Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Colonial Disease and Illness
3. Burial Practice
4. Gravestones
5. Funeral Sermons
6. Mourning Rings
7. Weaned Affections
8. Elegies
9. Apocalypse

Elegies

Elegies are poems that relate the experience of loss and search for consolation.  They help the reader with the "work of mourning" by defending the individual against the anxieties associated with mortality and death.  Elegies also serve a communal function: while loss may tend to isolate individuals, in the elegy mourners come together through an emotional bond of loss and concern and are reformed into a community.  While most elegies console the reader with the permanence of language, Puritan writers accommodated the elegiac form to their view of salvation and predestination.  As Jeffrey Hammond notes in The American Puritan Elegy, “By assimilating the dead into the story of salvation, the elegiac ritual transformed them [the dead] into permanent ‘texts’ of piety that were, like all Puritan texts, inseparable from the defining metatext of Scripture” (Hammond  169).  The dead became part of the ongoing word of God as it was revealed in New England.

Items Related to Elegies in the Archive

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