A Comparative Reading of the Concept of Elegy in Yadoallah Royayi’s Selected Epitaphs in Seventy Gravestones and Graveyard School’s Selected Poems

Elegy is a sad poem, in which fear of death and someone’s remembrance exist. Human beings are always preoccupied with the fear of death. However, the reason for this preoccupation can be different in different contexts. Some British Pre-Romantic poets, renowned as the Graveyard school, write elegy because it depicts the feeling of anxiety and isolation. Alternatively, they even write for political and religious issues or to commemorate a famous friend. In Iran, Yadoallah Royayi is a renowned writer of elegy whose book Seventy Gravestone is a best-selling. His reasons for writing elegy can be classified as fear of death, immortality, and searching for the truth about life which are quite different from his British peers. This paper aims to employ a comparative study of elegy's function in Yadoallah Royayi's selected elegies extracted from Seventy Gravestones and selected poems from Graveyard school poets. In this comparative study, the poems are analyzed thematically too. The result will indicate that although Graveyard school poets and Royayi are considered as poets who write about death and its fear but since Royayi has mixed his experience of Espacementalism with the theme of death, his epitaphs can be considered even more elegiac than the Graveyard School's poems.

Keywords:

Elegy , Death , Espacementalism , Graveyard School , Yadoallah Royayi