elegist

Yet in the very laisse where Charles, now an elegist, utters the ubi sunt cry, the reader knows exactly where Roland is: in heaven.

Thus, by way of contrast, an elegist might find despair in the natural imagery surrounding a parish church: "Birdless windless trees hold breath; / Stream tinkles to pond to be frozen to death.

It's not that he's only an elegist, or that the ultimate cul de sac for the lyric is the elegy.

Whether writing as a celebrant, critic, memoirist or elegist, he has precisely the "unswerving gaze" Pinter called for, one often fixed on figures in the margins and shadows whose lives are often left untroubled by literary description, but who, Longley insistently reminds us, have their own heroism, tragedy and nobility, and whose stories reveal the 'real truth of our lives."

He is a true elegist with the knack of being able to entertain with only the most humdrum of resources.

Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist. Cambridge.

Jefferson declares herself "a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor." She begins her memoir with a brisk flyover of its historic beginnings.

However, although the elegist is at the very end of her life, her voice remains strong and persuasive, and has yet to reveal her dramatic truths.

Gizzi is an elegist as well as a rhapsode, and his work can be as harrowing as it is exhilarating.