To some the eighteenth-century definition of proper
poetic matter is unacceptable; but to any who believe that
true poetry may (if not "must") consist in "what oft was
thought but ne'er so well expressed," Gray's "Churchyard"
is a majestic achievement—perhaps (accepting the definition
offered) the supreme achievement of its century. Its
success, so the great critic of its day thought, lay in its
appeal to "the common reader"; and though no friend of
Gray's other work, Dr. Johnson went on to commend the "Elegy"
as abounding "with images which find a mirrour in every
mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an
echo." Universality, clarity, incisive lapidary diction—these
qualities may be somewhat staled in praise of the
"classical" style, yet it is precisely in these traits that
the "Elegy" proves most nobly. The artificial figures of
rhetorical arrangement that are so omnipresent in the antitheses,
chiasmuses, parallelisms, etc., of Pope and his
school are in Gray's best quatrains unobtrusive or even infrequent.
Often in the art of the period an affectation of simplicity
covers and reveals by turns a great thirst for ingenuity.
Swift's prose is a fair example; in the "Tale of a
Tub" and even in "Gulliver" at first sight there seems to
appear only an honest and simple directness; but pry beneath
the surface statements, or allow yourself to be dazzled by
their coruscations of meaning, and you immediately see you
are watching a stylistic prestidigitator. The later, more
orderly dignity of Dr. Johnson's exquisitely chosen diction
is likewise ingeniously studied and self-conscious. When
Gray soared into the somewhat turgid pindaric tradition of
his day, he too was slaking a thirst for rhetorical complexities.
But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor
do we have artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed
maiden" apostrophized in Collins and Joseph Warton.
For Gray the hour when the sky turns from opal to dusk
leaves one not "breathless with adoration," but moved calmly
to placid reflection tuned to drowsy tinklings or to a moping
owl. It endures no contortions of image or of verse.
It registers the sensations of the hour and the reflections
appropriate to it—simply.
It is not difficult to be clear—so we are told by some
who habitually fail of that quality—if you have nothing
subtle to say. And it has been urged on high authority in
our day that there is nothing really "fine" in Gray's "Churchyard."
However conscious Gray was in limiting his address
to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not writing
to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was
to create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and
the approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed
by doubt; it ends on a note of "trembling hope"—but
on "hope." There are perhaps better evocations of similar
moods, but not of this precise mood. Shakespeare's poignant
Sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year"), which suggests no hope,
may be one. Blake's "Nurse's Song" is, in contrast, subtly
tinged with modernistic disillusion:
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp'rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
Here, too, are no tremblings of hope, no sound confidence in
the "average" man, such as Gray surprisingly glimpses. One
begins to suspect that it is more necessary to be subtle in
evocations of despair than in those of hope, even if the
hope is tremulous. The mood Gray sought required no obvious
subtlety. The nearest approach to Gray (found in Catullus)
may likewise be said to be deficient in overtones; but it
also comes home to the heart of everyman:
o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto!
These simple lines convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving
for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have
achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple
annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud
and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and
moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an
epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray
himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms
the poem into something like a personal yet universal
requiem; and for one villager—perhaps for himself—Gray
seems to murmur through the gathering darkness: "et lux
perpetua luceat ei." Although in this epitaph we may seem
to be concerned with an individual, we do well to note that
the youth to fortune and fame unknown, whose great "bounty"
was only a tear, is as completely anonymous as the ploughman
or the rude forefathers.
The somber aspects of evening are perhaps more steadily
preserved by Gray than by his contemporaries. From Milton
to Joseph Warton all poets had made their ploughman
unwearied as (to quote Warton):
He jocund whistles thro' the twilight groves.
With Gray all this blithe whistling stopped together.
Evening poems by Dyer, Warton, and Collins had tended to
be "pretty," but here again Gray resisted temptation and
regretfully omitted a stanza designed to precede immediately
the epitaph:
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year
By hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found;
The Red-breast loves to build & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.
With similar critical tact Gray realized that one might
have too much of stately moral reflections unmixed with
drama. Possibly such an idea determined him in discarding
four noble quatrains with which he first designed to end
his poem. After line 72 in the manuscript now in Eton
College appeared these stanzas:
The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow
Exalt the brave, & idolize Success
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Power & Genius e'er conspired to bless
And thou, who mindful of the unhonour'd Dead
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate
By Night & lonely Contemplation led
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate
Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease
In still small Accents, whisp'ring from the Ground
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace
No more with Reason & thyself at Strife
Give anxious Cares & endless Wishes room
But thro the cool sequester'd Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.
"And here," comments Mason, "the Poem was originally intended
to conclude, before the happy idea of the hoary-headed
Swain, &c. suggested itself to him." To reconstitute
the poem with this original ending gives an interesting
structure. The first three quatrains evoke the fall of
darkness; four stanzas follow presenting the rude forefathers
in their narrow graves; eleven quatrains follow in
reproach of Ambition, Grandeur, Pride, et al., for failure
to realize the high merit of humility. Then after line 72
of the final version would come these four rejected stanzas,
continuing the reproach of "the thoughtless world," and
turning all too briefly to one who could "their artless
tale relate," and to the calm that then breathes around
tumultuous passion and speaks of eternal peace—and "the
silent tenor of thy doom."
That would give a simpler structure; and one may argue
whether turning back from the thoughtless world to praise
again the "cool sequester'd vale of life" and then appending
"the happy idea of the hoary-headed swain, &c." does
really improve the poem structurally. Its method is, however,
more acceptable in that now the reflections are imbedded
in "drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total
effect is more pleasing to present-day readers since we
escape, or seem to escape, from the cool universality of
humble life to a focus on an individual grief. To end on
a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given the
poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must
be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No
more" (lines 20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades
through the imaginations of gloom-fed poets. But Gray,
although an undoubted "graveyard" poet, is no mere graveyard
poet: he stands above and apart from the lot of them,
and he was not content to end despondently in a descending
gloom. His, as he told West, in a celebrated letter, was
a "white melancholy, or rather leucocholy"; and he wrote
of "lachrymae rerum" rather than of private mordant
sorrows.
The poem is couched in universals: Gray writes in "a"
country churchyard, and the actual Stoke Poges, dear and
lovely as it doubtless was to Gray, clings to the fame of
the poem almost by accident. And yet, by a sort of paradox,
this "universal" poem in its setting and mood is completely
English. One could go too far from home for examples of
distinction—for the polar stars of the rude forefathers—just
as one could err by excess of "commonplace" reflections.
Some such idea encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth
quatrain, which in the Eton MS reads (the first line
has partly perished from folding of the paper):
Some [Village] Cato [who] with dauntless Breast
The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest;
Some Caesar, guiltless of his Country's Blood.
The substitution of English names is an obvious attempt to
bring truth closer to the souls of his readers by use of
"domestica facta" and the avoidance of school-boy learning.
All these changes illustrate the quality of Gray's
curious felicity. His assault on the reader's sensibilities
was organized and careful: here is no sign of that contradiction
in terms, "unpremeditated art." He probably did not
work on the poem so long as historians have said he did, but
he scanted neither time nor attention. Mason thought the
poem begun and perhaps finished in 1742, and he connected
its somberness with Gray's great sorrow over the death of
his close friend Richard West. All this seems more than
doubtful: to Dr. Thomas Wharton in September 1746 Gray
mentioned recently composing "a few autumnal verses," and
there is no real evidence of work on the poem before this
time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of
commencement, and it may be pointed out that Mason himself
is not so sure of 1742 as have been his Victorian successors.
All he says is, "I am inclined to believe that the
Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded, at this time [1742]
also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely composition
depends largely on the "inclination" to believe that the
"Elegy" was begun in 1742 and on a later remark by Walpole
concerning Gray's project for a History of Poetry. In a
letter of 5 May 1761 Walpole joked to Montagu saying that
Gray, "if he rides Pegasus at his usual foot-pace, will
finish the first page two years hence." Not really so
slow as this remark suggests, Gray finally sent his "Elegy" to
Walpole in June of 1750, and in December he sent perhaps
an earlier form of the poem to Dr. Wharton. Naturally delighted
with the perfected utterance of this finely chiseled
work, these two friends passed it about in manuscript,
and allowed copies to be taken.
Publication, normally abhorrent to Gray, thus became
inevitable, though apparently not contemplated by Gray himself.
The private success of the poem was greater than he
had anticipated, and in February of 1751 he was horrified
to receive a letter from the editor of a young and undistinguished
periodical, "The Magazine of Magazines," who
planned to print forthwith the "ingenious poem, call'd
Reflections in a Country-Churchyard." Gray hastily wrote
to Walpole (11 February), insisting that he should "make
Dodsley print it immediately" from Walpole's copy, without
Gray's name, but with good paper and letter. He prescribed
the titlepage as well as other details, and within four
days Dodsley had the poem in print, and anticipated the
piratical "Magazine" by one day. But the "Magazine" named
Gray as the author, and success without anonymity was the
fate of the "Elegy." Edition followed edition, and the poem
was almost from birth an international classic.
One of the author's prescriptions for publication concerned
the verse form. He told Walpole that Dodsley must
"print it without any Interval between the Stanza's, because
the Sense is in some Places continued beyond them."
In the Egerton MS Gray had written the poem with no breaks
to set off quatrains, but in the earlier MS (Eton College),
where the poem is entitled, "Stanza's, wrote in a Country
Church-Yard," the quatrains are spaced in normal fashion.
The injunction shows Gray's sensitiveness as to metrical
form. He had called the poem an Elegy only after urging by
Mason, and he possibly doubted if his metre was "soft"
enough for true elegy. The metre hitherto had not been
common in elegies, though James Hammond's "Love Elegies"
(1743) had used it and won acclaim. But the heroic
(hendecasyllabic) quatrain was regarded in general as too
lofty, stately, cool, for elegy. For the universal aspect
of Gray's lament, however, it was highly apt as compared
with the less majestic octosyllabic line, hitherto normal
in this genre. For years after Gray's great success, however,
most elegies, if in quatrain form, followed Gray's
quatrain in manner, whether or not their subjects demanded
the stately line.
The reasons why Gray is almost a poet of only one poem
are not far to seek. He did not covet applause, and apart
from melancholy his own emotions were too private to be
published. In the "Elegy" he is true to himself and to the
spirit of his age—perhaps of most ages. When he sought
for material outside of his own experience, he went curiously
to books, and was captivated by the "récherché." He was
also caught by the rising cult of sublimity in his two great
pindaric odes, and by the cult of the picturesque in his
flirtations with Scandinavian materials. In these later
poems he broadened the field of poetic material notably;
but in them he hardly deepened the imaginative or emotional
tone: his manner, rather, became elaborate and theatrical.
The "Elegy" is the language of the heart sincerely perfected.
The poem has pleased many and pleased long—throughout
two centuries. In part it works through "pleasing melancholy";
in part it appeals to innumerable humble readers
conscious of their own unheralded merit. Inevitably, since
the industrial revolution, modernist critics have tended to
stress its appeal to class consciousness. This appeal,
real though it is, can be overemphasized. The rude forefathers
are not primarily presented as underprivileged.
Though poverty-stricken and ignorant, they are happy in
family life and jocund in the field. "Nature is nature
wherever placed," as the intellectuals of Gray's time loved
to say, and the powers of the village fathers, potentially,
equal the greatest; their virtue is contentment. They
neither want nor need "storied urn or animated bust." If
they are unappreciated by Ambition, Grandeur, Pride, et al.,
the lack of appreciation is due to a corruption of values.
The value commended in the "Elegy" is that of the simple
life, which alone is rational and virtuous—it is the life
according to nature. Sophisticated living, Gray implies in
the stanza that once ended the poem, finds man at war with
himself and with reason; but the cool sequestered path—its
goal identical with that of the paths of Glory—finds man
at peace with himself and with reason. The theme was not
new before Gray made it peculiarly his own, and it has become
somewhat hackneyed in the last two hundred years; but
the fact that it is seldom unheard in any decade testifies
to its permanency of appeal, and the fact that it was "ne'er
so well express'd" as in the "Elegy" justifies our love for
that poem.
George Sherburn
Harvard University
