ENG4U Notes on Thomas Gray

							                                      Thomas Gray

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Gray’s “Elegy” raises the question of our mortality and who is remembered after he or
she dies. The setting of the poem in a country churchyard and the outsider status of the
educated poet create tensions between the rural and the sophisticated that get
amplified in the poem’s dominant theme: the paths of glory lead but to the grave. As a
poet Gray focuses on how we memorialize the dead and why we do so, questions that
continue to be relevant today. The tone of melancholy and the emphasis on solitude
and contemplation signal new directions in eighteenth-century poetry, and Gray’s elegy
demonstrates the break from Augustan wit and society and a poetics
of introspection and withdrawal.

Quick Notes
• Form: Pastoral elegy in iambic pentameter quatrains of abab.
• Key Passages: Introduction of poet in churchyard, 1–4; remembering
the forefathers, 13–28; paths of glory, 33–36; memorials of the
proud, 37–44; graves of unknown/unfulfilled potential, 45–60; poverty’s
effect on ambition, 61–76; memorials of the “unlettered
Muse,” 77–92; the poet’s death, 93–116; the poet’s epitaph, 117–28.
• Key Themes: The paths of glory lead but to the grave; full many a
flower is born to blush unseen; rural simplicity contrasted with the
dangers of the glamorous world; literacy is a privilege and a responsibility.

Note the elegiac tolling sound of the alternating
rhymes. The poem begins in a liminal state as night falls on the poet isolated in
the landscape; this in-betweeness is emphasized throughout the poem
as the outsider, anonymous poet seeks to find an appropriate way to remember
those people whose graves surround him.

The differences between the poet and the dead whom he does not know create a
cognitive gap that the poem tries to breach through sentimental imagery. This
sentimental imagery gives way to philosophical introspection as the poet considers the
mortality of the entire human race, including himself. After he considers the
limitations of poverty, he focuses on the dangers of the glamorous world
ways that echo Johnson’s moral satire, The Vanity of Human Wishes. How
has his attitude toward the rural inhabitants changed by this point in the poem? His
vision of his own death, memorialized by a “hoary headed swain,” reverses the dilemma
of the opening stanzas and emphasizes the poet’s ambivalence toward fame and
memory.

Although the poem contains many fine lines of moral sentiment, it is far more
complicated and ambiguous than appears by quick reading. Careful attention to the
shifts in perspective (note the two very different uses of the second person in
the poem) and the syntax yield interesting insights.
By taking up the theme of the dangers of the pursuit of fame and glory in contrast to the
virtues of rural simplicity, the poem participates in the literature of polite society.
However, Gray’s poem is no celebration of the virtues of landed gentry.

Discussion Questions
1. Whom among the dead do we commemorate, and how do we do so?
2. Whose elegy is this? Why is the speaker writing/speaking this elegy?
3. How does the perspective of the outsider poet affect the representation
of the rural poor in this poem?
4. As a pastoral elegy, the poem is populated with swains and shepherds.
What effect does this pastoral imagery have on the meaning of
the poem? (Would it be different if the characters were more realistic?)
5. How does the poem’s dominant theme—that we all await the final
hour of death—compare with the treatment of the theme in other poems
of the era, for example, Rochester’s Satire against Reason and
Mankind, Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, or Johnson’s “Vanity
of Human Wishes”?
6. In lines 37–40, whom is the poet addressing and why?
7. What does the poem have to say about the fame of the laboring poor?
Do they achieve fame? Why or why not?
8. The last section of the poem focuses on the role of epitaphs—poetry.
How does one remember the illiterate? What does the “unlettered
muse” write on their gravestones?
9. Who is “thee” in line 93, and what are the implications this address?
10. The poem celebrating the unhonoured dead ends with a fantasy of the
poet’s own memorial, where he envisions his anonymity and marginality
but creates his own fame (both in the epitaph and in the poem,
which literally made Gray famous). How does this ending illustrate
the problems of fame and immortality that the poem tries to work out?