An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard and The Eton College Manuscript | Page 3

poets. But Gray, although an undoubted
"graveyard" poet, is no mere graveyard poet: he stands above and apart
from the lot of them, and he was not content to end despondently in a
descending gloom. His, as he told West, in a celebrated letter, was a
"white melancholy, or rather leucocholy"; and he wrote of "lachrymae
rerum" rather than of private mordant sorrows.
The poem is couched in universals: Gray writes in "a" country
churchyard, and the actual Stoke Poges, dear and lovely as it doubtless
was to Gray, clings to the fame of the poem almost by accident. And

yet, by a sort of paradox, this "universal" poem in its setting and mood
is completely English. One could go too far from home for examples of
distinction--for the polar stars of the rude forefathers--just as one could
err by excess of "commonplace" reflections. Some such idea
encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth quatrain, which in the Eton
MS reads (the first line has partly perished from folding of the paper):
Some [Village] Cato [who] with dauntless Breast
The little Tyrant of
his Fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest;

Some Caesar, guiltless of his Country's Blood.
The substitution of English names is an obvious attempt to bring truth
closer to the souls of his readers by use of "domestica facta" and the
avoidance of school-boy learning.
All these changes illustrate the quality of Gray's curious felicity. His
assault on the reader's sensibilities was organized and careful: here is
no sign of that contradiction in terms, "unpremeditated art." He
probably did not work on the poem so long as historians have said he
did, but he scanted neither time nor attention. Mason thought the poem
begun and perhaps finished in 1742, and he connected its somberness
with Gray's great sorrow over the death of his close friend Richard
West. All this seems more than doubtful: to Dr. Thomas Wharton in
September 1746 Gray mentioned recently composing "a few autumnal
verses," and there is no real evidence of work on the poem before this
time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of commencement,
and it may be pointed out that Mason himself is not so sure of 1742 as
have been his Victorian successors. All he says is, "I am inclined to
believe that the Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded, at this time [1742]
also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely composition depends
largely on the "inclination" to believe that the "Elegy" was begun in
1742 and on a later remark by Walpole concerning Gray's project for a
History of Poetry. In a letter of 5 May 1761 Walpole joked to Montagu
saying that Gray, "if he rides Pegasus at his usual foot-pace, will finish
the first page two years hence." Not really so slow as this remark
suggests, Gray finally sent his "Elegy" to Walpole in June of 1750, and
in December he sent perhaps an earlier form of the poem to Dr.

Wharton. Naturally delighted with the perfected utterance of this finely
chiseled work, these two friends passed it about in manuscript, and
allowed copies to be taken.
Publication, normally abhorrent to Gray, thus became inevitable,
though apparently not contemplated by Gray himself. The private
success of the poem was greater than he had anticipated, and in
February of 1751 he was horrified to receive a letter from the editor of
a young and undistinguished periodical, "The Magazine of Magazines,"
who planned to print forthwith the "ingenious poem, call'd Reflections
in a Country-Churchyard." Gray hastily wrote to Walpole (11
February), insisting that he should "make Dodsley print it immediately"
from Walpole's copy, without Gray's name, but with good paper and
letter. He prescribed the titlepage as well as other details, and within
four days Dodsley had the poem in print, and anticipated the piratical
"Magazine" by one day. But the "Magazine" named Gray as the author,
and success without anonymity was the fate of the "Elegy." Edition
followed edition, and the poem was almost from birth an international
classic.
One of the author's prescriptions for publication concerned the verse
form. He told Walpole that Dodsley must "print it without any Interval
between the Stanza's, because the Sense is in some Places continued
beyond them." In the Egerton MS Gray had written the poem with no
breaks to set off quatrains, but in the earlier MS (Eton College), where
the poem is entitled, "Stanza's, wrote in a Country
Church-Yard," the
quatrains are spaced in normal fashion. The injunction shows Gray's
sensitiveness as to metrical form. He had called the poem an Elegy
only after urging by Mason, and he possibly doubted if his metre was
"soft" enough for true elegy. The metre hitherto had not been common
in elegies, though James Hammond's "Love Elegies" (1743) had used it
and won acclaim.