Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Gray begins his elegy with a sensuous, vivid description—not of the graveyard where the speaker is standing, but of the surrounding rural landscape—and a rhyme emphasizing the speaker’s placement within the landscape: “lea” (Line 2) and “me” (Line 4). This evocative and lyric description of the countryside continues in the second and third stanzas. Gray is paying close, careful attention to the pastoral setting as such a setting is incredibly important in elegy. In what is widely considered the most important and influential English elegy, “Lycidas,” John Milton called back to a much earlier Greek tradition where shepherds sat around in the countryside and lamented the death of one of their shepherd-friends, but eventually found comfort and consolation for their loss (Milton, John. “Lycidas.” Poetry Foundation). Gray is clearly alluding to Milton’s elegy in this poem and imitating the pastoral setting of the earlier poem.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker finally begins to describe the graveyard where he is standing and writes that the “rude forefathers” (Line 16) of the small town are buried there. The speaker doesn’t mean “rude” as inconsiderate; he means “rude” as uneducated. Stanzas five, six, and seven imagine the agrarian lives led by the unschooled countryfolk laid to rest in the cemetery.

In “Lycidas,” Milton pretended he and his dead friend were shepherds. That might seem odd, but it would not have seemed at all so to the Greeks from whom Milton was borrowing. They were all city folk pretending to be countryfolk in poems. Gray, on the other hand, is writing about actual countryfolk, which was considered revolutionary in 1751 when English poetry tended to focus on only the most privileged members of society. Moreover, unlike Milton, Gray is not just writing about one death. There are many dead in the churchyard in which the speaker is standing. When the speaker writes “forefathers” (Line 16) plural in the fourth stanza; uses the plural pronoun “them” (Lines 20-21) in the fifth and sixth stanza; and employs the plural possessive “their” (Lines 20, 23, 25-28) in the fifth stanza, sixth stanza, and on every line in the seventh stanza, it’s pretty clear the speaker is writing about more than one dead person.

In stanzas four through seven, Gray is writing about a group of long dead farmers, which seems peculiar. At the time Gray wrote this poem, an English elegy could be one of two things: First, an elegy could be a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. Milton’s “Lycidas” is an example of this kind of elegy, and this is the most often used contemporary definition. In Gray’s time, however, an elegy could also be a poem of serious reflection on any subject. Prior to Gray, John Donne wrote elegies on many subjects, including autumn (Donne, John. “Elegy IX: The Autumnal.” Poetry Foundation.); Gray’s contemporaries James Hammond and William Shenstone wrote elegies about love and other subjects (Hammond James. “Elegy II.” Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive; “Shenstone, William. “Elegies Written on Many Different Occasions.” Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership). Gray originally titled his poem ,“Stanzas, wrote in a Country Church-Yard,” but a writer-friend suggested he change the title (Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy. Johns Hopkins University, 1985, p. 133).

One way to interpret Gray’s “Elegy” is to say that it starts as a serious reflection on mortality and class, then becomes a poem of mourning occasioned by the speaker’s imagining of his own death, thereby encompassing both definitions of “elegy.” A better way to interpret the poem, however, is to say that in Gray’s time, the definition of elegy was far from clear-cut. Gray’s elegy is a serious reflection on mortality and class and a poem mourning a specific death (the poet’s). To understand this poem, the reader needs to understand that both these definitions of elegy are applicable.

In stanza eight, the speaker personifies “Ambition” (Line 29) and “Grandeur” (Line 31) and writes that Ambition shouldn’t make fun of the lower-class people buried in the churchyard and Grandeur shouldn’t look down on them. In this stanza, the speaker isn’t saying it’s a shame that these poor farmers are dead; instead, he’s saying it’s a shame not everyone is given the same opportunities in life. This fits better with the second definition of elegy: a poem of serious reflection written on any subject. This stanza is a serious reflection on class just as much as it is a serious reflection on death.

Stanza nine reflects upon class and death in relatively equal proportions. The first two lines of this stanza are about heraldry, power, beauty, and wealth (Lines 33-34). The last two lines point out that, no matter what humans have or do in life, everyone will die (Lines 35-36). This meditation and serious reflection on class and death in relatively equal proportions continues in stanzas 10 through 19.

Here, Gray continues to personify abstract concepts, the way he did in stanza eight. “Mem’ry” (Line 38) is personified in stanza 10; “Honour” (Line 43) is personified in stanza 11 as are “Flatt’ry” and “Death” (44); “Knowledge” (Line 49) and “Penury” (Line 51) are personified in stanza 13; and “Luxury” and “Pride” (Line 71) are compared to gods in stanza 18. In “Lycidas,” Milton wrote of a funeral procession, also known as a procession of mourners: A series of Greek Gods come through the poem to help the poet mourn the dead Lycidas. Gray’s elegy is concerned with lower-class Englishmen, so he doesn’t invoke Greek Gods; nonetheless, the personified concepts marching through the poem in these stanzas have the feeling of a procession of mourners. However, the fact that these aren’t actual people, just abstract concepts having to do with class and that are described as if they were people, contributes to the serious meditation on class and mortality.

In stanza 15, the speaker overtly references Milton by name rather than just subtly alluding to him by imitating “Lycidas.” The speaker looks around the graveyard and observes “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest” (Line 59). This is clever because it’s putting Milton in the poem and explicitly acknowledging the debt the poem owes to Milton, but it also sets Gray’s poem apart from his predecessor. Milton didn’t just elegize Edward King as a shepherd; he also elegized King as a fellow poet. This is a feature of the English elegy where a poet gets one point for elegizing a dead friend, but double points if that friend is also a poet. As a result, many of the most ambitious and famous elegies in English are written for fellow poets—for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy for John Keats and W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats. This presents a bit of a problem for Gray though, since the people in the churchyard weren’t taught to read and write and, as a result, could not have written poetry. Gray neatly sidesteps this issue by pointing out that someone in this graveyard could have had just as much talent as Milton, and simply not have had the opportunity to use it. He’s invoking Milton both positively—by naming him and saying the someone in this graveyard is likely as talented as Milton—and negatively—by saying no one in this graveyard was given the same chances as Milton. This further entwines the two definitions of elegy, because it uses Milton and the example of Milton’s elegy to contribute to a meditation on class.

The speaker’s meditation on the relative use/uselessness of earthly fame in stanzas eight through 19 leads to real lament in stanzas 20 through 23. The memorial of the crude graves “Implores the passing tribute of a sigh” (Line 80). This sigh leads to weeping in stanza 23 (Line 90). Such tears are expected in the traditional elegy, but the reference is to a collective (the nameless villagers in the graveyard), not a specific, individual death. Meditating on a nameless collective instead of an individual death better fits with the second definition of elegy.   

Many inferior poets would have ended the poem with the last two lines of stanza 23: “Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, / Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires” (Lines 91-92). Gray, however, includes a third act to follow his opening description and his meditation on class and death. In stanzas 24 through 29, the speaker imagines a “kindred spirit” visiting the graveyard after the speaker’s death and asking about the speaker’s “fate” (Line 96). In response, a white-haired local, or “hoary-headed swain” (Line 97) tells what he knows of the poet/speaker’s life and death, then instructs the visitor to read the speaker’s epitaph. The traditional elegy is all about finding substitutions for a loss. In this poem, the epitaph is the substitution for the lost living speech of the poet. Peter Sacks explains: “[S]o urgently does the poet need the assurance that his final, posthumous language (the epitaph) will continue to assert itself beyond his death that he contrives an action within the poem in which that epitaph seems actually to be read” (Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy. Johns Hopkins University, 1985, p. 133).

Substitution is important in the traditional elegy, but consolation is even more important. This elegy is supposed to end with consolation for the loss of the dead person. Traditionally, this consolation is achieved with an image of the dead person in heaven, also known as an apotheosis of the dead. This is exactly what happens in Gray’s poem. The epitaph tells readers that the poet is close to God in heaven.

This ending is very much traditional, though it was born of the speaker’s serious meditation on class and death. More and more, readers and scholars associate the word “elegy” with the traditional definition. Gray’s poem is one of the last moments in English poetry when two definitions held equal sway.