threnody

Of course, “the unspeakable horror of the literary life” — to borrow Mr. Earbrass’s phrase from Edward Gorey’s “The Unstrung Harp” — is a familiar threnody in the writing biz.

From Washington Post ● May 25, 2022

The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts.

From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2020

It was an acute and devastating threnody, which King read in a methodical cadence.

From The New Yorker ● Apr. 3, 2017

After a savage climax, a slow, occasionally discursive string threnody takes over, during which the brass intrusions gradually lose some ferocity and the music moves towards a tentative nobility.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 11, 2012

Their voices blended into a threnody of nostalgia about pain.

From "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison

On “From Ukraine, For Ukraine,” a darkly brilliant new omnibus album by the cutting-edge Kyiv label Standard Deviation, grief and rage melt into impudently beautiful contemporary threnodies.

From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2022

By fusing gay rage and sorrow with familiar musical gestures—Straussian orchestral explosions, Samuel Barber-like threnodies for strings—it ennobled a portion of the population for which many orchestra subscribers might have felt disgust.

From The New Yorker ● May 30, 2019

Gazing at demagoguery, environmental ruin and intimate betrayal, Thom Yorke croons threnodies, not lullabies.

From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2016

Less popular, less memorably chantable than Poet Eliot's neatly allusive threnodies, poems by Pound are trademarked by no less scholarship, by language that is both more violent and more obscure.

From Time Magazine Archive

Ultimately, life is for him a pageant with intervals for sentimental threnodies and rhetorical declamation.

From Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal by Harold Edgeworth Butler