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Mourning line

Structure
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A single poetic line explicitly conveying grief, sorrow, or mourning, often metrically weighted for emotional effect.

Detailed Definition
An individual verse line expressing grief, loss, or lamentation, serving as basic building block of larger elegiac structures. Mourning lines can stand independently as minimal expressions of grief or contribute to extended elegiac compositions, characterized by tone, imagery, and rhythm appropriate to sorrow, whether through slow, measured cadences, dark imagery, or direct statements of loss that accumulate to create sustained elegiac effect.
Example
Example in poetry:
A line mourning a lost friend in Tennyson’s "In Memoriam"; Thomas Gray’s elegiac couplet lamenting the dead; Auden’s funeral line “Stop all the clocks” evoking grief; Hardy’s single line sigh in "The Voice"; Sappho’s fragment yearning for the absent beloved
Additional Notes
Individual verse line expressing grief or loss. Building block of larger elegiac structures. Can stand alone or contribute to extended lament.
Also Known As
Elegiac line Lament verse Dirge measure Mourning meter Elegiac hexameter
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