An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard and The Eton College Manuscript | Page 2

night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your
winter and night in disguise.
Here, too, are no tremblings of hope, no sound confidence in the
"average" man, such as Gray surprisingly glimpses. One begins to
suspect that it is more necessary to be subtle in evocations of despair
than in those of hope, even if the hope is tremulous. The mood Gray
sought required no obvious subtlety. The nearest approach to Gray
(found in Catullus) may likewise be said to be deficient in overtones;
but it also comes home to the heart of everyman:
0. quid solutis est beatius curis, cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum desideratoque
acquiescimus lecto!
These simple lines convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one
evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity.
From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem
diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of
undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life,
and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray
himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into
something like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one
villager--perhaps for himself--Gray seems to murmur through the
gathering darkness: "et lux perpetua luceat ei." Although in this epitaph
we may seem to be concerned with an individual, we do well to note
that the youth to fortune and fame unknown, whose great "bounty" was
only a tear, is as completely anonymous as the ploughman or the rude

forefathers.
The somber aspects of evening are perhaps more steadily preserved by
Gray than by his contemporaries. From Milton to Joseph Warton all
poets had made their ploughman unwearied as (to quote Warton):
He jocund whistles thro' the twilight groves.
With Gray all this blithe whistling stopped together. Evening poems by
Dyer, Warton, and Collins had tended to be "pretty," but here again
Gray resisted temptation and regretfully omitted a stanza designed to
precede immediately the epitaph:
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year
By hands unseen, are
Show'rs of Violets found;
The Red-breast loves to build & warble
there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.
With similar critical tact Gray realized that one might have too much of
stately moral reflections unmixed with drama. Possibly such an idea
determined him in discarding four noble quatrains with which he first
designed to end his poem. After line 72 in the manuscript now in Eton
College appeared these stanzas:
The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow
Exalt the brave, &
idolize Success
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than
Power & Genius e'er conspired to bless
And thou, who mindful of the unhonour'd Dead
Dost in these Notes
their artless Tale relate
By Night & lonely Contemplation led
To
linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate
Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around
Bids ev'ry fierce
tumultuous Passion cease
In still small Accents, whisp'ring from the
Ground
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace
No more with Reason & thyself at Strife
Give anxious Cares &
endless Wishes room
But thro the cool sequester'd Vale of Life


Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.
"And here," comments Mason, "the Poem was originally intended to
conclude, before the happy idea of the hoary-headed Swain, &c.
suggested itself to him." To reconstitute the poem with this original
ending gives an interesting structure. The first three quatrains evoke the
fall of darkness; four stanzas follow presenting the rude forefathers in
their narrow graves; eleven quatrains follow in reproach of Ambition,
Grandeur, Pride, et al., for failure to realize the high merit of humility.
Then after line 72 of the final version would come these four rejected
stanzas, continuing the reproach of "the thoughtless world," and turning
all too briefly to one who could "their artless tale relate," and to the
calm that then breathes around tumultuous passion and speaks of
eternal peace--and "the silent tenor of thy doom."
That would give a simpler structure; and one may argue whether
turning back from the thoughtless world to praise again the "cool
sequester'd vale of life" and then appending "the happy idea of the
hoary-headed swain, &c." does really improve the poem structurally.
Its method is, however, more acceptable in that now the reflections are
imbedded in "drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total effect is
more pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to
escape, from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an
individual grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would
have given the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it
must be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No
more" (lines 20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades through the
imaginations of gloom-fed