Pyramid of Cestius an essential sight for many who undertook the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was much admired by architects, becoming the primary model for pyramids built in the West during this period. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" in "Adonaïs", his 1821 elegy for John Keats. In turn the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy saw the pyramid during a visit to the nearby Protestant Cemetery in 1887 and was inspired to write a poem, "Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats", in which he
Pastoral elegy of elegies In classic literature, an elegy was simply any poem written in elegiac meter and was not restricted by its subject. Elegiac meter was considered alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter. Most classical elegies were actually love poems, not laments. In English literature since the 16th century CE, the elegy has come to mean specifically a poem of lamentation. Additionally, it may be written in any meter the poet chooses. Key poets who shaped the genre After Theocritus' first idyll (early 3rd century BCE), the earliest Greek pastoral elegy is Bion of Smyrna's poem lamenting the death of