ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD THOMAS GRAY THOMAS GRAY, the author of The Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was born in London, December 26, 1716. To his father, a wealthy broker and scrivener, he owed little but ill-treatment and neglect. His mother, with the assistance of a maiden sister, kept a millinery shop and so supported her children and provided as well as she was able for Gray's education. He was sent to Eton, where he distinguished himself in scholarship, but rather than join his comrades at their games, he preferred to wander in the fields about Stoke-Pogis. On leaving Cambridge in 1738 without having completed the work required for a degree, he travelled in Europe with his friend, Horace Walpole, the son of the Whig minister. He desired on his return in 1741 to study law; and he took his degree of LL.B. in 1743. He did not, however, become a lawyer, but took residence at Cambridge University, where, with the exception of two years spent at the British Museum, he continued to reside for the remainder of his life. He had until 1768 no official connection with the University, and did not teach, but lived the life of a quiet student. Next to Milton he was the most scholarly of the English poets. He was proficient in almost every branch of learning except mathematics. He avoided society, and in the college chambers lived the life of a gentle recluse. He had a dignified bearing and a melancholy cast of mind. He was fastidious almost to effeminacy. His clothes and manners were faultless. In his orderly room was a harpsichord and at his window china vases of flowers. He had a great horror of fire and had exercised his ingenuity in devising several sorts of fire-escapes, which he frequently used as a result of the false alarms of his fellow-students. His character was so peculiar that even after he was made professor of modern history in 1768, he was still subjected to various petty annoyances by the rude and thoughtless undergraduates. During his mother's life, Gray spent most of his vacations at Stoke-Pogis, where his mother and her sister lived in a beautiful country house that commanded a distant view of Eton. There he wrote several of his famous poems, and there with love and affection he repaid the two heroic women for the sacrifices they had made in his behalf. The aunt died in 1749 and was buried in Stoke-Pogis churchyard, and four years later Gray's mother was laid beside her. On a slab are the following lines which Gray himself wrote: "In the vault beneath are deposited, in hope of a joyful resurrection, the remains of Mary Antrobus. She died, unmarried, Nov. 5, 1749, aged sixty-six. In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow; the tender, careful mother of many children, one of whom alone has the misfortune to survive her. She died March, 1753, aged sixty-seven." Without further inscription under the same tombstone, in 1771, was buried Thomas Gray, the poet. As a result of his fastidious taste and critical deliberation Gray wrote little verse. As he grew older his writings were romantic in character, but he never opposed his native classical desire for precision and polish. In 1740 he was so little conscious of the true nature of poetry or of the new trend in life and verse that he began to write a Latin epic poem that was to contain Locke's philosophy in poetic form. In 1742 he wrote the three odes, On the Spring, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and to Adversity. These contained the conventional classical moralizing and personified abstractions. In 1750 the Elegy was published. In 1757 appeared The Bard and the Progress of Poesy, poems that were highly imaginative and more romantic in form and spirit than the work of any of his contemporaries. The Norse and Welsh poems that appeared a few years later abandoned classical models altogether and sought in the literature of rude and untutored races those human characteristics and passions which are the basis of all true poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY Essays in Criticism, Matthew Arnold. The Macmillan Co. The Macmillan Co. Cambridge, England. London, England. Latest Literary Essays, Lowell. Houghton, Mifflin Co. The Macmillan Co. Lives of Famous Poets, William M. Rossetti. Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Gray, Mason. millan Co. The Mac Works of Gray, Edmund Gosse. The Macmillan Co. THE ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD THE Elegy, published 1750, stands midway between Gray's classical and romantic poems; and its style gives evidence of both classical and romantic tendencies. The theme was not new. Somewhat similar moralizing in a graveyard had appeared in previous classical poems written by Parnell, Young, Blair, and others. The poet accepts society as it is; there is no rebellion or questioning of authority or convention. Nevertheless, his feeling is democratic, and he shows a strong sympathy with the tillers of the soil and with nature. The language is usually concrete, and the point of view is subjective and individual. When the poem was first published, the departure from the heroic couplet was made less evident by printing the lines one after another without stanzaic breaks. It appeared in the form of a six-penny brochure and was well received; four editions were printed within a year. Its popularity has increased with the passage of time. It is to-day the most widely known poem in English literature, and it has been translated into various languages. If the passion expressed is chill and stately, it nevertheless, springs from human life. No other English poem is so nearly perfect in technique. Its polished diction, its remarkable felicity of expression, its exquisite metre, make it a finished work of art. THOMAS GRAY ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD THE curfew° tolls the knell of parting day, Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 5 Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower, Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade,° The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call° of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, 10 15 No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. 20 |