threnody

When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance.

From New York Times ● Oct. 13, 2022

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

A threnody for strings, rich in aching suspensions, appears twice, first to lament the deaths of millions and later to mark a more personal loss.

From The New Yorker ● Jan. 1, 2016

He can still drag tears from hardened hacks with his Song for Richard Collopy, a threnody for his late guitar restorer, whose devastation lies in its affectionate detail.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 7, 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

What wonder that their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan calendar.

From Sabbath in Puritan New England by Alice Morse Earle