Pastoral elegy condition of death, not just the death of a single individual. John Milton’s "Lycidas," considered the most famous pastoral elegy, mourns the death of the poet’s good friend Edward King. In the 17th century, John Donne, a contemporary of Milton’s, explored the genre further and addressed matters of human love, which to his metaphysically inclined mind often resembled death. In the English language some of the greatest pastoral elegies are "Adonaïs" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which mourns the death of poet John Keats, and "Thyrsis" by Matthew Arnold, which mourns the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. In 17th century England, Andrew
Pastoral elegy then, the term elegy usually refers to a meditative poem of lamentation with no set metrical form. Examples of modern elegies include Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” which reflects on the death of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", which mourns humanity as a whole. Other examples include e e cumming's “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop's “Hours,” A E Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and W H Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats." Pastoral poetry is a genre that typically relates to country/rural life and