ABSTRACT
The tendency to restrict the subject-matter of the Ds Funeral Elegy in English to death is seen in J. Sylvester, Monodia. An Elegie in Commemoration of Dame Helen Branch, and the published title of Elegy in 1611, but previously it had denoted for the Greeks such as Theognis and Callimachus a poem on any topic in elegiac form, i.e., in couplets alternating hexameter and pentameter. In English verse before the 1590s, elegy was used in the Horatian sense of Art of Poetry to denote any poetic lament, but especially the Petrarchan love-lament, as explained by Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie. The elegy was one of the five excepted by the licenser from 1633, but its blasphemous basic analogy, theological parody and political comment seemed harmless enough for it to be printed in 1635.
