The traditional genre of the elegiac poem or marthiyya reemerged in the 19th century with the reorganization of social and political structures around the values of the Arab Renaissance or nah?a. In their elegies, poets such as A?mad Shawq? (1868-1932) and ??fi? Ibr?h?m (1872-1932) mourned the death of fellow poets and intellectuals who, through their passing, bequeathed to their fellow citizens ideals of a unifying Arab nation. Poetic mourning in this context served to honor the passing poet or writer and exalt the modern nation as a both a political and cultural project mediated through literature. These elegies inscribed the dead poets and intellectuals as the fallen heroes of the modern nation. However, the historical events of the mid twentieth century and the Arab defeats in the face of Israel starting 1948 more specifically, inverted the positive relation between the mourned intellectual and the rising nation. The loss of Palestine marks the beginning of Arab intellectuals’ disenchantment with the social and cultural ideals of the nah?a and ushers a new literary reconfiguration of the poetics of mourning. This change paves the way for the development of a new elegiac genre that melancholically ties the death of the poet to that of the nation. In this paper I examine three elegies composed by Ma?m?d Darw?sh, Sam?? al-Q?sem, and Muhammad al-Magh?t. Through a psychoanalytic reading of the structure of loss in the poems, I argue that melancholia, defined by Freud as identification with and an internalization of the lost object, emerges as a dominant affect in this poetic genre. I examine the ways in which Arab intellectuals mourned in these elegies are identified through metaphors of dispossession that condemns them to a permanent exile and deprives them of a resting ground in the nation’s soil. I argue that while the Nahda marthiyya presented the death of the poet as a moment of transcendence and national salvation, in the three elegies I examine the death of the poet brings about the death of the nation as such. In my reading of the contemporary marthiyya, I explain how the contemporary Arab intellectual’s disenchantment and loss of ideals imbue and shape his melancholic subjectivity.