Thomas Gray
Life and works
Thomas Gray was born in London in 1716. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge where he spent most of
his life. Gray began to write poetry in English as well as the Latin of his youth. He began his most famous
poem “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” in 1745, completing it in 1750.
He kept on writing poems, marking a lucid shift from the lucid exposition typical of Neoclassicism to a more
obscure and much darker form of poetry marked by an interest in the sublime, which anticipated
Romanticism.
He died in 1771.
Gray and the Sublime
Gray’s poem is written in the form of an elegy, a poetic lament for somebody who has died, but his subject
is not an individual person, but the lives of different generations of an entire rural community which comes
to represent humankind and life in general.
Burke’s essay explores the mixture of horror and pleasure which enters our minds particularly when we
think about things related to the infinite.
“Elegy written in a country churchyard”
For the first three stanzas we do not know the nature of the place Gray is describing. Only from the end of
the third verse do we see the church tower emerging and then the graveyard shaded by ancient trees
where the forefathers of the village lay buried. Important at the beginning of the poem is the establishment
of a certain mood of growing darkness and melancholy solitude.
It is the end of the working day, and the poet occupies the border between the living and the deat. The
reflections which the graveyard inspires in Gray concern the place of ordinary human life in the natural
cycle of generation and corruption.
The poet in fact goes on to meditate on the forgotten lives of the villagers. He imagines that among them
there may have been potentially great literary talents of possibly, political tyrants.
However, in death, the poet remarks, they become equal to the greatest of men whose positions and
achievements are cancelled in the grave. The poem ends with the poet imagining his own eventual death,
evoked as a simple absence. This ending may in part relate to Gray’s uncertainty about his own literary
“immortality”, but it may also be read as a reflection on the ultimate vanity of poetry itself as a form of
memory immune to death.
Between Classicism and Romanticism
