INTRODUCTION THE poetry of love and mortal grief that has blossomed from the human heart under the shadow of death, and the poetry of trust and immortal hope that has unfolded in the light of religion, these are flowers of the spirit whose pure and tender colours blend in a natural harmony. I have bound them together in this volume with the title Elegies and Hymns. Elegy is a word which the Greeks and Romans used in a twofold sense: first, to describe any kind of mournful song or lament, even the wordless melody of the nightingale or the halcyon; and second, to denote a poem written in a certain metre, the so-called "elegiac verse" which consisted of alternate dactylic hexameters and pentameters, a smooth, restrained, pensive movement. In English poetry the latter sense is not often used, as the metre is one which it is difficult to imitate in our language, and there are but few examples of it. The former sense, in which the word is broadly applied to various forms of melancholy and regretful poetry, is familiar to critics. Coleridge attempted to make it broader still, defining elegy as "the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind." He asserts that "it may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself, but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself." In the usage of the people, however, the word has taken a different course. It does not include the poetry of regret for fugitive pleasure or unrequited love, nor all the forms of verse in which the poet, to follow Coleridge's phrase, treats of his subject always and exclusively with reference to himself. These are classed with the pure lyrics, or with reflective verse. But an elegy, in common parlance, has come to mean a poem dealing with the thought or the fact of death. It is not an outward, metrical shape: it is an inward, spiritual form. It is the poetic utterance of the heart of man when he faces the sorrow of mortality. It is the voice in which he answers death and calls after the departed. It is the music with which he at once expresses and soothes the grief of the last farewell, pays tribute to vanished goodness and the memory of noble names, and encourages his own spirit to meet the end that comes to all, with fortitude and an equal mind. It is in this sense that I have interpreted the sphere of elegiac poetry in this volume, bringing together the best of the shorter poems, of various types, in which the thought of death is central and controlling, and grouping them in six divisions, according to the different notes which they strike. First come the poems in which the subject of man's mortality is more broadly treated |