Michael Longley, born in Belfast in 1939, is of the same generation as Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney and his poetry ranks equally with theirs in its integrity, range and excellence. All three reached artistic maturity about the time of the resurgence of Northern Ireland's Troubles in the late sixties, and the violence has left an indelible imprint on their work. For Longley, as for Heaney, elegy also brought with it a number of challenging problems, among them the risk of falsifying the reality of sectarian murder by committing it to poetry and the unpalatability to modern taste of elegy's traditional propensities towards idealization and transcendental consolation. Heaney's success in remaking elegy by strenuously engaging with such artistic problems has received its due weight of critical attention, but there has been no comparable study of Longley's evolution as an elegist nor of his equally important contribution to the rehabilitation of the genre. This essay will attempt to supply these deficiencies by way of a detailed examination of his work in elegy.