Free Elegy Generator
Generate an elegy that moves from loss to reckoning to consolation, with the restraint that mourning poems need.
Elegy · Reflective
A blank page, for now
Choose a form on the left, tell it what the poem is about, and it will write. You can edit every line afterwards.
Free, unlimited, no account needed. Press ⌘ Enter to write.
What is a elegy?
An elegy holds a loss steady enough to look at. The form has no fixed shape, but it has a shape of feeling: grief, then the struggle with it, then some settling, even if the settling is a refusal to be comforted.
The rules, exactly
- A poem of mourning for a person, a place, or a way of life that is gone.
- Move through three stages: the loss, the reckoning with it, and some form of consolation or refusal of consolation.
- Restraint carries more grief than intensity.
- Avoid sentimentality and cliché images of loss.
Where it comes from
The classical elegy was defined by its meter rather than its subject. The English tradition made mourning the point, and Milton's Lycidas set the template that Gray, Shelley and Whitman all worked against.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea.