The paper investigating the group of mourning poems by Spenser, the dirge for Dido from the November eclogue of the ‘Shepheardes Calender’ and two formal elegies, ‘Astrophel’ and ‘The Doleful Lay of Clorinda’, is a part of series of articles devoted to the development of the elegy in the English Renaissance poetry. Despite Ovid’s popularity in the Renaissance England, the type of love elegy seems to have been almost ignored by Elisabethan poets who preferred the mourning variety of the elegy. This type of elegy might be treated as a development of the national tradition of poetic lamentations but for the obvious reluctance of the makers to try to infl uence the fate of the deceased with prayers, which may be explained in part by the doctrinal difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, the latter having been reestablished as an offi cial religion with Queen Elisabeth’s coming to power. The authors make an attempt to bring to light some structural principles and topical variety of Spenser’s elegies mentioned above to represent them as a remarkable combination of various elegiac motives, both classical and modern.