48

Chapter II

.Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

A poem of ail poems

Matthew Arnold possibly best sums up Gray’s position when he writes in his

Essays in Criticism, “he never spoke out”.1 Thomas Gray has been regarded as a poet

of transition - transition from neo-classical poetic tradition to the Romantic Age. He

is often clubbed with Williams Collins to be a great harbinger of romantic revival.

Like Collins, Gray was swayed by conflicting literary forces. We find a marvelous

synthesis of classicism and romanticism, of form and content in Gray’s Poetry. On the

classical side, he has Pindaric odes to his credit, which was a great imitation of the

great Greek poet Pindar, who lived before Plato and evolved the form of ode known

after his name. The Pindaric ode has three parts - strophe, anti-strophe and epode. In

every Pindaric ode, there are three strophes and three epodes, to be repeated in a

cycle. It is a tribute to a great genius that he not only imitated but also mastered

Pindaric ode and his two odes The Bard and The Progress of Poesy is a testimony to

his craftsmanship. On account of this reason, some critics feel that Gray’s genius is

primarily disciplined.

Gray's poetry, though scanty in volume, is of the highest quality. The starting

line by Matthew Arnold, that "Gray never spoke out", had hit the nail on the head,

when he further says that the scantiness of Gray's poetry results from the fact that he,

"a bom poet who fell upon on age of prose."2 What is pertinent is the quality of what

he did produce.

And any competent and impartial critic has never disputed this. Finicky^ritics

indeed pick holes in Gray's poetry on the score of its readymade diction,
 49

personifications and other conventions of the classical school, but they are trivial

things and only show that Gray was a poet of his times and would not or could not

shake himself entirely free from the shackles of the prevailing lashion. But that, he

was discontented with it, is clear. He avoided the couplet altogether in favour of

lyrical measures. That he was romantic in feeling is equally clear, but he expressed it

with classical restraints. It is this combination of romantic feeling and classical

restraint that gives his poetry its unique character. Gray was a very painstaking and

conscientious artist. Everything he has written has elegance, conciseness, clarity and

artistic finesse that place him in the front rank of English poets. It is sheer pedantry,

if not critical timidity, to assign him a place below the greatest.

To this extent the famous criticism of Gray by Matthew Arnold is justified: the

age could give the poet little society that was really congenial. Gray was not antisocial

in the general meaning of the term; he was a rare jewel that needed care in the setting,

a picture that would not fit into every frame. But it is doubtful if any other age could

have provided Gray with a circle of congenial friendship greater than his own. He is

by no means the only poet driven to seek solitude. But where Gray’s affections were

roused they were real and constant. His letters to Wharton, Nicholls, and even to

Mason, show how deep and unforgetful was his friendship. “Spenser was among his

favourite poets; and he told me,” says Nicholls; “he never sat down to compose poetry

without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously.” 3

But Gray’s love of solitude, of cultured seclusion, his contempt for the world

at large, did not blind him to the good in human nature. It is significant that his

sympathies with humanity are stirred by children as in his Eton Ode, or by the

humblest people as in his Elegy. “I never rightly understood Mr. Gray’s political

opinions. Sometimes he seemed to incline to the side of authority; sometimes to that

 50

of the people.”4 Such was the opinion of Horace Walpole; and Gray’s poetry

corroborates the remark. Behind Gray’s cold and stiff exterior, beneath his contempt

for humanity at large, there lay hidden, but occasionally revealed, a warmth and

breadth of sympathy for his fellows, far more real than that of some much more

demonstrative persons. He knew that narrowness of sympathy was a natural defect of

his temperament, and so he tried to overcome it. He wished to enter the broad stream

of humanism, which rolled through the eighteenth century like a river, broadening and

deepening and gathering force as it went along, and his letters show that the words

were written in all sincerity.

The generous spark extinct revive,

Teach me to love and to forgive,

Exact my own defects to scan,

What others are, to feel, and know myself a Man,5

{Hymns to Adversity, 11.45-8)

Of his English poems, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750)

possesses universality of appeal beyond the rest. Essentially, it belongs to a

recognizable eighteenth century genre. He gave England some poems, which are

among the most popular in the language. Ailing and melancholy, he was led to

contrast the carefree games of the schoolboys of Eton with the varied ills, which

would befall their riper years. All these young Etonians exhibit a petulance for which

youth is the only excuse; and Gray himself writes, “It is very possible that two and

two make four, but I would not give four farthings to demonstrate this ever so

clearly.” 6As he wondered at twilight in a country churchyard, he meditated upon the

humble fate of those who were sleeping there and who were perhaps equal in virtue

and natural endowments to the heroes whose fame has filled the world; this is the
 51

theme of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, whose quatrains live in every

English memory. To such simple theme he devoted verses lyrical in form, more

refined in style, and more melodious than those of Pope.

As the author of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Gray,

endeared himself to millions all over the world, he was a poet whose influence upon

subsequent literature was largely in excess of the volume of his published works. He

was bom in Comhill on 26th December 1716. His father, Philip Gray, was an

Exchange Broker. His mother, Dorothy Gray was a second wife to her husband. He

was educated at Eton and Peter House College, Cambridge. The poet's melancholy is

said to have been due to his mother's separation from her husband, because of his

violent and harsh temper. Young Gray became a pupil in Eton, where his mother’s

brother was a teacher, and then he proceeded to Cambridge, which he entered at the

age of eighteen. Four years later he left the university without taking a degree, and

with Horace Walpole, a fellow-student at both Eton and Cambridge, began a tour of

the Continent, which lasted till 1741.

Gray’s father died in 1741, after having squandered nearly all his fortune.

Accordingly the next year the poet’s mother moved to the village of Stoke Pogis, in

southern Buckinghamshire, and was soon joined by her son. Here Gray wrote his first

English poems, Ode to Spring, the Eton College Ode, and the beginnings of Elegy

Written in a Country Churchyard, and latter probably suggested by the churchyard .

near his new home in Stoke Pogis. During winter of the same year, 1742, he returned

to Cambridge, took the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, and settled down to a

dreamy life of study in the libraries of the university. In 1747, his Ode on a Distant

Prospect of Eton College was published, but it met with a little favour. The Elegy, on

which he had been working at intervals since 1742, appeared in 1750.

 52

From 1754 to 1757 Gray produced some few short poems, among them his

well-known Pindaric odes. Later he was offered the laureateship, an honour that he

refused. In 1768 he was given the professorship of Modem History and Modem

Languages at Cambridge, but he never delivered a lecture. In 1771 the shy, sensitive,

secluded scholar died, and was buried beside his mother in the “country churchyard”

of Stoke Pogis.

Nothing can be stated with certainty about the date when Gray began the

Elegy; which stanzas were written first; or when exactly he altered what was

originally a simple meditation among the tombs and turned it into an elegy. The data

for any assured conclusions are lacking. In his Memoir of Gray (1775), William

Mason wrote: ‘I am inclined to believe that the Elegy in a Country Churchyard has

begun, if not concluded, at this time also’7; that is, under the spur-of poetical activity

caused by the death of Richard West. On the other hand, when Gray sent the

completed poem to Horace Walpole on (2 June 1750, he wrote: ‘Having put an end to

a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately sent it to you. You

will I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it. You are desired to tell

me your opinion, if you can take the pains of these lines.’5 It was Walpole s

impression that the poem was posterior to West’s death at least three or four years

when he says “...lam sure that I had the twelve or more first lines from himself about

three years after that period, and it was long before he finished it”. 9 In response,

however, to a letter from Mason, he deferred to the latter s opinion. Yet his

recollection of having received ‘the twelve or more first lines some years before

1750 was probably well founded; and if so, the twelve lines may have been the

‘Epitaph’, and Gray may thus have written it after the shock he had received on
 53

hearing that West was dead. In that event, the bulk of the poem was written at a later

date.

According to Gray’s own statement, he aimed at a style with “extreme

conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.”10 In this he has

succeeded so admirably that almost any one of his few poems is well worth the
c

reader’s acquaintance. He was well versed in the classics, especially Greek, and all his

work was instinct with the Greek spirit. He was all considered the greatest scholar of

his days in modem European literature. His letters are among the best in the language.

Gray has left us his charming and characteristic letters and a small number of

English and Latin poems. Their quality is such as to give Gray a unique and

permanent place. He has been regarded as the greatest precursor of Romantic

Movement in English literature. However, there is a synthesis of classical and

romantic qualities in his poetry. It is said that he is partly classical and partly

romantic, i.e., he looks back to Dryden and Pope and looks forward to Wordsworth

and Shelley, It is said that Gray has classical clothes under which a romantic heart is

beating. His discipline is classical but content is romantic. On account of this reason,

he is called a poet of transition. His subjectivity, his scholarship, and his technical

excellence, all these place him with the highest acme of literary glory.

Gray's elegy is not pastoral in the sense in which Milton’s Lycidas is pastoral,

Shelley's Adonais is pastoral and Arnold's Thyrsis & The Scholar Gipsy are pastoral.

There are certain by-pastoral touches in poem, in terms of its rustic atmosphere and

description of village Hampton, because Gray's basic passion was to narrate "simple

and short annals of the poor" (p. 129, St. 8,1. 32). It has rustic touches and against this

backdrop, which is very close to the pastoral, Gray focuses attention on futility of all
•*- *"T7.T\

human ejuste^^^^Se^feali26s feat the ('paths of glory but lead to the grave."(p.

a ceev
I
 54

129, St. 9,1. 36). It would be an interesting aspect to highlight the composition of the

elegy as Gray took ten years in writing this poem. This throws light on his

intellectual fastidiousness and a temperament, indebt towards reticence.

Elegy is composed in chiselled stanza form of A B A B rhyming scheme.

Poetically, the first and the third line echo and the second and the fourth line have the

same pattern. This has been uniformly followed throughout the poem. For instance,

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, A

Their sober wishes never learned to stray; B

Along the cool requester’s vale of life, A

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. B

(p. 130, St. XIX, 11. 73-6)

Gray’s contribution, however, lies mainly in anticipating the romantic age and ,
° l
in this respect his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a great watershed in the 1

development of poetry. From this poem, the undercurrents of romantic revival

becomes clearly perceptible which were to blossom later in the poetry of Wordsworth, \

Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and others. This poem has been classed as his greatest

achievement and it is believed that if he had not written anything else, he would have

been as great as Shakespeare. c

Romanticism is a term, which has been attached retrospectively to categorize

the new upsurge of self- confidence and the abounding energy, which was evident in

the works of the poets writing at the end of 18th and the beginning of the 19th century.

Broadly speaking ‘Romantic’ poet looked to himself, rather than to the world around

him, for his subject matter. The Romantics discovered the creative function of the

imagination, possessed and realized to a large extent by Shakespeare and other

Elizabethan poets. For the Romantics, the rediscovery of what Coleridge called “the
 55

shaping spirit of imagination”11 offered a whole new dynamic concept of the poetry.

One amongst them was Thomas Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

- of which the first nine stanzas is seen as an ‘intermediary’ stage, a bridge between

the restrained ‘classicism’ of Pope and Johnson and the effusive ‘Romanticism’ of

Wordsworth and his confreres. We will quote the stanzas first and then interpret them

keeping in view our perspective.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

(p. 128, St. 1,11. 1-4)

c

The poem’s rhythm is emphatically iambic. From the opening line, the

alternately stressed syllables ring out loud and clear in imitation of the steady intoning

of the curfew bell, the image that ushers in the poem. This bell, with its note of

sustained melancholy, establishes the tone of the poem. To the poet’s mind it is a

‘knell’, or a parting tribute, tolling for the day that is dying. This reflection puts the

poet into a meditative frame of mind and launches him on the course of rumination

that he is to follow in the ensuing stanzas. Gray’s elegy is ‘written in a country

churchyard’; and from the poem’s title and the funeral note of the opening line it is

clear that death will be the dominant theme of the poet’s speculation.

For such a theme the structure that Gray has chosen is most apt. He does not

write in couplets but in four-line stanzas, each stanza advancing at an unhurried,

measured pace, unfolding each image of the departing day and the approaching night-

and the thoughts they inspire in the poet - in a simple, uncomplicated way. The poet

is in no rush; the whole night stretches before him and he luxuriates in the prospect of
 56

being free to allow his thoughts to range wherever they will, even if they gravitate

towards the dark topography of death. For though the corpse in its clayey resting -

place is the nucleus around which the poet’s fancies soon come to revolve, such a

topic does not lead him to despair but rather towards an acceptance of the evident

truth that ‘the paths of glory but lead to grave’ (p. 129, St. 9,1. 36). The rhythm of the

poem points to the universal but undemonstrative rhythm of life. The first stanza

affirms this, with its gong - like bell, its herd of cattle taking its meandering course

‘slowly’ across the meadow and its farm labourers, homeward- bound, planting their

tired feet with the same ‘plodding’ regularity, and at the same unhurried pace, as the

poem itself.

These initial images create the appropriate atmosphere for the meditation that

is to follow. Having observed his fellow men obeying the summons of the ‘curfew’

and retiring behind their doors and shutters for the night, the poet is left alone. In the

first stanza the focus narrows down from the world around him to the final ‘me’, the

‘egoistical sublime’ that Keats would detect at the centre of Wordsworth’s verse. Yet,

since he is not a full-fledged ‘Romantic’, Gray does not see his position of solitude at

this point of gathering dusk as an opportunity to plunge within him and drag forth

some long- buried psychic treasure into the light of poetic consciousness. Instead, the

poem continues as before, registering the impressions that come to the poet from both

outside and within, while he himself remains uninvolved. A Romantic poet, on the

contrary, would have actively engaged his mind in the images that come to it,

imaginatively fusing a unified vision, or ‘higher reality’, out of the disparate elements.

Gray, by contrast, remains a somewhat dry observer, cataloguing what he sees around

him without attempting to relate the phenomena of external nature too intimately to

his own inner life.

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Nature, which figures frequently in the poetry of the Romantics, serves them

chiefly as a stimulus to wider-ranging inquiry, either inward through the chasms and

caverns of the poet’s own soul or outward towards explorations of the heavens and a

definition of man’s part in the universal scheme of things. The ‘pre- Romantic’ poet,

on the other hand, is much more restrained in his reflexes to the animal and the

vegetable kingdoms. It is the ‘external ’ reality of nature that strikes him, rather than

its ‘internal’ essence or hidden meaning; and he goes about the task of tabulating its

phenomena dutifully, with a detached and dispassionate eye. Thus, while Gray differs

from the bulk of his contemporaries in considering the natural scene at all, he

undertakes his peregrination through the nocturnal world of bestial sights and sounds

with the imperturbable aplomb and exactly measured gait of the village policeman.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

(p. 128, St. II, 11. 5-8)

The second stanza dearly illustrates how Gray conceived his role as a passive

receptacle of the impressions that came to his senses. The effects that the ‘glimmering

landscape’ and the ‘droning beetle’ make on the sight and the hearing are duly

registered but the poet himself remains disengaged with his passion undisturbed. The

‘solemn stillness’ that governs all around him reigns in his own soul. When his

contemplation of nature does eventually stimulate a response in him it is not an

intuitive emotional reaction but rather a carefully weighed, deliberate and, above all,

rational reflection. This is not to say that Gray’s more ‘reasonable’ attitude to the

natural world is necessarily inferior to the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful

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feelings’ characteristics of the Romantics’ more participatory response. But it does

suggest that for Gray the instinctive reaction to life’s phenomena is not to be trusted:

it must be filtered still through the funnel of reason before finding an expression in

diction and a metre intended to tranquillize rather than agitate. Gray, like his

contemporaries* believed in keeping nature at arm’s length; the day had not yet

arrived when he might have said, as John Keats was to say more than half a century

later, ‘ if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about

the gravel’.12
e

The 18th century, with its love of the landscaped garden and its preference for

the ‘picturesque’ in art, desired nature to be ‘tame’: something that the mind could

cope with. Gray’s poem shows where his predilection lies: in the direction of the

nature that is neither unruly nor unpredictable. Thus the images that come to him

during his vigil are those he is predisposed to receive. The evening contains no

surprises. So, in stanza 2, the beetle ‘wheels’ in ‘droning flight’, the monotonous

‘droning’ sound encourages a relaxation towards sleep. The sheep in their folds are

‘lulled’ by the ‘drowsy tinkling’ of their bells: an example of pathetic fallacy,

suggesting that Gray, intent on having all the natural phenomena in consonance with

his soporific mood, is more interested in imposing an anthropomorphic interpretation

on the sheep’s behavior than in any independent observation of the habits of such

animals. Creation of the initial mood is Gray’s first task: he must establish a relaxed,

sleepy atmosphere so that he may proceed to meditate aloud. Thus he projects onto

surrounding nature the ‘drowsiness’ that is an essential preliminary to his poem.

Save that, from yonder ivy- mantled tow’r

The moping owl does to the moon complain

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Of such as, wancTring near her secret bow’r,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

(p. 128, St. Ill, 11. 9-12)

The third stanza shows more clearly how Gray credits nature with human

feelings and intentions. The one creature that is stirring at this crepuscular hour is the

owl, a bird traditionally identified as a harbinger of death and therefore appropriately

discovered in an ancient ‘ivy- mantled’ tower overlooking the graveyard. Gray

interprets the bird in a fanciful ‘humanized’ way, without doing violence to its actual

behavior; the owl’s whooping call, he claims, is a sulky moan of protest leveled

against the poet who dares to disturb, at this untoward hour of the night,

‘her...solitary reign’. The bird’s human dimension is suggested by the use of ‘her’

rather than ‘its’, just as when referring to the beetle the poet mentions ‘his’ droning

flight. Gray is wrapping his night creatures up in human coats.

The poet’s primary aim, the evocation of those moments before slumber when

the mind, on the threshold of sleep, is relaxed and reflective, is attained. Gray selects

those elements in animal life, which assist this purpose, excluding those that might

not. Nature is disciplined by the poet’s rationalizing sensibility. It is not allowed to

behave too chaotically: there has to be a reason for the owl’s weird, unearthly cry, and

the poet duly supplies it. Nor is the darkness permitted to become too overwhelming:

the landscape ‘glimmers’ in stanza II, subsequently to be illuminated by the moon of

stanza III. It is comfortable rather than a disquieting obscurity: a vapour rather than a

void.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew- tree’s shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

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Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

(p. 128, St. IV, 11. 13-6)

In stanza IV Gray approaches the main preoccupation of his elegy: the passing

from life of the former inhabitants of this small village (the ‘forefather of the

Hamlet’). His thoughts are guided in this direction by the encompassing darkness and

by his awareness of the trees in the churchyard, shading the graves of the villagers.

These ‘rude’ people, uneducated’ but honest, are now imprisoned ‘forever’ in a

‘narrow cell’. Yet some of the claustrophobic horror of death is lessened by Gray’s

euphemistic assertion that the cemetery gives ‘sleep’ to these worn-out peasants and

not utter annihilation; an impression which is furthered by his depiction of the trees

standing guard over the beds of the ‘sleepers’ and the turf that covers them ‘heaving’

like blankets tossed about by a slumberer. It appears that the hamlet’s forefathers

might at some future time shake off their present hibernation. The tone of the poem,

though solemn, is not morbid. The graves’ tenants may have departed ‘forever’ from

this world but they are at the same time resting prior to their journey next.

The breezy call of incense- breathing Mom,

The swallow twitt’ring from the straw- built shed,

The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing hom,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

(p. 128, St. V, 11. 17-20)

The freshness of the ‘incense-breathing’ morning and the sweet odours from

its opening flowers can make no impression on the olfactory organs of the grave-

dwellers. Nor can the swallow’s ‘twittering’ reach their ears. Their senses, along with

their bodies, are stilled and ‘mouldering’ with the turf. They will be equally heedless
 61

of the cockerel’s reveille and the hunter’s horn. Only the Judgement-Day trumpet now

has the power to reach them and ‘rouse them from their lowly bed’.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall bum,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care;

No children ran to lisp their sire’s return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

(p. 128, St. VI, 11.21-4)

Gray has begun now to celebrate the life that the dead ones have left: the

exhilarating scents of the fields, the chattering activity of the birds, the excitement of

the fox hunt, the health and vigour of the countryside where nothing exists. He

develops this in stanza VI with an avocation of the domestic joys that are perforce a

thing of the past for the churchyard’s tenants. The welcoming warmth of the fire, the

bustling ministrations of a matronly wife and the affectionate attentions of his

offspring, all serving to compensate the workman at the end of a day’s hard labour,
C

are treasures all the more precious for their inevitable impermanence. Gray’s tone

here is one of the nostalgia and regret, not of despair: the regular measure of the

iambic feet, if nothing else, reassures us. With so much love evident in the earthly

cottage, how impossible that such love should not be magnified a thousand fold in the

heavenly mansion.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afeild!

How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

(p. 128, St. VII, 11. 25-8)

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In stanza VII Gray pays tribute to the physical energy of these late harvesters,

‘rugged’ as the elms, which now watch over their remains. The ‘yielding’ of the

harvest crop suggests that the com only surrendered after a tough struggle; and the

peasant must have developed military virtues in himself to combat the ‘stubborn

glebe’ and wrest subsistence from it. He had to fight nature and to dominate it; and in

the end even the trees of the forest ‘bowed’ down before him, acknowledging him as

master. But for the labourers who now lie beneath Gray’s feet, demobilized by death,

the glory of such physical power is departed. The harvesters have themselves been

harvested and the earth over which they had hitherto reigned supreme now rests on

top of them. Yet there is something so ‘natural’ about this cycle of the events that

one’s sorrow must be tempered by acceptance.

Gray goes on to justify his calling the attention of his literate middle and upper

class readers to the humble lives and deaths of the illiterate peasantry. Death, the great

leveler, does not recognize social class, physical beauty or cultured accomplishment;

all such superfluities must be deposited at the entrance to the ‘narrow cell’ that awaits

poor and rich alike:

Let their Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple jannals of the poor.

(p. 129, St. VIII, 11. 29-32)

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to grave.

(p. 129, St. IX, 11. 33-6)

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The poem has its roots evidently well embedded in the 18th - century poetry of

moral tutelage. Yet its tone is not as dryly didactic as, for example, a poem on a

similar theme by Johnson might have been. The graveyard atmosphere anticipates the

terrors called forth later in the century by similar settings in the Gothic novels of Ann

Radciiff and M.G. ‘Monk’ Lewis. There is in Gray, however, a passive acceptance of

the known facts of life and death, which is notably absent from the more febrile

writing of the Gothic novelist and Romantic, poets who were to follow in his wake.

There are, however, two aspects at least, in which Gray foreshadows those

writers of a more turbulent epoch and for which he is sometimes dubbed ‘pre-

Romantic’. Firstly, he has forsaken the city streets to seek stimulus from the rural

environment. He shows sensitivity towards nature and an awareness of its power to

trigger off human emotions and musings, even though neither nature nor the thoughts

it inspires are allowed to trespass beyond the limits preimposed by the poet. Secondly,

the poem seems to map out, at the end of its opening stanza, ‘leaves the world to

darkness and to me’ (p. 128, St. I, 1. 4), a subjective terrain that, in the event, is left

unexplored. Having indicated his own place in the panorama, Gray turns his gaze

outward and keeps it there. The self-examination, which the first stanza seems to

promise, is not forthcoming. “Neither chaos from the inner world nor turmoil from

outside is allowed to intrude to the point of disturbing the even flow of perfectly

weighed aphorism.”13

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault,

If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where thro’ the long- drawn isle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise

(p. 129, St. X, 11. 37-40)

 64

This stanza evokes the memory of the King’s College Chapel where the fate

decrees fortune and the students adorned with the trophies under the majestically

carved tomb with golden fire roof and the fan-tracery of its ‘vault’. The college has

been described as the Temple of Fame with Tong-sounded isles, and intermingled

graves’. The varied hymns lift the rising soul. Gray may have decided that there was

something ludicrous about ‘swaying’ reins or have wished to avoid echoing ‘Proud

names that once the reins of empire held’.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

(p. 129, St. XIII, 11.49-50)

The poet depicts reaching vainly up towards Happiness, Virtue and

Knowledge, one hand being chained up by poverty to misery, folly and ignorance, and

one foot weighted down with despair. The image is like a scroll, rich with the spoil of

nature.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is bom to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

(p. 129, St. XIV, 11. 53- 6)

There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl

in the bosom of the sea that never was seen, nor never shall be beneath the dark,

unfathomed caves of the ocean, like woodland flowers, which paint the desert glades,

and waste their sweets in unfrequented shades.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never leam’d to stray;

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Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

(p. 130, St. XIX, 11. 73-6)

As when in tumults rises the ignoble crowd, mad in their motions, and loud in

their tongues, leaving the road of strife and treading the pleasing, silent path of life. It

embodies a platitude, which can be traced far back in Italian poetry.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d Muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply;

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

(p. 130, St. XXI, 11.81-4)

Stanza XXI is probably the weakest in the Elegy. The ‘unletter’d Muse’ is the

stonemason who engraves texts on tombstones. He cannot properly be said to ‘strew’

them (but ‘strew’ is the rhyme to ‘muse’); ‘many a holy text’ is singular, and therefore

line 84 should therefore be read: ‘That teaches... to die’? Gray’s editors have not

commented on these defects, whether because they have not noticed them or because

the text of the Elegy is too sacred to be questioned. We observe even among the

vulgar, how fond they are to have an inscription over their grave. It requires little

philosophy to discover and observe that there is no intrinsic value in all this; the real

tribute is the tears in remembrance and the possession of a peaceful grave.

For who, to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing ling’ring look behind?

(p. 130, St. XXII, 11. 85-8)

 66

On some food breast the parting soul relies;

Some pious drops the closing eye requires:

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries;

Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

(p. 130, St. XXIII, 11. 89-90)

Man’s reluctance to be forgotten after death could have caused either the

inscription on the grave to teach those still living how to consider death. Those

thoughts that wander through eternity, to perish rather, swallowed up and lost in the

wide womb of uncreated night, devoid of sense and motion. The spirit of dead would

have gone forth to its native air, pious tears would have wet their breast, and the

fingers would have closed their eyes gazing at a familiar sky.

One suspects, however, that Gray was diverting attention from his real

sources, which was surely Chaucer’s ‘Yet in our ashes cold is fire yreken’. Similarly,

with reference to the verse in the ‘Epitaph’ - ‘There they alike in trembling hope

repose’ (p. 132, St. XXXII, 1. 127). He had been annoyed and disappointed that few

readers had understood the many allusions in the Pindaric odes, and in response to

Walpole’s urging he agreed to annotate them, and also the Elegy. Cultured readers

should have been able to recognize the many phrases he had taken from Latin and

English poets, on a range of subjects which did honour to his learning.

“The Elegy had appealed to those eighteenth-century readers who, living in a

comfortable and prosperous age, with servants to wait upon them, had time to indulge

in the luxury of tears. Melancholy was fashionable.”14 As it was in sententious verse

of Gray who wrote exactly the kind of poetry, which the public expected; only, he

wrote it better than anyone previously. He worked over the stanzas again and again,
 67

annexing other men’s thoughts in memorable lines. The modem reader probably

prefers a more astringent pessimism; or, by contrast, the simple gaiety which is his

defense against the tragic realities of life.

The bulk of the Elegy, that is the first 92 lines, mingles thoughts and

expressions known to be those of his friend with certain of his own; but for the most

part the borrowing is from Latin, Italian and English poets. The principle ideas could

easily have been conveyed in fewer stanzas. The theme is simple enough. Here in the

churchyard lie the forefathers of the hamlet; no more will they know the joys of the

home and the health of country life. Some might have been great poets, statesmen or

soldiers: yet if something prevented their rise to greatness, it also excluded the crimes,

which often accompany it. Better, perhaps, that they should live ‘far from the

madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ (p. 130, St. XIX, 1. 73)r Gray added, as an

afterthought, two stanzas on the sorrow despite the above comfortable reflection of

the ‘parting soul’ who leaves ‘the warm precincts of the cheerful day’ (p. 130, St.

XXIII, 1. 87). Dr. Johnson, no doubt, warmly praised this part of the poem because it

expressed his own morbid apprehension of death. ‘On some fond breast the parting

soul relies’ is no doubt true of many dying men and women. Hamlet had uttered the

same wish to Horatio:

If thou hast ever held me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awile.15

(.Hamlet by Shakespeare)

But to suppose that the old, worn out with pain and weary life, with its bitter

taste of tears, feel anything but relief in escaping from it - unless they leave those

whom they love- is probably untrue. Gray is merely expressing his own dread of the
 68

end; and Ketton- Creamer is without doubt right in saying that Gray told his readers

more about himself in the Elegy than in any other poem.

c

In a letter written to Horace Walpole from Peterhouse, Gray has described

himself as a corpse lying among, and conversing with other corpses. It was much later

that the churchyard at Stoke Pogis was assumed, no doubt rightly, to be the scene of

the poem. Various details in the description point to Stoke; and by this time the

macabre images of the letter to Walpole had been discarded.

Lord Lytton observed that “ornament is less the accessory grace than the

essential merit of his designs.” 16A reading of the poem bears out this view. Compare

the Elegy first with the bare simplicity of the sepulchral epigrams in the Greek

Anthology; or, again, with Wordsworth ‘Lucy’ poems which, in a few strokes, create

the most poignant sense of grief; and then study the details of Gray’s poem. The first

six and seven stanzas are the best in the entire poem. The remainders are studded with

literary reminiscences and paraphrases.

The next following stanza (verses 93 - 6) the poet clearly addresses himself, in

spite of the shift to the second person. But the view has recently been fashionable that

Gray was either referring to a ‘village poet’ other than himself or, specifically, to the

Muse responsible for the rhymes and inscriptions on the gravestones mentioned

earlier.

For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead,

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,

Some kindred Spirit shall inquire thy fate,

(p. 131, St. XXIV, 11. 93-6)

 69

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

‘Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

‘Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,

‘To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

(p. 131, St. XXV, 11. 97-100)

From the branches filled with mellifluous dews, the morning arrives with the

freshness of breaths, and the dash of trembling drops. From the bent bushes, like the

verdant maze, the poet pursues his walk. The poet omits the evening scene, which he

used it in the opening lines and drifts towards morning walk and noontide repose.

“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Mutt’ ring his wayward fancies would rove;

Now dropping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,

Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

(p. 131, St. XXVII, 11. 105-8)

Some mention of woods was necessary according to the poet, which turned

hard because of cottage chimney smoke. The wayward fancies, like the scornful

smile, and thousand like this are the creation of the idle brain.

The swain continues to recall the movements of the person in question - who

turns out to be ‘A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown :’(p. 131, St. XXX, 1. 118)

- he says that ‘One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill’ (p. 131, St. XXVIII, 1.

109), describes his burial, and concludes:

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay

Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.

(p. 131, St. XXIX, 1. 115-6)

 70

After this comes the ‘Epitaph’. But whom is the swain addressing? Who is

asked to read? It must be the ‘kindred spirit’ who had inquired about the youth’s fate

(verse 96); but he must be the same person as the one who appeared unexpectedly in

verse 93, addressing whoever was speaking at this point, with the words:

For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead

Dost to these lines their artless tales relate;

(p. 131, St. XXIV, 11. 93-4)

This must be Gray himself. If this interpretation were accepted, the first

twenty-three stanzas (92 verses) should be placed between inverted commas, since

they are the words of the dead youth. Gray speaks the next five lines; whilst the swain

to Gray speaks lines 98 to 116; and Gray must then have written the ‘Epitaph’ of the

dead youth, referring to Gray's faith in virtues and greatness of God. There are elegiac

elements in the poem. The poet feels that like the poor forefathers he too may be

forgotten. He feels that some unknown poet may come in future, and will write about

him,

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth,

A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown;

Fair science frown'd not on his humble birth,

And melancholy mark'd him for her own.

(p. 131, St. XXX, 11. 117-120)

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,

He gained from Heaven (‘twas all ha wish’d) a friend

(p. 131, St. XXXI, 11. 121-4)

 71

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread adode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

(p. 131, St. XXXII, 11. 125- 8)

The ‘Epitaph’ was perhaps inspired by the inscription in the church, which is

profusely blessed by the heaven, and which reads as follows:

Pleasing his speech, by nature taught to flow, persuasive sense and

strong, sincere and clear. His manner greatly plain; a noble grace, self-

taught, beyond the reach of mimic art, adorned his calmer temper, nor

pity softer, nor was truth more bright, constant in doing well, he

neither sought nor shunned applause. No bashful merit sighed,

sympathizing he wiped off the tear from sorrow’s clouded eye. With

kindly hand, and taught her heart to smile. Here lies a youth, borne

down with love and care, joy left his bosom with parting fair, and
| •j
when he durst no longer hope, he died.

The whole poem is informed by deep and highly personal and melancholic

feeling. In 1742, when he began the Elegy, Gray was saddened by his quarrel with

Walpole, the death of his mother and of Richard West; and worried about his future

and his material prospects. These private concerns nowhere .explicitly enter the poem,

but they serve to crystallize what would otherwise be a purely generalized emotion. It

is this that gives to the poem its half-articulate romanticism, as in the image of him as

the "hoary- headed swain" may recall him. The poem begins by describing the

approach of the evening. Evening brings with it silence and darkness. The darkness is
 72

an inspiring force for weeping thoughts. Gray is deeply concerned about the plight of

the poor people of the country's churchyard.

In the various parts of the poem, where despair is shown in varied imageries

are described hereafter. The very first stanza refers to this darkness

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

(p. 128, St. 1,11. 3-4)

The dead people cannot be woken up from everlasting sleep and they can no

longer enjoy the family gathering. These villagers were very humble; they had no

ambitions and never committed crime. There are no monuments erected in their

memory, and nobody remembers them because they had no money. The poet believes

that his forefathers of Hamlet could have become as great as Milton and Cromwell,

but no opportunity was given to them. Such great people lie at the bottom of

wilderness and the grave. There is an element of pathos in the following lines:

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

e Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

(p. 129, St. XV, 11. 59-60)

The villagers remained unaffected by the vices of materialistic society, but

they had great love for honesty and truth. They remained away from the busy life

those virtues wishes. Even then, the poet feels that they should not have been

forgotten after their deaths. Only their goodness is left. Gray perhaps is thinking of his

own death, that people may also forget him. This very feeling is expressed in the

following lines:

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unlettere’d Muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply;

 73

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

(p. 130, St. XXI, 11. 81-4)

It will be interesting to concentrate what are specifically romantic elements in

his poetry. To begin with, love for nature. Gray expresses this feeling and has treated

nature as a bright force, which has the power to heal and comfort us. We are living in

a materialistic world and we definitely need some kind of consolation and nature can

provide us that Gray is conscientious of this phenomenon. He expresses his elegiac

temperament through nature -

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy ticklings fill the distant folds;

(p. 128, St. II, 11. 5-9)

Melancholy has also been considered as a very great romantic quality.

Gray shows melancholic temperament and in the Elegy, we find reference

to yew tree which symbolizes his melancholic temperament -

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ ring heap,

(p. 128, St. IV, 11. 13-4)

Democratic element is also found in Gray's poetry. He was very deeply

concerned with the freedom of poetry. This democratic element is essential for

flowering of poetic genius, because you cannot compose poetry in slavery. Love for

middle classes, middle ages and the past is an important element, traceable in Gray's
 74

poetry. In the Elegy, we find loving sentiments, which express the futility of life and

ultimate decay -

The next with dirges due in sad array,

Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay

Grav’d on the stone beneath you aged thron.

(p. 131, St. XXIX, 11. 113-6)

The fame of Elegy was spread to all countries, and has exercised an influence

on all poets and critics and they have remarked on the great Gray and his great poem

The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. General Wolfe is said to have remarked

on Gray's deathbed, that he would rather be the author of the 'elegy' than the

conqueror of Quebec. Palgrave, who would have excluded the Elegy from his Golden

Treasury, on accounts of its length, had to make an exception in its favour on the

insistence of Tennyson.

No short poem has perhaps been the subject of so many commentaries and

studies as the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The Elegy, appealed to the

sentimentalism of readers of English and American literature. To the generality, who

are neither noble nor great, and who have achieved nothing of note, it may have been

gratifying to reflect that those who are noble, those who have achieved greatness, will

come to the same dusty end as themselves. By abasing the great ones of the earth and

seeming to ennoble the humble, Gray unintentionally ministered to envy and jealousy,

two of the unlikeliest of vices.

But it remains a fact that those poets greater than Gray have also admired the

Elegy: Byron, Tennyson and Edward Fitzgerald. The ornate and studied language, the

lapidary phrases, perhaps also the flavour of Miltonic diction, no doubt account for
 75

this admiration. Like many readers, they were less concerned with ideas than with

language; and one suspects that it is, in the main, the beauty of the language that has

made the Elegy so popular. Gray’s contemporaries were naturally not insensitive to

the ideas and the sentiments. Professor F.C. Green praised too highly the ‘mellifluous

and haunting melancholy’ of the poem, or its author as “the champion of oppressed
18
humanity, the sweet mediator of divine compassion.”

The crucial fact about the poem, of which by no means all discussions of

Elegy take account, is that we possess two distinct versions of it: the version which

originally ended with the four rejected stanzas in the Eton MS, and the familiar,

revised and expanded version. Many of the difficulties in the interpretation of the

poem can be clarified if the two versions are examined in turn. As has been stated

above, Mason’s assertion that the first version of the poem ended with the rejected

stanzas appears to be fully justified. In this form the Elegy is a well-constructed poem,

in some ways more balanced and lucid than its final version. The three opening

stanzas brilliantly setting the poem and the poet in the churchyard, are followed by

four balanced sections each of four stanzas, dealing in turn with the lives of the

humble villagers; by contrast, with the lives of the great; with the way in which the

villagers are deprived of the opportunities of greatness; and by contrast, with the

crimes inextricably involved in success as the ‘thoughtless world’ knows it, from

which the villagers are protected. The last three stanzas, balancing the opening three,

return to the poet himself in the churchyard, making clear that the whole poem has

been a debate within his mind as he meditates in the darkness, at the end of which he

makes his own choice about the perfectibility of obscure innocence to the dangers of

the ‘great world’.

 76

The conclusion of the first version of the Elegy ultimately failed to satisfy

Gray, partly perhaps because it was too explicitly personal for publication, but also no

doubt because its very symmetrical and order represented an oversimplification of his

own predicament, of the way he saw his own life and wished it to be seen by society.

A simple identification with the innocent but uneducated villagers was mere self­

depiction. Gray’s continuation of the poem may lack some of the clarity, control and

authority of the earlier stanzas, but it does represent a genuine attempt to redefine and

justify his real relationship with society more accurately by merging it with a

dramatization of the social role played by poetry or the poet. As Gray starts to rewrite

the poem, the simple antitheses of rich and poor, of vice and virtue, of life and death,

which underlay the first version, are replaced by a preoccupation with the desire to be

remembered after death, a concern which draws together both rich and poor, making

the splendid monuments and the ‘frail memorials’ equally pathetic.

This theme, which runs counter to the earlier resignation to obscurity and the

expectation of ‘eternal peace’ hereafter, leads Gray to contemplate the sort of ways in

which he, or the poet into whom he projects himself, may be remembered after his

death, and the assessments he gives in the word of the ‘hoary-headed swain’ (p. 131,

St. XXV, 1. 97) and of the ‘Epitaph’ also evaluate the role of poetry in society. The

figure of the poet is no longer urban, urbane, worldly, rational Augustan man among

men, with his own place in society; what Gray dramatizes is the poet as an outsider,

with an uneasy consciousness of a sensibility and imagination at once unique and

burdensome. The lack of social function so apparent in English poetry of the mid and

late eighteenth century is constantly betrayed by its search for inspiration in the past.

Significantly, Gray’s description of the lonely, melancholy poet is riddled with

 77

phrases and diction borrowed from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. The texture of

these stanzas is fanciful, consciously ‘poetic’, and archaic in tone.

The metrical form adopted was that which Richard West had used in his

Monody on the death of Queen Caroline; Gray uses it only in this poem; it is the verse

form employed by West. As the poem is unlike any other that Gray wrote, one might

fancy that West contributed more than the lines:

Ah me! What boots us all our boasted power,

Our golden treasure and our purpled state?

They cannot ward th’ inevitable hour,

Nor stay the fearful violence of Fate.

(p. 277, St. V, 11. 77-80)19

This stanza is paraphrased by Gray in

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

(p. 129, St. IX, 11. 33-6)

Nothing could have been more natural than that Gray should make his poem a

veiled tribute to West; to describe the poem as dying young, as West had died; but, to

mingle in his description, and in the ‘Epitaph’, certain traits which were not

specifically West’: these may have been introduced to conceal from the public the

identity of the young poet.

Besides the Elegy, which though begun in 1742 was finished ini750, Gray's

poetical works includes has odes, On Spring, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College,

On Adversity, On the Death of a Favorite Cat (his friend Walpole's) and the two
 78

Pindaric Odes The Progress of Poesy and The Bard. His studies in Icelandic and

Celtic languages resulted in two imitative poems The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of

Odin, undoubted forerunners of romanticism. The familiar quotation "Where

ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise”20, is the last line of the Eton Ode. The ode on

the Favorite Cat shows that the melancholic Gray was not devoid of humour. "A

favorite has no friends"21 is a quotation from the poem, which also contains amusing

lines.

Dr. Johnson's critical hostility to Gray was unreasonable as that to Milton,

even being such an austere critic and biographer, who criticized Gray's Pindaric Odes

The Bard and The Progress of Poesy. He criticized these two odes saying "Glittering

accumulation of ungraceful ornaments"22 but he has been very soft on Elegy. He

writes in The Lives of the Poets, "the churchyard school abounds with images which

find a mirror in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an

echo". ‘He attacked Gray,’ says Boswell, ‘calling him a dull fellow, in fact he was a

reserved and might appear dull in company; but sure he was not dull in poetry. To

which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull
23
everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him great.’

In a poet of such magnitude, how shall we explain his scantiness of

production? Shall we explain it by saying that to make Gray a poet of this magnitude

is absurd; that his genius and resources were small, and that his production, therefore,

was small also, but that the popularity of a single piece, the Elegy - a popularity due

in great measure to the subject - created for Gray a reputation to which he has really

no right?

To which Matthew Arnold aptly remarked that though Gray’s production was

scanty, and whatever he produced was not always pure in diction, it was true in
 79

evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he was alone in his age. Gray said himself

that ‘the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure,

perspicuous, and musical’.24 Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the

golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general,

Gray’s may be said to have reached, in style, the excellence at which he aimed; while

the evolution also of such a piece as his Progress of Poesy must be accounted not less

noble and sound than its style.

Gray himself, however, maintained that the Elegy was not his best work in

poetry, as high was the praise due to the Elegy1, it is yet true that in the other
o

productions of Gray he exhibits poetical qualities even higher than those exhibited in

the Elegy. He deserves, therefore, his extremely high reputation as a poet, although f

his critics and the public may not always have praised him with perfect judgement.

Gray, a bom poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task

was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and

cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul. As regards literary

production, the task of the eighteenth century in England was not the poetic

interpretation of the world; its task was to create a plain, clear, straightforward,

efficient prose. Poetry obeyed the bent of mind requisite for the due fulfillment of this

task of the century. It is a sentiment that very universally prevails, that poetry is a

light kind of reading, which one takes up only for a little amusement, and that

therefore it should be so perspicuous as not to require a second reading. This

sentiment would be apt for all the other work by Gray except his Elegy To this

sentiment Dr. Gregory responded in a letter to Dr. Beattie,

The sentiments would bear hard on some of your best things, and on all

Gray’s except his ‘Churchyard Elegy’, which, he told me, with a good
 80

deal of acrimony, owned its popularity entirely to the subject, and that

the public would have received it as well if it had been written in

prose.25

It was intellectual, argumentative, and ingenious; not seeing things in their

truth and beauty, not interpretative. Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a

genius poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining them and fortifying them by

lofty studies, he yet could not fully deduce and enjoy them; the want of a genial

atmosphere, the failure of sympathy in his contemporaries, were too great.

Nothing could be more perverse, and yet, no doubt, it was inevitable. For quite

apart from superficial mannerism, the very texture of Gray’s thought and sentiment

must always have been uncongenial to Johnson. The tender, shallow, and somewhat

willful melancholy of the Elegy, with its facile philosophy and gentle egotism, can

never have appealed much to one who ‘hated’, as he told Hannah More, ‘to hear

people whine about metaphysical distress when there is so much want and hunger in

the world’: a world, as he said on another occasion, ‘bursting with sin and sorrow’.

Admiring the work of Gray, specially referring to Elegy, Edmund Gosse says,

It possesses the charm of incomparable felicity, of a melody that is not

to subtle to charm every ear, of a moral persuasiveness that appeals to

every generation, and of metrical skill that in each line proclaims piece

of English verse, our poem of poems, not that it is the most brilliant or

original or profound lyric in our language, but because it combines in

more balanced perfection than any other or all the qualities that go to

the production of a fine poetical effect.26

Cleanth Brooks has recently devoted a chapter to the Elegy in the collection of

Studies in the Structure of Poetry that he has called The Well Wrought Urn (1947),
 81

and this is the most elaborate discussion that Gray's poem has received. In this book,

he seems to be forcing a meaning on Gray's words that is not really there and the

poetic 'structure' that he uncovers does not amount to very much. Gray is trying to

cheer himself up on the face of a bitter disappointment. The "anxious ears and endless

wishes"27 are not poetical ornaments but his own private demons.

He further describes the hidden feelings of Gray, when he wrote, "Elegy

provides a clue to the inner conflict in Gray's poem. The opposition between the

natural, almost animal life of the village and the futile artificial life of the proud."28

This picture of the heartless insincerity of high life - the hypocritical funeral anthem,

the flattery of the expensive epitaph, the brazenness, the poetical reflection of the

proud and luxurious, is a picturisation of his own recent dependence on Walpole, the

° Prime Minister's son and his realistic recognition of poverty. His heart is pregnant

with celestial fire, but chill penury soon represses his noble rage and freezes the

current of his genius.

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd

Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.

(p. 129, St. XII, 11.45-8)

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,

And forze the genial current of the soul.

(p. 129, St. XIII, 11.49-52)

 82

In the ‘Review of Gray’s Odes’ (1757), Goldsmith writes, “we would only

intimate that an English poet - ‘one whom the Muse has marked for her owncould

produce a more luxuriant bloom of flowers by cultivating such as natives of the soil,

than by endeavoring to force the exotics of another climate.”29 That is to say that,

such a genius as Gray might have given more pleasure, and acquired a larger portion

of fame, if, instead of being just an imitator, he did justice to his talents, and ventured

to be more original.

In the book ‘Estimations in Criticism ’ (1864); Bagehot describes Gray’s Elegy

as a mood which Gray felt more than any other men. It is more popular, perhaps, than

any other English poem, because that sort of feeling is the most diffused of high
<.

feelings, and because Gray added a habitual proneness to a contemplative but

unbiased meditation on death and life.

Johnson acclaimed the Elegy, as the refinement of subtlety and the

dogmatisms of learning. He says, “The Churchyard abounds with images which find a

mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”'

Other poets cannot hope for such success: a subject so popular, so grave, so

wild, and yet so suitable to the writer’s nature. A Criticism on the Elegy (1783) by

one of his contemporaries; "Delicacy recoils at the publication of internal grief. They

profane the hallowedness of secret sadness and suppose selected and decorated

expression compatible with the prostration of the soul."31 He had not written in

entirely as an act of private Katharsis. The poem was a protest, not only against his

own personal misfortunes but also at the social order that had made them possible;

whatever Gray was doing he was not writing with his eye on a phenomenon object.

The descriptive inaccuracies, therefore, do not matter; and also literal accuracy would
 83

have been inappropriate in a description of a symbolic village, whose essential

function was simply to be the opposite of'polite company'.

Pope's Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady seems to have been

Gray’s principle model. Gray points the same contrast as Pope in his Epistle to

Burlington between the 'useful toil' of the villagers and the pomp power: As Pope

says -

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke.32

(Episitle to Burlington, 11. 68-9)

In this concept of a scared silence, positive and rational, both the public and

the private conflicts of Elegy, finds their solution. It is not the silence of death, though

it resembles death, but of 'eternal peace'. The Christian humanity, that is to provide

the Christian Charity that, is the implied prescription for the social ills of Augustan
c
c-
England parallels the solvent of his personal difficulties.

Thomas Gray, in spite of his talents, however, is a poet only of the

presentative or reflective class; yet one whom the world will never forget as the

author of the Elegy - a production of sentiment dignified and temperate rather than

profound, yet so wide in appeal and so nearly perfect in expression that it is perhaps

the best known and best loved poem in the English language. Thus, in conclusion of

the chapter, we can say that Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has the classical

perfection packed with highly subjective exploration of the philosophy of life &

death, where, death is said to be the ultimate conqueror. In the words of Bagehot, in

Estimations in Criticism (1864), the chapter can be best sum up as,

Gray’s Elegy describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men,

but which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular,
 84

perhaps, than any other English poem, because that sort of feeling is

the most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a

singular habitual proneness to a contemplative - unbiased meditation

on death and on life. Other poets cannot hope for such success: a

subject so popular, so grave, so wide and yet so suitable to the writer’s

nature.33
 85

Notes

Charles Mills Gayley and Clement C Young, English Poetry: Its Principles

and Progress (London: The Macmillan Company, 1917).

The above-mentioned edition is the source of annotations quoted from the

0
poem Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Their page numbers,

stanza numbers and line numbers are mentioned below the quoted lines.

1 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd.,

1902)62.

2 Arnold 65.

3 Doughty Oswald, English Lyrics: In the Age of Reason (New York: Russel

& Russel, 1971) 162.

4 G.E. Haggerty, “Horace Walpole’s epistolary friendships” British Journal

for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29(2) (2006): 210 <http: // www.google.co.in/

www.thomasgrav.org/ materials/ biblj. shtml. >

5 Thomas Gray, Hvmn to Adversity. < http:// www.google.co.in/

www,poetry online.org/ gray_thomas_hymn_to_adversity.html>

6 Sir A.W. Ward, The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. X:

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 117.

7 A.L. Lylton Sells, Thomas Grav: His Life and Works, (London: George

Allen and Unwin, 1980) 172.

8 Roger Lonsdale, The Poems of Thomas Gray William Collins Oliver

Goldsmith (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969) 103.

9 Sells 172.

10 Gayley and Young 127.

 86

11 John Garrett, British Poetry since the Sixteenth Century (London:

Macmillan Education, 1986) 95.

12 Garrett 99.

13 Garrett 102.

14 Sells 181.

15 As quoted in A.L. Lylton Sells 175.

16 EBL Lvtton, EGL Lytton, Caxtoniana: Essays on Style and Diction

(London: Harper publishing, 1868). 82

17 Roger Lonsdale, The Poems of Thomas Gray William Collins Oliver

Goldsmith (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969) 138-9.

18 Sells 172.

19 Robert Dolsley, ed., A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes, Vol. II, The

fifth Edition (London: Stanford University Libraries, 1758) 277.

20 J.Wain, The Oxford Library of English Poetry (London: Oxford University

Press, 1986) 58.

21 H.W. Herrinton, English Masterpiece (London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1957) 756

22 Wain 95

23 Hugh Skyes Davies, The Poets and Their Critics: Chaucer to Collins,

(Hutchinson Educational Ltd., 1943) 225.

24 Davies 238-9.

25 Davies 222.

26 Sir A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller, The Cambridge History of English

Literature. Vol. X: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 117.

27 F.W. Bateson, English Poetry- a Critical Introduction (London: Longsman,

Greens, 1950) 130.

 87

28 Bateson 135.

29 Davies 222-3.

30 Davies 225.

31 Davies 235.

32 A. Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1963) 132.

33
Davies 236.