An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard and The Eton College Manuscript

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Title: An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton
College Manuscript
Author: Thomas Gray
Release Date: March 18, 2005 [EBook #15409]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ELEGY
WROTE IN A COUNTRY ***
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The Augustan Reprint Society
THOMAS GRAY
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard
(1751)
and
The Eton College Manuscript
With an Introduction by
George Sherburn

Publication Number 31
Los Angeles
Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University
of California
1951
GENERAL EDITORS
H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library
RICHARD C.
BOYS, University of Michigan
JOHN LOFTIS, University of
California, Los Angeles
ASSISTANT EDITOR
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
BENJAMIN
BOYCE, Duke University
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of
Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L.
CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN,
University of Chicago
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of
California, Los Angeles LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University

SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER,
University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College,
London
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los
Angeles
INTRODUCTION
To some the eighteenth-century definition of proper poetic matter is
unacceptable; but to any who believe that true poetry may (if not
"must") consist in "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed,"
Gray's "Churchyard" is a majestic achievement--perhaps (accepting the
definition offered) the supreme achievement of its century. Its success,
so the great critic of its day thought, lay in its appeal to "the common
reader"; and though no friend of Gray's other work, Dr. Johnson went

on to commend the "Elegy" as abounding "with images which find a
mirrour in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom
returns an echo." Universality, clarity, incisive lapidary
diction--these
qualities may be somewhat staled in praise of the "classical" style, yet it
is precisely in these traits that the "Elegy" proves most nobly. The
artificial figures of rhetorical arrangement that are so omnipresent in
the antitheses, chiasmuses, parallelisms, etc., of Pope and his school are
in Gray's best quatrains unobtrusive or even infrequent.
Often in the art of the period an affectation of simplicity covers and
reveals by turns a great thirst for ingenuity. Swift's prose is a fair
example; in the "Tale of a Tub" and even in "Gulliver" at first sight
there seems to appear only an honest and simple directness; but pry
beneath the surface statements, or allow yourself to be dazzled by their
coruscations of meaning, and you immediately see you are watching a
stylistic prestidigitator. The later, more orderly dignity of Dr. Johnson's
exquisitely chosen diction is likewise ingeniously studied and
self-conscious. When Gray soared into the somewhat turgid pindaric
tradition of his day, he too was slaking a thirst for rhetorical
complexities. But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor do we have
artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed maiden"
apostrophized in Collins and Joseph Warton. For Gray the hour when
the sky turns from opal to dusk leaves one not "breathless with
adoration," but moved calmly to placid reflection tuned to drowsy
tinklings or to a moping owl. It endures no contortions of image or of
verse. It registers the sensations of the hour and the reflections
appropriate to it--simply.
It is not difficult to be clear--so we are told by some who habitually fail
of that quality--if you have nothing subtle to say. And it has been urged
on high authority in our day that there is nothing really "fine" in Gray's
"Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting his address to
"the common reader," we may be certain he was not writing to the
obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to create an evocation of
evening: the evening of a day and the approaching night of life. The
poem was not to be perplexed by doubt; it ends on a note of "trembling
hope"--but on "hope." There are perhaps better evocations of similar

moods, but not of this precise mood. Shakespeare's poignant Sonnet
LXXIII ("That time of year"), which suggests no hope, may be one.
Blake's "Nurse's Song" is, in contrast, subtly tinged with modernistic
disillusion:
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp'rings
are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My
face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews
of