"Threnody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not a touch of Fate's irony that I should be sending this threnody of death to one who might expect to receive from me only messages and pleadings of love? Death and love are the very antipodes of our existence, one would say. And yet I do not know; I feel nothing incongruous in linking the twain together. Love, too, breaks open the barriers ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... comes when night has descended and the valley below is blotted out by the darkness. Then from the copse beyond the orchard there sounds the mournful threnody of the owl. The day is over, he says, and all is lost. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I only am left to tell the end of all things. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I've told it all before a thousand times, but you wouldn't believe me. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Now, you can't deny it, for the night is dark ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... carried stored from beast and bird; Join the sweet notes of doves for their lost love To the wild moans of hours,—wailing move; Let choirs of Heaven and of the earth then peal, All living beings my dread sorrow feel! Oh, come with saddest, weirdest melody, Join earth and sky in one sweet threnody!" ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... oligarchic pathos, and to wonder that the men who had slain Tiberius Gracchus and hurled his body into the Tiber, could find their hearts thus suddenly dissolved at the death of an unfortunate but undistinguished servant. The motive of the threnody was somewhat too obvious, and many minds passed from the memory of Tiberius's death to the thought of the doom which this little drama was meant ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... expression, he may consult the Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln; than which it would be difficult to find anywhere a purer, more elevated, more poetic, more ideally abstract, or at the same time more pathetically personal, threnody—uniting the thrilling chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final unfathomed satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman is a master of words and of sounds: he has them at his command—made for, and instinct ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... word of consolation, sanctification, and benediction, closing the awful agony of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, this magnificent threnody ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... color, are rare examples of the lyrical epic. The Forsaken Merman and Saint Brandan, which are dealt with elsewhere in this volume, are good examples of his shorter narrative poems. In Thyrsis, the beautiful threnody in which he celebrated his dead friend, Clough, Arnold gave to the world one of its greatest elegies. One finds in this poem and its companion piece, The Scholar-Gipsy, the same unity of classic ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... growth for that. So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne's masterly experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... printings of his book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry |
