Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of literature and writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer. Here, he examines Gray’s “Elegy” as a reflection of social conscience, finding it to be advanced in identifying the problems of a class-based society but lacking in solutions.

The most common interpretation of Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is that it is an expression of sympathy and support for those who have the misfortune to be without money or social prestige. When critics do not approach it from this angle, they almost always look at it as a broader philosophical statement about how fortune in this world ends up being no help to the dead, an interpretation that rests almost entirely upon line 36, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” These are both pertinent ideas that Gray does cover, but they’re fairly obvious ideas to readers today, and either could have been adequately dispatched in a poem a third as long. We have to question how obvious such ideas about social rank would have been in the feudal monarchy of Gray’s England, circa 1750. If Gray was a thinker ahead of his time, then the ideas that we take for granted may have been unheard of to his peers.

It would be almost impossible to believe that people before Gray wished anything but the best for victims of misfortune. After all, as the word itself indicates, misfortune has two significant characteristics: it is bad, and it happens because of luck or chance, fortune. By its basic definition, people with bad luck cannot be blamed, and that makes them innocent sufferers. To that extent, Gray seems to have brought nothing new to the question of human relations, just the circular argument that those who do not deserve misfortune do not deserve it. The fact is, though, that the issue has never been as clear-cut as that. There is the question of whether the poor, such as the struggling farmers that Gray talks about, have been cast their lot by random chance, or whether they might not actually be collecting exactly what they deserve.

We see this same question arise just as clearly, if not more so, in contemporary America. In our two-party system, the general attitude toward poverty and its related problems, such as poor education and health, shifts from one side of the spectrum to the other every generation or so. One party is dominant during a time when the general public believes that the poor are neglected, and as a result spending for social programs will increase; a few years later, the prevailing mood will hold that the poor are coddled and therefore lack the will to raise themselves out of poverty, and spending then decreases. The issue seems to balance on the question of just how much the people involved are responsible for their own positions as part of the

“The ‘Elegy’ has an inconsistency in praising the inherent worth of the simple country people while pretending that their lives are somehow less for having not received the benediction of a poet before.”

underclass, and therefore how much sympathy they deserve.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” appeared at one of those cultural moments when change was in the air but had not quite arrived. In a piece celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the “Elegy”’s publication, Carl J. Weaver provided an inventory of “the originality of Gray’s democratic sympathy”: the American Revolution was twenty-five years away, and the French Revolution forty; it was to be twenty years until Oliver Goldsmith would write of “a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,” and still another twenty-five after that until Robert Burns framed the simplicity of the democratic spirit with “A man’s a man, for a’ that.” Ideas of equality may be at the core of the society we live in, but they were exceptional when Gray wrote.

This apparently was the reason why he felt the need to go to such lengths to help his readers know the simple country people he was writing about. They were not the lazy, stupid brutes his readers would have to believe they were in order to believe that they deserved to live in poverty and obscurity. They worked hard at “useful toil,” their children loved them, and they asked for little in return. These were not easy people to ignore, by Gray’s standard: their virtues should have made them stand out as society’s finest, and he writes with bitterness that they were left to rot in obscurity in tiny churchyards while men and women not nearly as useful or loved rested under marble monuments.

As a vindication of the poor, this poem does excellent work: like all of the best works of social conscience, it knows how to handle its audience, making our hearts swell with pride for the virtues of the downtrodden. This is where the regular rhythm and unyielding rhyme scheme fit in, by assuring readers of the inevitability of this view of the simple country folk and not just a limited view of one select group. The problem is that, having imagined the greatness of the “rude Forefathers” so well and rendered them so convincingly, Gray did not have any idea about what he should do about their descendants that labored on. He was hardly the revolutionary. As much as he opposed inequity, still he was not ready to call for some sort of Marxist social reorganization that would bring the intellectuals and civil servants to the farms and give plowboys their turn in the House of Lords. The best that Gray could come up with to compensate for the opportunities that had been denied these simple country people was the complaint that they should have memorials on their graves as nice as those that mark the remains of social luminaries, in acknowledgment of the fact that they could have been important too, given the chance.

The problem with having nothing to offer but praise and recognition is that the poem burns up the value of praise on its way to affirming the commoners’ self-worth. “Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?” the poem asks, and the answer, of course, is no. “Can Honor’s voice provoke the silent dust, or / Flattery sooth the dull cold ear of Death?” Since they can’t, then just what are we supposed to do about those who died without recognition? The poem expends much of its energy convincing readers that these people lived valuable, useful lives and that memorials are for the Proud and the Vain, but it also wants to stir our sense of pathos over the fact that they do not have grand memorials. As William Empson has pointed out, referring to the fourteenth stanza of Gray’s “Elegy” in his essay “Proletarian Literature,” “a gem does mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked.” The occupants of the churchyard may have had bad lives, but that is not their own view, it is the judgement of an onlooker, the speaker of the poem: it is the same voice that simultaneously warns us not to be so arrogant as to assume that their lives are worthless.

In the end, there is nothing the speaker can offer but himself. Literary historians have gone back and forth for two-and-a-half centuries about who the young man elegized at the end is supposed to be: Gray, his recently deceased friend Richard West, a townsperson, or someone completely new. One thing that seems certain is the bond between him and the speaker of the first 116 lines; the melancholy of the nightfall in the first stanzas perfectly matches the young man’s “drooping, woeful wan” muttering as he looked out over the cemetery. The attitudes and sensibilities which take their effect on readers throughout the 29 initial stanzas have already affected the “youth to fortune” who is buried there, and so his way of dealing with social inequity can be taken as the poem’s result.

The answer this poem offers for the fact that good people who lack social prominence are left forgotten after death is for a prominent person to climb down into the grave with them, to be buried beside them and to raise up at least one large monument with a lofty epitaph within that forsaken cemetery. It is a much more temperate solution than calling for a revolution to disrupt the social structure (like the revolutions that were to come later in that century). It is at least more active than simply walking away from the problem and concluding that the downtrodden must somehow deserve the fate dealt them. Lacking a burning indignity about the way things are but unable to sit comfortably with it, Gray’s young man, steeped in sadness, opts for a show of solidarity to mock the rules that say he is from a different “set” than the farm people.

Is it effective? There is no way to tell from the way the poem leaves things. Generally, rejection of one’s class privileges and identifying with the downtrodden only produces the minimal effect of making one’s relatives and former friends sigh and wink, unless the class advantage is used to pry some good out of the situation. A child of wealth from a gated suburban community who goes to live in the inner city in order to upset conventional assumptions is likely to just make people think he or she has an inflated sense of importance, while a physician who goes to an impoverished area to work is both an inspiration and a practical asset. The “Elegy” has an inconsistency in praising the inherent worth of the simple country people while pretending that their lives are somehow less for having not received the benediction of a poet before. This is reflected in the egoism in believing that having the body of a beloved young man from a good home among them is somehow an enriching experience for the rural dead. Gray’s heart was in the right place, far ahead of its time in terms of his thoughts on social equity, and with no models for him to draw from we shouldn’t be surprised that his attempt to bridge the chasm of social class would reflect the very prejudices he was trying to overcome.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2000.

Aviya Kushner

Aviya Kushner is the Contributing Editor in Poetry atBarnesandNoble.comand the Poetry Editor of Neworld Magazine. She is a graduate of the acclaimed creative writing program in poetry at Boston University, where she received the Fitzgerald Award in Translation. Her writing on poetry has appeared in Harvard Review and The Boston Phoenix, and she has served as Poetry Coordinator for AGNI Magazine. She has given readings of her own work throughout the United States, and she teaches at Massachusetts Communications College in Boston. In the following essay, Kushner describes the pastoral qualities of the “Elegy,” which contribute “to the sense that it tells a universal story which spans both nations and centuries.”

One of the most famous poems in the history of the English language might never have been published if its author had had his way. Thomas Gray never tried to publish “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and was quite dismayed to find that a journal he didn’t like much chose to print it.

Once it was published — through a friend of Gray’s who sent a copy in to the journal — the “Elegy” was a hit. The poem’s grip on the readers of its time was no temporary fluke. Today, the “Elegy” still resonates with readers around the world. Much of that resonance is due to the great classic literary texts the “Elegy” borrows from, and the major human stories it manages to contain. The Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and the pastoral visions of Virgil all lie quietly beneath the poem, contributing to the sense that it tells a universal story which spans both nations and centuries.

Fittingly, the elegy of timeless topics begins in slow motion:

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.

The words “toll,” “lowing,” and “slowly” physically decrease the speed of the poem. The numerous “l”s in the first stanza produce a lull, and the reader literally “plods his weary way” along with the poet.

As Henry Weinfield observes in his book The Poet Without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History, there are numerous opportunities for sound here. The plowman and the herd both make noise, and yet, the overwhelming impression

“The poet then details the sounds of the countryside — the cock in the morning, the swallow, the echoing horn — which are not heard by the dead. While the opening stanza may have detailed a still silence, the dead and buried know an even stiller silence.”

of the first stanza is silence. It is this deep and carefully controlled silence, presented in exact rhyme and pristine pentameter, that gives the opening a timeless feel.

With its mention of the herd, the opening stanza also positions itself in the pastoral tradition — the line of poetry based on songs sung by shepherds. Pastoral poetry often involves nostalgia for a past, but that past doesn’t necessarily exist. Instead, pastoral poems often look back longingly on an idealized time where purity and virtue supposedly ruled.

Musically, the second stanza maintains the silence of the first. Late afternoon is turning to evening:

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;

The movement of the day, from afternoon to dusk to dark, is just one of the movements the “Elegy” will address. Day and night foreshadow life and death, along with labor and the end of labor, and the building and destroying of personal history.

The plowman is progressing on his journey as day turns into evening. And soon, he reaches the churchyard, where beneath “rugged elms” and the “yew-tree’s shade,” the “rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”

The poet then details the sounds of the countryside — the cock in the morning, the swallow, the echoing horn — which are not heard by the dead. While the opening stanza may have detailed a still silence, the dead and buried know an even stiller silence.

These buried forefathers not only don’t hear anymore, they also don’t see and feel. They don’t see their children or their wives, and they don’t gaze upon the fireplace. This inactivity doesn’t mean they weren’t active in their lives. In fact, they worked very hard:

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

At one time, these buried men had power over their animals and over the woods. Although they were only country laborers, the poet takes pains to make sure these achievements are not belittled:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure,
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

This addressing of powers like “Ambition” and “Grandeur” seems a bit reminiscent of the Platonic forms of the Good, the Beautiful, and the like. Plato tried to nail down a definition of the Good, and here the poet seems to question what Ambition and Grandeur are, anyway. After all, one thing is clear in a graveyard — it is the final resting-place for all social classes.

Power, beauty, and wealth, according to the poet, all “awaits alike th’inevitable hour.” At the end, the wildly successful match the poor in one respect: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

In this country churchyard, the poet speculates about the talents of those buried here:

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 the ecstasy the living lyre.

Some of those buried here may have been outstanding ministers, rulers, or musicians. But destiny is often controlled by money, or what the poet calls “Chill Penury.” This churchyard might have contained a Milton or a Cromwell, if only economics didn’t play a part.

But despite the poverty and relative obscurity of those buried here, they still require the dignity of a proper place to rest:

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture
      deck’d,Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

The churchyard, according to the poet, protects the dead from insult. But it also performs an essential function — it “teaches” the living how to die.

The poem ends with a description of the death of one individual man, who wasn’t seen on his usual hill, heath, and tree. He was also not “beside the rill” or “up the lawn.” He had died, and was being carried to the churchyard.

The dead man is carried slowly through the church-way path, the motion mimicking the slow-motion opening of the poem. Although those in attendance can’t read, an epitaph has been prepared for the dead man.

The epitaph acknowledges that this dead man was not lucky in Fame or Fortune. But in death, he is equal to all others, ready to relocate to “the bosom of his Father and his God.”

Source: Aviya Kushner, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• The most authoritative edition of Gray’s poetry is the edition originally published by the Oxford Press in 1966, entitled The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray: English, Latin and Greek. H. W. Starr wrote the introduction and edited the book with J. R. Hendrickson.
• John Dyer is a Welsh pastoral poet who wrote at the same time as Gray. His greatest works, including “Grongar Hill,” considered one of the first romantic pastoral poems, are included in the collection Poems, 1761.
• Samuel Johnson was the outstanding literary figure of Gray’s time. Among his writings was the ten-volume Lives of the Poets, which includes a brief biography of Gray, as well as a number of poems that he wrote himself. He is best known today for the biography that James Boswell wrote about him, The Life of Samuel Johnson, considered one of the best biographies ever and an important source for readers who want to understand the British literary scene in the eighteenth century.
• Gray wrote during the Age of Enlightenment, a period of intense intellectual activity throughout the world. One of the leading thinkers of the time was French Philosopher Rene Descartes, who is often credited with adding humanity to the age of ideas. His Discourse on Method and the Meditations is still considered one of the world’s most important philosophical works.
• Thomas Gray is often considered a poet ahead of his time, who predated the Romantic Movement that swept across the globe approximately fifty years later. More than his contemporaries, his contemplative style, and concern for humanity are often compared to the works of William Wordsworth, one of the founders of Romanticism. Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13th, 1798,” has a much looser structure than Gray’s “Elegy,” but there is a similarity in the melancholy of both poems.
• Richard Gough’s The History of Myddle was written between 1700 and 1706, chronicling the lives of people living in the small English town of Myddle in Shropshire. This rural history is probably as close as one can get to reading about the lives of the people discussed in Gray’s “Elegy.” A 1980 edition of Gough’s book is available, with an introduction by Dr. Peter Razzell.