- Elegy, meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a public personage or of a friend or loved one; by extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of human mortality. - The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy is John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638), written on the death of Edward King, a college friend. - Other notable pastoral elegies are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), on the death of the poet John Keats, and - Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.