Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

1. Who or what is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard mourning?

2. What homely pleasures shall the ‘rude forefathers of the hamlet’ miss and why?
3. According to the speaker, what might have the rustic country people achieved if chance and
poverty had not impeded them?
4. Explain the reference to Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell as used in Gray’s Elegy.
5. What does Gray mean by "the madding crowd's ignoble strife"?
6. What ‘frail memorial’ is built for the villagers long dead in the Churchyard? How do country folk
mourn their dead?
7. What prompts the speaker in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard to start thinking about his
own death?
8. What is Gray’s attitude toward the people buried in the cemetery?

The Chimney Sweeper

1. Who is the speaker in The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Innocence? What conditions lead the
speaker into chimney sweeping?
2. Why did Tom Dacre cry? How did the speaker console him?
3. What is the significance of Tom dreaming that the chimney sweepers were “locked up in coffins
of black”?
4. Bring out the significance of the expression 'A little black thing' used by Blake in The Chimney
Sweeper [from Songs of Experience].
5. Why does the child think he is wearing “the clothes of death”?
6. Explain the phrase “a heaven of our misery” with reference to The Chimney Sweeper.
7. Comment on the parallels and differences in the following phrases from The Chimney Sweeper
poems:
- 'if all do their duty they need not fear harm.'
- ‘They think they have done me no injury’

Ode to a Nightingale
1. What is the cause of the speaker’s sense of ‘a drowsy numbness’?
2. The speaker wishes to fade into the dim forest with the nightingale. What does he wish for to
aid this process first? Which way does he prefer eventually?
3. What has the nightingale never known according to the poet?
4. What does Keats imply by 'No hungry generations tread thee down'?
5. How did the poet feel the presence of flowers and fruits?
6. What is a musk-rose?
7. Why does the poet say that he would ‘have ears in vain’ to the nightingale’s song?
8. If the nightingale is immortal, who else has heard its song according to Keats?
9. Which word brings back the poet to his solitary self? What has deceived him?