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

Mr. Greenwood’s own score for the movie “There Will Be Blood,” for example, features his “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a work directly inspired by the Hiroshima threnody.

From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2020

On one level it is a dryly detailed and topographically exact portrait of a small town in the American midwest, but on another it is a devastating threnody for lost love.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 2, 2019

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

From The New Yorker ● Apr. 3, 2017

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

But we must have due regard for them, for they only miss greatness by a little, and remind us of the faint threnodies that stir in the throats of bird musicians upon the dawn.

From A Lute of Jade : selections from the classical poets of China by L. (Launcelot) Cranmer-Byng