How To Use Dirge In A Sentence

There are reggae jams and Velvet Underground dirges, one-minute tracks that float by like nothing and sprawling campfire singalongs.
The flock simultaneously screamed and swooned as Way crooned "Cancer," a dirge about a slow death from the title illness, all while backlit with a massive white spotlight and engulfed in a faux smoke haze. The Washington Post: National, World & D.C. Area News and Headlines - washingtonpost.com
The first and last are love poems, but the second is a dirge for an Irish hero.
They stepped so high, the bagpipes sounded a dirge, they snapped their heads around at attention at their commanding officer.
I'm not sure what melancholy instrument it is that carries this ponderous, mournful dirge.

A "dirge" is a funeral or mourning song, so perhaps this is meant literally ... or, perhaps, this is a reference to some of the new American Pie - Program Notes
There are celebratory songs, such as in the wedding masques in As You Like It and The Tempest, and there are the more solemn dirges and laments of Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing.
He poured out his otherwise ignored feelings into music, making his flute wail with stormy rage, sigh soft dirges, or trill in happy abandon.
Dozens of patients, mostly dressed in black, marched through the streets following a draped coffin while musicians played a dirge on a flageolet and melodion.
The new album incorporates vocal laments from Eastern Europe and a dirge-like hymn from a Croatian church congregation.
The signature brow beating and bleating dirges still abound, but there's an increased focus on songwriting rather than the moping first-person exposition that typified their first few records.
The dark and dirge-like clouds lift for a few rays of petrified beauty in melodies or in single, sustaining piano notes, achieving a smooth, even balance.
If you are one of the resort's pool of bankrupt songwriters but still have grave interests and tendencies, think about turning to writing dirges for funerals.
A somber dirgelike music seems to announce a death.
Played at a quickstep tempo, the dirge was at once transformed into a jaunty, comic, oompah version of the Scottish anthem.
But the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis. A Writer's Recollections — Volume 1
At his best with hyperearnest Creed-style rock numbers, he couldn't deliver a song that required the least bit of funk or humor, as he proved on Tuesday's Elvis night with a couple of plodding numbers including a dirgelike rendition of A Little Less Conversation. American Idol Fails to Tinker with Taylor - Tuned In - TIME.com
The hushed, dirge-like song closes the album as it opens, with beautifully reflected sorrow.
The band's sound included syncopated drum beats, a prominent bass line that flirted with funk rhythm, and a dirge-like guitar.
The song is a cover of the 1980's teen dirge.
Dozens of patients, mostly dressed in black, marched through the streets following a draped coffin while musicians played a dirge on a flageolet and melodion.
This album is full of self-pitying dirges which give the impression of a slightly sad man-child sulking about girls in his bedroom.
The music was practically dirge-like, and a couple of the speakers 'voices are just whiny and annoying. Teachers Union Drops Over $300,000 On Pennsylvania Radio Ad For Hillary
Catherine hummed and sang a hymn that faded quickly from a cheery ode to a mournful dirge.
That its low-fi songs are most commonly described as dirge-rock has probably put plenty of people off. Times, Sunday Times
The dirgelike humming of Lorna Simpson's nearby video installation was audible in the background.
Mini's songs were neither dirges nor fight songs but soulful chants with melodies of promise.
It seemed like they had so much in common: nasal voices, a taste for writing long, slow, acoustic dirges, and a closet full of flannel.
Following debut album Appetite for Destruction, Axl starts referencing the likes of Elton John with the ecclesiastical piano dirge of ‘November Rain’ from follow-up Use Your Illusion.
(Did shake my head at "Falling Slowly" though - how did a droning, dirgelike song with almost melody win again?) Swell Season on Boing Boing Video Boing Boing
The novel's dirge-like tone may put off readers looking for the next Kite Runner, but Mengestu's assured prose and haunting set pieces ... are heart-rending and indelible. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears: Summary and book reviews of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.
The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery.
In 1982, he released Nebraska, a masterpiece of hush-toned dirges about murderers and chicken-man killers and accidentally invented lo-fi.
Mixing the ‘let freedom ring’ chorus in with the funeral dirge that is still ringing in the hearts of the victims' families is just shy of vile.
The sense I get is of Iraq as an undertone, a kind of dirge playing softly beneath the pop charts. Living Politics: Waiting For The Heads to Roll
They could be diary poems like Clive James' dirges but the passion and love and guilt and everything else pour out of the Hughes poems like an emotional cornucopia - a death note maybe but a special one.
These dissonant days the best a player can hope for as an inspirational backdrop to his talent is an off-pitch dirge.
Although not what the musicians intended, the dirge provided a wholly apposite soundtrack for a truly lamentable second half performance.
A few of the dirges work, but over the course of fifteen tracks, enough gets to be enough; the rhythm just keeps getting bogged down on the slow ones.
Terren's staff sang out with a lamenting dirge, causing many men to cast away their weapons and run for safety, allowing Terren to cut down their abandoned comrades with his staff and short, erratic bursts of magic.
One minute the crowd is jumping around, happy and hyped, and the next minute they are being subjected to an hour and half of music more suited to a funeral dirge…
That is what barbarians say in their eastern tongue as a prelude to the dirge of death, whene'er royal blood is spilt upon the ground by deadly iron blades. Orestes
Homesongs, the solo debut from ex-Fridge bassist Adem Ilhan, gives his lonely heart its own club band, but unfortunately, these dragging, faceless roots-tinged dirges fail.
That is what barbarians say in their eastern tongue as a prelude to the dirge of death, whene'er royal blood is spilt upon the ground by deadly iron blades. Orestes
The dirge-like sounds coming out of the orchestra are anything but cheerful.
The novel is a dirge that keens and lulls by turns.
Meanwhile, out on the business side of the "security" lines, phalanxes of outsiders contract politzei, ninja-turtle-like in their black riot armor and helmets are advancing in half-step shuffle mode, all in unison while beating their riot batons upon their shields in the rhythm of their dirge-like gait, putting Tiananman Square to shame by comparison. The Invasion of Pittsburgh
Highly effective as a literary dirge and lamentation, it comes up short when judged by the standards of the history discipline.
The songs in "Deirdre," especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute passionate understanding. Irish Plays and Playwrights
From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Mumu
She walks slowly in a circle to the beat of a dirgelike drum.
It is steeped in references to Arthurian legend and there are chunks of dirge-like opera, during which the story grinds to a halt.
On the other hand I don't want a funeral which is one long dirge from beginning to end. ABSOLUTE TRUTHS
First then for thee we sisters must chaunt our dirge, and then for Achilles when Rhesus
The overture smote like a dirge on her ear, and when the callboy came to announce that the moment of her entrance was at hand, it reminded her of nothing so much as the feeling of mourners when the sable mute appears at the door, as a signal to form the procession to the tomb. Mary Anderson
In the competition for most doleful, Larson himself mentions the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 and several funeral marches and dirgelike hymns such as "Nearer My God to Thee. Thomas Larson's 'The Saddest Music Ever Written,' reviewed by Michael Dirda
Before they get a chance to turn on the dirge-like music which means our little speech-slot is over, I bounce over to the microphone.
The sound was awful, each song was a tuneless, discordant dirge.
It sounds like an Oasis dirge only with airier vocals. Sunbirds (No 810)
Next came a double file of priests in their surplices, with a missal in one hand and a lighted wax taper in the other, chanting the funeral dirge at intervals -- now pausing, and then again taking up the mournful burden of their lamentation, accompanied by others, who played upon a rude kind of bassoon, with a dismal and wailing sound. Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 France and the Netherlands, Part 1
The dirgelike song was not a smash.
The muleteer, with head wrapped up in a shawl, intoned a kind of dirge, pausing sometimes to ask Allah to improve his plight. The Valley of the Kings
The langorous, minimalist melodies are as wonderfully dirge-like as ever.
Knowing that repeating his previous pain-racked dirges would just turn him into a caricature, Rollins continues in the tradition of his last outing Get Some Go Again, letting it all hang out with a pure rock delivery.
Combined with his flinty voice, the results are often bluesy and hypnotic without being dirge-like. The Short List: Steven Van Zandt Goes to Norway in 'Lilyhammer'
When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and buried it “with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which The Golden Bough : a study of magic and religion
The 18 tracks include the infamous Vietnam War rant against the US military top brass, War Pigs, Children Of The Grave, and Killing Yourself To Live, among other dark dirges.
Cash treats the song (which I'm only vaguely familiar with in its NINcarnation as a moaning anti-drug plaint about waste) as a kind of dirgelike meditation on the last, dying embers of life; the video shows archival footage of the Man In Black contrasted with the Dying King of today, surrounded by the wrack of the flood-ravaged (although the video brilliantly implies tragic, Ozymandian neglect) Cash Museum in Nashville. Kenneth Hite's Journal
As for new songs, there's a Latvian lullaby, a Czech dirge and a Bulgarian ballad.
While in no degree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline. Ponkapog Papers.
Played at a quickstep tempo, the dirge was at once transformed into a jaunty, comic, oompah version of the Scottish anthem.
They, unfortunately, seem more content on alternating between dirge-like arrangements and angular riffs and grooves.
What is ‘Danny Boy,’ after all, but a funeral dirge?
Her melodies match the melancholy mood of her vocal timbre, using protracted, dirge-like lines for an effect that may initially seem haunting, but eventually gets pretty old.
And the Minutemen covers break up the dirges with up-tempo, jazzy pep talks for the workin’ man.
The dirge is a lament for Aung San Suu Kii, the deposed leader of Burma who has been held under house arrest in her home in Rangoon for 17 years. James Mulvaney: Laura Bush: Political Prisoner?
The casual greeting of "peace, man" that had dominated the jolly 1967 Summer of Love had been replaced by the dirge-like chanting of the word "OM".
These verses, which sounded as if they had been sung expressly for the dirge of my departed happiness, were only an aggravation of my feelings.
And a too jarring, ham-fisted, funeral dirge of a score by usually dependable composer Terence Blanchard doesn't help matters any.
All night long the Greeks raise the funeral dirge.
The score breaks into a dirge-like rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
His songs have a hymnal quality, their insistent melodies dirge-like.
Then about that barrow the battle-keen rode, atheling-born, a band of twelve, lament to make, to mourn their king, chant their dirge, and their chieftain honor. RIP Duke Gyrth Oldcastle of Ravenspur
It is from the latter of these two words that the English term dirge is derived. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 3: Brownson-Clairvaux
Gwen's conversation was a dirge of complaints, with the implication that Alma should deal with them, Alma should somehow redeem it all. LOST CHILDREN
Of course, anything other than a funeral dirge might be a little too upbeat for the game.
From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Mumu
The needles splinter the wind into dirges and laments that tell of the long and tragic history of the trees.
For seven minutes the quartet play a tuneless dirge that occasionally changes and is entwined with a slowly oscillating synthesizer.
Somewhere, in the distance, a funeral dirge played.
Each song delivers short, thudding, dirge-like rock with the same bleak atmosphere.
The heavy, dirge-like music combined with dark, haunting lyrics combine to take you on a trip through the darkest parts of your soul.
The sequence is accompanied by dirgelike music, which eventually becomes a sung lament.
The song's titular scream provides the frozen emotional centerpiece for a feverish and insistent dirge, and a rare moment of absolute release amidst an album often marked by a chilling sense of emotional confinement.
The winds howled their dirge about the rough-hewn stone dwellings huddled under the grim fortress of the Sorcerers who kept watch over the once-great plains of Kal Maros.
Here, in a place said to closely resemble the North Bennington of Shirley Jackson's day, a dirge-like tune of unknown origin prevails from generation to generation, unquestioned by the brainless local citizenry: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson
Which, unfortunately, never occurs in this puzzlingly lifeless play, presented with respectful, dirgelike portent by director Alexander Strain. Theater review: Forum Theatre's dismal 'One Flea Spare'
Dozens of patients, mostly dressed in black, marched through the streets following a draped coffin while musicians played a dirge on a flageolet and melodion.
Sirens wailed their mournful dirge as they raced towards the hotel.
It's a film, basically, about the impossibility of love, a film whose message could be summed up by the dirge-like pop tune sung by brothel mistress Lysiane Jeanne Moreau, the film's sole female presence: "each man kills the thing he loves. Querelle
Those damn dirges are still running around my brain, like a tone-deaf rat with a megaphone is trapped inside my head.
Nine musicians, clad in head-to-toe black, slowly walked onstage playing a dirgelike Just a Closer Walk With Thee. Jackson honored at Essence Music Festival
Gwen's conversation was a dirge of complaints, with the implication that Alma should deal with them, Alma should somehow redeem it all. LOST CHILDREN
The stranger, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge.
He used to recite dirge songs and had established a unique status for his touching elegiac tone.
Welding punked-out, ska, psycho-rap backfilled with wailing metal dirges, Bad Acid Trip surge pedantically from whimsical to venomous in one foul breath.
'Love has no wherefore,' says one of those Latin poets who wrote love-verses called elegies, -- a name which we moderns appropriate to funeral dirges. Kenelm Chillingly — Complete
The young men cranked a dirgelike song on their stereo praising Moqtada al-Sadr and shouted at residents to get off the streets. Iraq's New Guns for Hire
It was immediately regarded as a work of great power and emotional charge, especially the second movement, Preghiera per gli innocenti, a dirge in memory of the Great War's victims.
Catherine hummed and sang a hymn that faded quickly from a cheery ode to a mournful dirge.
Rightly so, Lewd Acts front-load this album with a few more like this before throwing its first genuine sonic curveball, a slow spoken word dirge called "Who Knew The West Coast Could Be So Cold?". MetalSucks
Had I, in my grief, created a four year old Leonard Cohen who would be bent on ringing in Christmas with dirge-like ballads? Hallelujah, Hallelujah | Her Bad Mother
There are brief improv duets between Malaby and the bassist, and a suite composed for Malaby passes from a dreamily dirge-like theme, through free-improv and back, with Kerecki's booming rhythmic figures giving the band immense life. Stéphane Kerecki/Tony Malaby: Houria
The new songs show Pedro The Lion's move towards more darker material, showing off an ability to go from slow-core-ish dirges to frenzied beat-heavy rock numbers.
When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and buried it with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which Christmas begins. Chapter 54. Types of Animal Sacrament. § 2. Processions with Sacred Animals
Gwen's conversation was a dirge of complaints, with the implication that Alma should deal with them, Alma should somehow redeem it all. LOST CHILDREN
Its other side, the paean of sorrow for a self-destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has been faithfully and lastingly accomplished. Biographical Study of A W Kinglake
In the mean time you can check out sample Acheronian Dirge tracks via the band's official MySpace page. Metal Underground.com
Come, raise with me that dirge once more; uplift the woful strain that brings relief. Electra
Plato observes that the types were once distinct: a hymn would not be confused with a dirge, dithyramb, or paean.
On the soundtrack, bouncy pop tunes alternate with electronic dirges.
To commemorate his death anniversary Salar Jung Museum has organised a special exhibition of manuscripts, dirges and elegies.
He yanked out a knob and the music, a dirgelike stew of whistles, honks, and clanks, slowed down even more and went flat. Stalling
The relentless drilling of the dirge-like background music here made my teeth ache. Holly Robinson: A Survivor's Guide to Watching The American
It even has a hummable melody, as does ‘Mary’, the liveliest of her mournful dirges.
The sound was awful, each song was a tuneless, discordant dirge.
When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and buried it "with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which Christmas begins. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
In university bookstores, they sell vote or die T shirts; in TV ads with dirgelike music, Bush and Kerry depict each other as avatars of peril. THE NEXT FLORIDA
The acoustic guitar's melody is pretty and downbeat and the percussion is interesting, almost dirge-like.
Hmmm, I thought,: ‘Maybe this time they won't have me pulling my eyelashes out one-by-one while listening to their Muzak funeral dirges.’
The Dead C have been treading the same water since their inception in 1987 and their leaden, layered guitar-soaked dirges just feel tired up against the vibrancy of Konono.
A ‘threnody’ is a dirge, a song of lamentation; the artist intended to create an environment that would be conducive to meditation on death and destruction.
Its other side, the paean of sorrow for a self - destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has been faithfully and lastingly accomplished. Biographical Study of A.W. Kinglake
Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 The Catholic Reaction
He grabbed the sledge, hoisted it over his shoulder and began hammering away, the dirge-like music somehow comforting. The Hole in the Wall « A Fly in Amber
The ballet ends with a slow, dirgelike walk offstage by the entire cast.
It's not impossible for them to start off with a barrelhouse boogie and, by the end, be dragging through a New Orleans funeral dirge with a singing saw leading the charge.

How To Use Dirge In A Sentence

Report a problem

Please indicate a type of error

Additional information (optional):