Ddac Llorens Cubedo

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), by Thomas Gray

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly oer the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
5 Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
10 The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-trees shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
15 Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cocks shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
20 No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sires return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
25 Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
30 Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth eer gave,
35 Awaits alike th inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault
If Memory oer their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
40 The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

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Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honours voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
45 Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
50 Rich with the spoils of time, did neer unroll;
Chill Penury repressd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomd caves of ocean bear:
55 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
60 Some Cromwell, guiltless of his countrys blood.
The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty oer a smiling land,
And read their history in a nations eyes,
65 Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
70 To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muses flame.
Far from the madding crowds ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
75 Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Yet even these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
80 Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:

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And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.
85 For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being eer resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
90 Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who, mindful of the unhonoured dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
95 If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, --
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
100 To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;
There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
105 Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.
One morn I missed him on the customed hill,
110 Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
115 Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.
The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
120 Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heaven did a recompense as largely send:

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He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,

125 He gained from Heaven (twas all he wished) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

Notes
Title. In classical Greek poetry, the term elegy designated a poetic composition that
followed a specific metrical pattern (the elegiac couplet). The perception of the elegy as
a poetic form that conveys the poets meditation on loss and death stems from the
Renaissance. The churchyard chosen as the setting of the poem is in Stoke Poges
(Buckinghamshire), which Gray knew very well and where he is buried.

Church and graveyard, Stoke Poges

Versification. The Elegy is written in heroic quatrains or elegiac stanzasthis stanza

pattern takes its name from this very poem. The lines are iambic pentameters rhyming
abab.
l. 1. Curfew: the sounding of a bell at evening (Merriam Websters Online
Dictionary). The first image in the poem is auditory; images belonging to this category,
evoking the sounds of country life, abound in the opening stanzas: the tolling knell, the
lowing herd, the droning beetle, the tinkling of cowbells, the hooting of the owl, the
twittering swallow, the cocks crow, the echoing horn, the voices of children.

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l. 4. To darkness and to me. The phrase encapsulates two basic aspects of the poem:
on the one hand, the imagery of dusk and darkness that pervades it; on the other, the
introspective point of view, which marks a historical evolution in poetic tastes and
prefigures Romantic subjectivism.
l. 10. The moping owl. In Ancient Greece, the owl was the symbol of Athene, the
goddess of wisdom; accordingly, Western tradition has associated the owl with this
quality. In the medieval English poem The Owl and the Nightingale (12th century), the
two birds are symbolic of opposite attributes: wisdom versus frivolity, gravity versus
cheerfulness, religion versus love.
l. 13. That yew-trees shade. The symbolism of trees in the poem (elm, yew, beech,
thorn) is a fascinating aspect to explore. In England, yew trees are often planted in
churchyards and cemeterieshence their symbolic association with death. But they are
evergreen trees and therefore, they may also symbolise immortality.
l. 16. Rude: here meaning rustic, unrefined, uncouth.
l. 23. Their sires return. Gray chooses a male as a prototypical dead ancestor: the
head of a country household whose main source of joy is an idyllic family life.
l. 26. Glebe: a plot of cultivated land (Merriam Websters Online Dictionary).
l. 29. Ambition. This is the first of a number of capitalised nouns. Most of these key
notions (Ambition, Grandeur, Memory, Honor, Flattery, and so on) are personified,
which is reminiscent of medieval allegories, in which characters represent virtues or
sins.
ll. 33-36. The boast of heraldry [...] but to the grave. In this stanza, three literary
clichs rooted in classical literature converge: aequo pulsat pede, omnia mors aequat
and sic transit gloria mundithese can be translated as it stamps with the same foot /
with equal force, death makes all equal and thus vanishes the glory of the world
respectively.
l. 41. Storied: bearing an inscription oroften narrativerelief.
ll. 51-52. The phrases noble rage and genial current of the soul bring to mind the
Romantic emphasis on inspiration and the force of the creative genius.
l. 57. An anonymous countryman who may have rebelled against a tyrannical
landowner is compared to John Hampden (1594-1643), a member of Parliament who
heroically opposed Charles Is taxation policies.

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l. 59. The English poet John Milton (1608-1674) has a counterpart among the rude
Forefathers as well: unlike the poet, who became blind in his fifties, this inglorious
Milton is mutewith this adjective, the poet also establishes a metonymical
identification between silence and death.
l. 60. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) became the main political figure after the
execution of Charles I and his campaigns in Ireland and Scotland resulted in cruel
bloodsheds. The man who is buried in the country churchyard may have resembled
Cromwell in his determination or charisma, but he is guiltless of his countrys blood.
ll. 57-60. Interestingly, in the original manuscript, we read Cato for Hampden,
Tully for Milton and Caesar for Cromwell (see note to line 57 of the poem at
The Thomas Gray Archive, <http://www.thomasgray.org/>). Cato the Young (95-46
BC) was admired for his political honesty and courage; like Tully (Marcus Tullius
Cicero, 106-43 BC), he stood against Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC). Gray finally
chose three figures representative of English Republicanism. Lee Morrisey has
interpreted the substitution as signalling an evolution from the exclusive emphasis on
classical models, which characterises the first half of the 18th century, to the emergence
of nationalistic pride: a new, tentative sense that English history can stand on its own
(English Literature in Context, ed. Paul Poplawski, Cambridge: CUP, 2008, p. 251).
ll. 61-72. Remarkably, this sentence spans three whole stanzas.
l.73. Far from the madding crowd. The phrase has transcended the poem and become
idiomatic. The novelist Thomas Hardy quoted the line in order to give a title to the first
of his Wessex novels, published in 1874. Hardys Far from the Madding Crowd, like
Grays poem, has a pastoral and picturesque spatial setting.
ll. 73-74. Gray associates the simplicity of country life with a natural tendency to virtue,
opposed to the temptations of excessive ambition or the dubious morality of more
sophisticated social circles. According to Morrisey, these two lines hint at the negative
consequences of urbanisation and the political upheaval that went with it: maybe it
would have been better for England to have kept to its rural course and, relatedly, not to
have experienced the Civil Wars and Interregnum (English Literature in Context, p.
251).
ll. 77-80. Although Samuel Johnson disliked Grays poetry, he praised the originality of
these lines in his Lives of the Most Emminent English Poets: I have never seen the
notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has
always felt them (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 2863).

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ll.78-79. Some frail memorial [...] sculpture decked. In a previous stanza, Gray has
linked the sphere of celebrity and public relevanceto which Hampden, Milton and
Cromwell belongedwith the parallel world of the deceased inglorious, those who
lived a dignified life in total anonimity. Similarly, he sets against the storied urn or
animated bust (l. 41) of those who achieved fame and wealth, this frail memorial
unprepossessing and of little artistic merit, but moving.
l. 84. Teach the rustic moralist to die. The line is reminiscent of the ars moriendi
tradition (the art of dying). Books inspired by this philosophy were very popular
during the Middle Ages and also, to some extent, during the Renaissance. Prayer and
the reading of many a holy text (l. 83) were considered invaluable aids for the purpose
of dying well.
l. 90. Some pious drops, i. e. the tears of the living for the dead.
ll. 93-94. The beginning of the stanza would seem to indicate that the poet is turning to
the reader but, as the second verse line makes clear, thee is the poet, addressed by the
lyrical speaker or main voice in the poem. In this way, Gray effectively includes himself
and his readers in his vision of future death.
l. 95. If chance: if it should happen (that...).
l. 98. The use of the first person plural reinforces the opposition / parallelism between
the communities of the livingto which the swain belongsand the deadto which
the rude Forefathers belong.
ll. 105-108. The typical behaviour of a frenzied poet. The furor poeticus was assumed
to come over the poet in Ancient Greece. The stanza echoes this classical notion, at the
same time foreshadowing the Romantic identification of the furor poeticus with
inspiration, which was given a central role.
ll. 120-121. The first line could be paraphrased as he was blessed from birth with a fine
intellect. In the poems of the so-called Pre-Romantics, melancholy results from the
awareness of social change, and specifically from one of its concomitants: the
detachment from Nature. Decades later, the Romantics will continue to concern
themselves with this idea and to give vent to their melancholy.