Analysis Of Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard By Thomas Gray

Paul Mariani, an American poet and a professor at the Boston College, once said that “Lyric poetry is by its very nature elegiac–we write about what in fact is already slipping away from us.” This expression demonstrates how elegies can be psychological and literary devices used to convey serious feelings of reconceiving a lost wonder as the subject of lamentation “slips” with time (Harbus 186). What this quote fails to show, however, is that elegies are more than forms of communication between the poet and the reader. As noted by Michele T. Sharp, below the surface, elegies are also used for establishing a “poetic stature”. By publishing an elegy, a poet makes a statement that calls for scrutiny and evaluation by the public. Such a gamble

“Gray was,” describes Noggle and Lipking, “not easily satisfied; he constantly revised his poems and published very little,” (1330). Gray’s meticulousness in producing works for the public to see proves the importance he gave to his public image as a poet. In his elegy “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, Gray takes his sorrowful view of the countryside graveyard and reflects on the mortality and morality of mankind. While doing so, Gray also examines the social context of the 18th century and creates a position in the poem in which the speaker praises the lower class and criticizes the higher class. Although Gray noticeably sides with the modesty of the poor over the haughtiness of the rich in the elegy, he does not classify himself into any of the social contexts he deliberates and instead uses the elegy to establish his image as an observant wanderer of earth. Gray does, however, accept his fate and attaches himself to the rest of humanity through admittance of the mortality of his body in his epitaph at the end of the

For instance, after looking at the graves of the countrymen, Gray points out that the laborers will not be able to come back from the dead to enjoy working on the fields and intricately describes the work routine of the farm workers (Mazzeno, “Elegy-Summary”):
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team