Elegy

However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead".

[1][2] The Greek term ἐλεγείᾱ (elegeíā; from ἔλεγος, élegos, ‘lament’)[3] originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).

That looser concept is especially evident in the Old English Exeter Book (c. 1000 CE), which contains "serious meditative" and well-known poems such as "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and "The Wife's Lament".

[9] By the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others, the term had come to mean "serious meditative poem":[5] Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.

In Spain, one of the capital works in Spanish is Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre (Stanzas About the Death of His Father), written between 1460 and 1470 by Jorge Manrique.

This was originally written for piano, as a student work; then he set it as a song; and finally it appeared as the "Invocation", for cello and orchestra, a section of his incidental music to Leconte de Lisle's Les Érinnyes.