What name is given to a song or poem of lament, especially for the dead?
The Wife's Lament The Wife's Lament "The Wife's Lament" or "The Wife's Complaint" is an Old English poem of 53 lines found in the Exeter Book and generally treated as an elegy in the manner of the German "frauenlied", or woman's song. The poem has been relatively well-preserved and requires few if any emendations to enable an initial reading. Thematically, the poem is primarily concerned with the evocation of the grief of the female speaker and with the representation of her state of despair. The tribulations she suffers leading to her state of lamentation, however, are cryptically described and have been subject to
Lament for the Makaris under helme and scheild; Victour he is at all mellie; Lament for the Makaris I that in Heill wes and Gladnes, also known as "The Lament for the Makaris", is a poem in the form of a danse macabre by the Scottish poet William Dunbar. Every fourth line remorselessly repeats the Latin refrain "timor mortis conturbat me" (fear of death troubles me), a litanic phrase from the Office of the Dead. Apart from its literary quality, the poem is of notable for the list of makars it contains, some of whom are historically attestable as poets only from Dunbar's testimony