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The Full Text Is Here Thomas Gray

The document discusses Thomas Gray's poem 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. It analyzes the poem's themes of memory, mortality and the importance of education. It also notes the poem's beautiful language and argues it should still be required reading in schools today.

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Chandan V Chandu
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74 views

The Full Text Is Here Thomas Gray

The document discusses Thomas Gray's poem 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. It analyzes the poem's themes of memory, mortality and the importance of education. It also notes the poem's beautiful language and argues it should still be required reading in schools today.

Uploaded by

Chandan V Chandu
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Gray's Elegy" is a poem that most older adults in the UK can quote, if only a few lines.

In my ideal school curriculum, it would still be required reading. Musical, eloquent, moral, the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is not only a beautiful poem in its own right, but opens a network of cultural pathways. It connects the reader to English history and to European literature: Dante, Milton, the classical writers. Its ideas about society and education are deeply relevant today. For brevity's sake, I've chosen the first 15 stanzas, where many of the best-loved lines and phrases occur, but the poem has a bigger argument and needs to be read in its entirety. The full text is here. Thomas Gray began work on the "Elegy" in 1742. The setting may be in Stoke Poges, where Gray's mother was buried, and where his own remains would eventually lie. But the poem was probably composed in Cambridge, and the curfew tolled by the bell of Great St Mary's. Modern readers may associate curfew with political unrest or public disorder, but this was simply a fire precaution, signalling "lights out". No wonder the first stanza is often memorised: not only a visual masterpiece, it has an impressive array of sound-effects. In fact, there is a striking quantity of alliteration stowed away in the whole poem's tidy, iambic portmanteau. It's particularly audible in the first four lines, where the mournful, vowel-heavy sounds of the cattle lowing and the bell's tolling are grounded by the earthier throb of tired, heavy, mud-caked footfall. In stanza two, the sky has darkened, and the sounds have become lighter, fainter, yet somehow more intense: the beetle's "droning flight", the high, faint and silvery "tinklings" of sheep-bells. Then the music changes again, to suit the "moping owl" in the next stanza. Presumably, the owl is disturbed by human presences rather than unquiet spirits unless, of course, as is sometimes suggested, the narrator himself is a ghost. The low status of the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" is indicated by the fact that they are interred in the churchyard, and not inside the church. They have no ornate memorials. The poet himself is now their chief mourner, and the recording angel of their rustic life. His portrait is idealised, but strong details lend realism. The housewife's vague but incessant activity is nicely captured in "ply", and the credible little adjective, "envied," in "envied kiss", evokes the children's scrambling rivalry for their father's attention. From stanza eight, Grey's lyricism builds to a grander music. Milton is named at the argument's climax, and Milton's art is equalled in the syntax and tone. Originally, Gray chose three Romans as representative men of achievement: Cato, Tully and Caesar. A 19th-century commentator remarks that the English figures Gray substituted, Hampden, Milton and Cromwell (not quite so distantly historical in Gray's time, of course), must have struck readers as a daring novelty. The revision certainly sharpens the poem's crucial insight, and stresses that the uneducated villagers were not simply denied the heroism of a lost golden age, but a political influence closer to home. Gray goes on to explore a counter-argument. If poverty circumscribes the "growing virtues" of the rustics, equally, it limits their "crimes". Obscurity is safer than fame, and morally superior. Yet the poem's deeper concern seems to be with memory and memorial: "For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey./ This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,/ Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,/ Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?" The rhymes on the tombstones may be "uncouth", the inscriptions basic,

yet by emphasising the importance of text, of lettering and naming, the poet is reinforcing his earlier argument. The final "Epitaph" is a conundrum. Is it Gray's epitaph on himself (as the whole poem might be an elegy to himself) or does it commemorate, as sometimes supposed, the "stone-cutter poet?" Like the inscription on the tomb of the unknown soldier, it celebrates noble obscurity, but its resonant memorial would not, of course, exist without language and literacy. current system, and what will happen to them in the projected future of tuition fees, cuts to Arts and Humanities funding and the no doubt ongoing reinventions of the school curriculum?

Read the full article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/17/poemof-the-week-elegy-country-churchyard#ixzz2UgvVvlfe

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