Journal “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
This poem by Thomas Gray is written in abab cdcd efef etc rhyme, but I find it easier to read the poem in the aa’s then bb’s then cc’s and dd’s etc order. The poem is written with many sub-themes but the way it progresses makes it readable. The title describes its function, lamenting someone's death, and affirming the life that preceded it so that we can be comforted. So the title implies that the poem was actually written in a country churchyard, not merely an imaginative reconstruction of such a scene.
An elegy is by definition about someone else, but speaker folds himself into this poem, making himself as much an object of reflection as the scene and those buried in the cemetery. Some considerable questions posed by critics are: “does it express Gray's melancholic democratic feelings about the oneness of human experience from the perspective of death”? or “does Gray discuss the life and death of another elegist, one who, in his youth, suffered the same obscurity as the "rude forefathers" in the country graveyard”? And “should Gray have added the final Epitaph to his work”? All reasonable philosophical questions but what I would say to this is that what really matters is, over time an elegy still serves as a means to console. The power it has on readers who are unfazed by these questions remains in memory of these allegorical figures. The purpose of this poem is to memorialize and reflect upon the memorialization of otherwise unremarkable people.
One may die after decades of anonymous labour, being uneducated, unknown or scarcely remembered, and one's potential unrealized, Gray's poem says, but that life will have as many joys, and far fewer ill effects on others, than lives of the rich, the powerful, and the famous. I think this is a great message because in the end, what counts is friendship, being mourned, and being cried for by someone who was close as lines 123-124 explain.
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend
I read that the capitalization of nouns, still mandatory in modern German, was a printers’ custom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that it lent an air of naturalness to the eighteenth-century habit of generalization and unobtrusive personification. For example, Ambition (line 29), Grandeur (line 31), Memory (line 38), Honor (line 43), Flattery and Death (line 44), Knowledge (line 49), Penury (line 51), Luxury and Pride (line 71), Forgetfulness (line 85), and Nature (line 91) is a little more than abstract nouns, it governs an active verb. So are we meant to visualize it? Just a wonder.
An elegy is by definition about someone else, but speaker folds himself into this poem, making himself as much an object of reflection as the scene and those buried in the cemetery. Some considerable questions posed by critics are: “does it express Gray's melancholic democratic feelings about the oneness of human experience from the perspective of death”? or “does Gray discuss the life and death of another elegist, one who, in his youth, suffered the same obscurity as the "rude forefathers" in the country graveyard”? And “should Gray have added the final Epitaph to his work”? All reasonable philosophical questions but what I would say to this is that what really matters is, over time an elegy still serves as a means to console. The power it has on readers who are unfazed by these questions remains in memory of these allegorical figures. The purpose of this poem is to memorialize and reflect upon the memorialization of otherwise unremarkable people.
One may die after decades of anonymous labour, being uneducated, unknown or scarcely remembered, and one's potential unrealized, Gray's poem says, but that life will have as many joys, and far fewer ill effects on others, than lives of the rich, the powerful, and the famous. I think this is a great message because in the end, what counts is friendship, being mourned, and being cried for by someone who was close as lines 123-124 explain.
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend
I read that the capitalization of nouns, still mandatory in modern German, was a printers’ custom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that it lent an air of naturalness to the eighteenth-century habit of generalization and unobtrusive personification. For example, Ambition (line 29), Grandeur (line 31), Memory (line 38), Honor (line 43), Flattery and Death (line 44), Knowledge (line 49), Penury (line 51), Luxury and Pride (line 71), Forgetfulness (line 85), and Nature (line 91) is a little more than abstract nouns, it governs an active verb. So are we meant to visualize it? Just a wonder.