Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Primarily, a poem descriptive of rural scenes and events; a pastoral or rural poem, like the idyls of Theocritus, Goldsmith's “Deserted Village,” or Burns's “Cottar's Saturday Night”: applied also to longer poems of a descriptive and narrative character, as Tennyson's “Idylls of the King,” and to prose compositions of similar purport treated in a poetic style.
- noun An episode, or a series of events or circumstances of pastoral or rural simplicity, fit for an idyl.
- noun In music, a composition, usually instrumental, of a pastoral or sentimental character.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A short poem; properly, a short pastoral poem; ; also, any poem, especially a narrative or descriptive poem, written in an eleveted and highly finished style; also, by extension, any artless and easily flowing description, either in poetry or prose, of simple, rustic life, of pastoral scenes, and the like.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Alternative spelling of
idyll .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a short poem descriptive of rural or pastoral life
- noun a musical composition that evokes rural life
Etymologies
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Examples
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Perhaps I had better say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by
Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn 1877
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The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and
Robert Browning 1892
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The term 'idyl' has been explained above (page 248, note to iv): such idyls may be either narrated as stories, or brought out lyrically or dramatically, as in the present case.
Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature Richard Green Moulton 1886
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You will find three different classes of idyls in Theocritus; the idyl which is a simple song of peasant life, a pure lyric expressing only a single emotion; the idyl which is a little story, usually a story about the gods or heroes; and lastly, the idyl which is presented in the form of
Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn 1877
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And then there's the radiant Lily Bell Dominique McElligott, the educated widow of a surveyor, who is more attached than is good for her to the idyl of preserving a pristine wilderness.
Tales of the Old West and Aging Spies Nancy deWolf Smith 2011
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Arthur Connan Doyle, a frustrated geographer, had Sherlock Holmes instruct his companion Watson that the idyl of the English countryside hid far more heinous crimes than were possible in the city.
The urban age: how cities became our greatest design challenge yet « Stephen Rees's blog 2010
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And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a grove situated in heaven.
Les Miserables 2008
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The progress of his idyl suffered a check when the great senatorial fight came on in the Legislature.
Jennie Gerhardt 2004
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The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew.
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Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life.
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