threnody
Definitions
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun A song of lamentation; a dirge; especially, a poem composed for the occasion of the funeral of some personage.
Examples
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Now for those of us who do not know what that word means right off hand (I had to look it up as I was reading a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson long ago), a threnody is a song or hymn inspired by the grief of losing someone you love.
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House of Exile is a bold, inventive and often haunting threnody for European letters in a terrible century.
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The riot of imagery and emotional inflation in the short feminist allegory “The Call,” in the long poem “The Children of the Moon,” or in the blazing threnody “A Litany at Atlanta” suggested trances, gnostic visions, dark nights of the soul, and, as one perceptive biographer observed, other intensely religious moments that are surprising at first to see in an agnostic and publicly restrained Du Bois.
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In fact, its tensions could have as much to do with the exquisite intensity of love -- Barber didn't intend it as a threnody -- but Alsop and the orchestra did nothing to go against the prevailing view; it got a gentle, modulated performance from the orchestra's rich strings.
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“I Remember Clifford” is a jazz threnody written by Benny Golson in memory of the Clifford Brown, the influential jazz trumpeter who was killed in an automobile accident in 1956 at the age of 25.
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You will likely hear my anguished response to The Spirit once I see it in a week or so, although I can bet it will be a threnody on the theme: Frank Miller has no sense of humor.
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But my toaster doesn't offer the tantalizing music of Pynchon's voice, with its shifts from comic shtick to heartbroken threnody, its mordant Faulkneresque interludes, its gusts of lyric melancholy blown in by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its ecstatic perorations from Jack Kerouac.
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The widow, bloated with tears and surrounded by her would-be comforters, was indeed still spouting words between her bouts of weeping, and had no objection to continuing her threnody for the benefit of the sheriff, when he drove her companions away for a short while, to have the bereaved woman to himself.
Note
The word 'threnody' comes from the Greek roots meaning 'dirge, lament' and 'song'.
