Placing Sorrow

In this full-length critical study of a richly varied poetic convention, Ellen Lambert aims to define the particular literary experience common to those funeral laments we call pastoral elegies. She suggests that what distinguishes the pastoral elegist's vision of death from that of other funeral elegists is a setting rather than a doctrine: the special landscape in which he places his sorrow. The pastoral elegist brings to death the consolations of a sunlit world: intensification, clarification, simplification. Theocritus's first Idyll and the fifth Vergilian Eclogue are studied in detail in the opening chapters, which provide the groundwork for discussions later in the book of diverse Renaissance elegies by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Sannazaro, Tasso Sceve, Sidney, Spenser, and others. With Milton's "Lycidas," where the mourner must make his own way, in the course of his poetic journey recreating the traditional landscape which others found before him, the convention reaches its climax. In her Epilogue the author underlines the essential unity of the convention up through "Lycidas" by showing the significance of revisions by later elegists who surround death with shadows, mysteries, complications.