Q. ‘Was it a vision or waking dream’…explain.

Ans: Keats's Ode to a Nightingale reveals the poet’s longing for escape from pessimism and
dejection of reality. Keats composed this poem at the time when his heart was full of sorrow. His
youngest brother Tom had died, the second one had gone abroad and the poet himself was under
the suspense and agony by the passionate love for Fanny Brawne. Here the poet moves into a
higher thematic ground moving from the ache of the beginning through yearning for permanence
and eventually exploring the tension so as to balance the transient with the permanent. However,
escape from reality is neither possible, nor desirable. Keats makes imaginative flights into the
ideal world, but accepts the realities of life despite its 'fever, fret and fury'.

In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his
preoccupation with the nightingale and back into him. As the nightingale flies farther away he
says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking
dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or
asleep. The poet realizes that the ivory tower of fancy cannot give one permanent immunity from
the hard realities of life.
Q. Significance of the Epitaph of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

Ans: Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was written in 1742, shortly after
the death of his close friend Richard West. The elegy mourns the death not of great or famous
people, but of common men. The speaker of this poem sees a country churchyard at sunset,
which impels him to meditate on the nature of human mortality and commonality of human fate.
The poet considers the fact that in death, there is no difference between great and common
people.

An epitaph is a tribute written to someone dead. The epitaph of Elegy Written in a

Country Churchyard is often taken to refer to Gray himself and what he thinks might be written
about him after he dies. It states:

“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.”

The epitaph is significant because it shows that the poet identifies with all the humble, unknown
souls lying in the country churchyard as described in the main body of the poem. The poet is not
setting himself above them, but states he is equally obscure. Like them, he has not been born to
fortune, which would be high rank or money.

The last three stanzas of the poem are, in fact, the speaker’s epitaph; the way in which the
speaker imagines his epitaph will read. Through the epitaph, the speaker asks the passerby not to
remember him as wealthy, famous, or brilliantly educated, but as one who was “melancholic” or
deeply thoughtful and sad. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere. His generosity was, in
fact, his willingness to mourn for the dead. Because he was so generous, the speaker reasons,
heaven gave him a “friend”—someone who would, in turn, mourn for him after his death. This
friend is unnamed, but we can deduce that it is any “kindred Spirit”—including the reader—who
reads the speaker’s epitaph and remembers him. No farther seek his merits to disclose, or draw
his frailties from their dread abode.The bosom of his Father and his God. The speaker concludes
by cautioning the reader not to praise him any further. He also asks that his “frailties,” his flaws
or personal weaknesses, not be considered; rather, they should be left to the care of God, with
whom the speaker now resides. In the third stanza: reading this stanza we notice that, the poet
thinks that life is a transitional period that brings to the death, where God compensates us, such
reward consists in an eternal enjoy life together Him. The poem, then, is an elegy not only for the
common man, but for the speaker himself. Indeed, by the end of the poem it is evident that the
speaker himself wishes to be identified not with the great and famous, but with the common
people whom he has praised and with whom he will, presumably, be buried
The verse of the epitaph is sometimes interpreted to simply be the epitaph to an anonymous poet.
Therefore, there is riddle about the identity of the poet. However, there is no riddle that the
epitaph is an extension of the poem and adds extra charm to the poetry.