Page 264 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 25: Thomas Gray: The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

someday they, like the skulls’ former occupants, would die: from this practice we get the phrase Notes
memento mori, which we say to this day to describe any token one uses to keep one’s mortality in
mind. In this poem, the graveyard acts as a memento mori, reminding the narrator to not place too
much value on this life because someday he too will be dead and buried. The speaker of the poem
is surrounded by the idea of death, and throughout the first seven stanzas there are numerous
images pointing out the contrast between death and life. After mentioning the churchyard in the
title, which establishes the theme of mortality, the poem itself begins with images of gloom and
finality. The darkness at the end of the day, the forlorn moan of lowing cattle, the stillness of the air
(highlighted by the beetle’s stilted motion) and the owl’s nocturnal hooting all serve to set a
background for this serious meditation. However, it is not until the fourth stanza that the poem
actually begins to deal with the cemetery, mentioned as the place where the village forefathers
“sleep.” In the following stanzas, the speaker tries to imagine what the lives of these simple men
might have been like, touching upon their relations with their wives, children, and the soil that they
worked. They are not defined by their possessions, because they had few, and instead are defined
by their actions, which serves to contrast their lives with their quiet existence in the graveyard. This
“Elegy” presents the dead in the best light: their families adored them and they were cheerful in
their work, as they “hummed the woods beneath their steady stroke.” The speaker openly admits
that they are spoken of so well precisely because they are dead, because death is such a terrible
thing that its victims deserve the respect of the living. In line 90, the poet explains, “Some pious
drops the closing eye requires,” explaining that the living should show their respect for death with
their sorrow.

Enumerate the themes of Thomas Gray: The Elegy written in a Country Church yard.

25.4.1 Search for Self
The speaker of this poem goes through a process of recognizing what is important to him and choosing
how to live his life (which leads to the epitaph with which he would like to be remembered). In stanza
8, the poem begins naming the attributes that are normally considered desirable but are now considered
pointless when compared with the lives of the rustic dead in the country graveyard. Ambition and
Grandeur, according to the speaker, should not think less of these people because of their simple
accomplishments. He goes on to assert that Pride and Memory have no right to ignore them, and that
Honor and Flattery will be as useless to the rich as to the poor when they are dead. The speaker, an
educated person, gives much consideration to the subject of Knowledge, and whether the lack of it
made the lives of these country people less significant. Their poverty blocked the way to knowledge,
he decides, and the lack of knowledge separated them from vices as well as virtues, so that in the end
he does not consider his education a factor in making him better or worse than them either. In the
end, having eliminated all of the supposed benefits of the wealthy, educated world that he comes
from, the speaker identifies himself with the graveyard inhabitants to such a degree that he winds up
in this humble graveyard after his death. In contrast to the simple graves that he pondered over
throughout his life, though, the speaker’s grave is marked with a warm-hearted memorial, the
“Epitaph” at the end of the poem. Assuming that such a thoughtful person would not have been so
immodest as to write this epitaph for himself, there must have been some other literate person to
remember him. He is also remembered by an illiterate member of the farm community, the “hoary-
headed swain” who has to ask someone to read the epitaph. Before the death of the poem’s narrator,
this Swain established a nonverbal relationship with him, observing him from afar, wondering about
him just as the narrator wondered about the country people buried there.

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