ELEGY (Lat. elegia; Gk. δειξίς, δειξίς, from λέγω, to cry woe! woe!), in its modern acceptance denotes a poem in a plaintive strain; a song of mourning, a lament. Among the ancients, however, this term had reference merely to poems composed in a particular metre—namely, a distich consisting of an hexameter and a pentameter; and accordingly it comprehended equally the warlike poems of Tyrtæus, the melancholy effusions of Mimermus, the aphorisms of Theognis and Solon, and the miscellaneous poems of Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, and Catullus. Among the most celebrated of modern elegies may be mentioned the Lycidas of Milton, Gray's Elegy, Shelley's Adonais, and the Elegie of the German poet Matthiessen.