Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Question 1

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Literary Loneliness

Answer 1

• the particular consciousness mid-century authors had of themselves” is “as solitary writers for solitary readers

Question 2

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Sensibility

Answer 2

• Gray’s poem is drawing on the mid-18thC’s increased interest in interiority, in inwardness (re: Locke & identity)
• “Sensibility”: ‘susceptibility to feelings’; the capacity to feel for others; to identify with & to respond to the sorrows of others; to empathize; to ‘feel the misery of others with inward pain’
• In the mid-eighteenth century, in a reversal of Popeian values, sensibility becomes a socially accepted, even desirable trait
• Whereas the Scriblerians associated a concern with interiority / inwardness as a sign of self-interestedness, at mid-century, the man of sensibility becomes the selfless/polite/moral man
• The social sign of that sensibility, registered through the body: the tear

Question 3

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Graveyard Poetry

Answer 3

• The “Elegy” is an example of “graveyard poetry”: a school of poetry & a mid-eighteenth century phenomena; begins with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742)
• Mournful, reflective in tone; explores the brevity of life, the fact of mortality
• Emerges as a reaction against Augustan aesthetic principles, which characterized such inwardness, emotionality, & self-display as gaudy & inappropriate
• Graveyard poetry’s interest in interiority is part of a broader reaction that happens in post-Pope British society, which we see in the rise of the novel & of the cult of sensibility.

Question 4

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

An Elegy

Answer 4

• A form of lyric poetry
  Augustans eschewed the lyric, for obvious reasons—i.e., it is geared toward the expression of individual emotion
• Typical subjects: a poem of mourning, for a particular person, &/or a meditation on death
• Can have a distinct form (i.e., the elegiac stanza, as in Gray’s poem = a 4-line stanza, decasyllabic, rhyming ABAB), but not absolutely necessary

Question 5

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Summary - Part One

Answer 5

• Like Pope & Leapor, Gray begins with an examination of exterior place (the landscape) in search of independent confirmation of ‘rightness’ of the existing social order
• But, much like in Leapor’s poem, exterior place doesn’t provide that affirmation; instead, Gray’s speaker must move inward, imagining the emotional life of those buried in the landscape
• Gray will ultimately make the move back to ‘the nation,’ but the order of the movement has shifted
  From external place -> social order
  To external place -> interior spaces -> social order

Question 6

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Summary - Part Two

Answer 6

• Like some labouring class poets, Gray registers the hardship, sacrifice, & suffering of the poor as real & meaningful
• That suffering/hardship can’t be easily reconciled to the social order via an appeal to concordia discors, that explanation that normalizes the sufferings of the poor
• Insists, in fact, that that hardship, sacrifice, & suffering be honoured, remembered, & commemorated

Question 7

Thomas Gray - Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard

Summary - Part Three

Answer 7

• In place of an appeal to concordia discors, we have the affirmation of the worth of each life
• The larger movement of the poem, then, is the discovery of a unifying principle (memory, commemoration) that provides dignity to the lives of the poor, that accords & acknowledges meaning in their lives, however circumscribed they might have been—& that openly accepts that their limitations & acceptance underwrite & sustain the social order