 23 above. 135.

^^ See 25 above. 15.

28 See 2d above. The quotations thereafter are taken from the same source.