The Moping Owl :the Epitome of Melancholy
by Zinia Mitra
The history of Eighteenth Century poetry for all its confirmation to, what we call, the Augustan
tradition, appears to us today as the history of struggle between the old and the new forms of poetry
and the gradual triumph and acceptance of the new. On one hand there were poets who adhered to
the continuance of the Augustan tradition, to the school that Pope had popularized and brought to
perfection, and, on the other hand , there was a discernable tendency to deviate from the rigid
principles set by that school and a response to a wider range of experiences, seeking fresh subjects,
fresh forms, fresh modes of feelings and expression. When Joseph Warton in his Essay on the Genuis
and Writing of Pope (1756) held a position that Pope was a great “wit” but was not a great poet
since he allegedly lacked imaginative and emotional qualities that are fundamental to true poetry
1
and when Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), maintained that poets
must stop imitations of classical models and be sensitive to nature and the promptings of individual
genius, it was evident that a change of taste was beginning to express itself in quite an open
disapproval. Age of Johnson (1744-84) was an age of transition, innovation and varied
experimentation. The chief characteristics to which the school of Pope adhered to as the classical
school were astuteness and distinct lack of emotion and imagination. The poetry they produced were
exclusively town poetry. The poetry they produced avidly rejected romantic spirit. The style and form
were extremely artificial and formal. They adhered rigorously to closed couplet.
The reaction that I was referring to entered into poetry and modified its dry intellectuality and its
constricted didactic principles. Emotion, passion and imagination was set in. Poetry showed a gradual
increase in interest in nature and rustic life. The most significant was the interest in the growth of the
sense of the picturesque. With romanticism gradually making in there were attempts to br eak away
from the stereotyped conventions of poetic diction and to look for substitute in the simplicity of
phrase and language of nature. The superiority of the closed couplet was questioned and other forms
of verse began to be used in its place. Such reactions against the established conventions of an age
sometimes hurl in together and sometimes are independent of one another and yet sometimes they
cross one another at some crossroads resulting in great complication for the literary critics to note
down the characteristic deviations in clear-cut points.
We may conveniently begin with the change in form. The key characteristic of the reaction in
style was the rejection of the Popean couplet for experiments in other kind of verse. Thomson’s
Seasons was fashioned on Milton. Other examples of poetry not fashioned on the restrictive
poetic diction but belonging to the closing years of the age of Pope include William Somerville’s
The Chase, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Robert Blair’s The Grave, John Dyer’s The Ruins of
Rome (1740) and Dr. Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). The Age of
Johnson was as an age of transition and experiment ultimately led to the Romantic Revival.
The greatest protagonist of classicism at the time was Dr. Johnson and he was enthusiastically
supported by Goldsmith. As Macaulay points out :
He took it for granted that the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had
been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with
success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down
as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the
earlier part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant progress of
improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope had been, according to him, the great
reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination by the standard established among his
own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he
seems to have thought the Æneid a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have
thought so; for he preferred Pope’s Iliad to Homer’s. He pronounced that, after Hoole’s
translation of Tasso, Fairfax’s would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine
old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy’s fondness
for them.
2
Goldsmith was equally convinced that the classical standards of writing poetry were the best and
that they had attained perfection during the Augustan Age and that “Pope was the limit of classical
literature.”
The poets who showed romantic leanings, during the Age of Johnson, and who are today described
as the precursors or harbingers of the Romantic Revival were James Thomson, William Collins,
James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Cowper, George Crabbe and Thomas
Gray.
James Thomson (1700-1748) in The Seasons, which is a poem of empathetic depiction of nature,
follows the Miltonic blank verse. In his dream allegory The Castle of Indolence he used the Spenserian
stanza. William Collins’ (1721-1759) advocacy, return to nature, to unsophisticated simple life
eventually became the fundamental creeds of the Romantic Revival. Though his Oriental Eclogues was
written in the closed couplet, it was romantic in its feeling. In his the odes: To Simplicity, To Fear, To
the Passions, and in the short lyric How Sleep The Brave, and the exquisite Ode to Evening he valued
solitude and quietude. Much like Gray, whom we are to discuss, Collins exhibited deep feelings of
melancholy. James Macpherson (1736-1796) who became famous by the publication of the ‘Ossianic’
poems, which he claimed were translations of Gaelic folk literature, introduced melancholy and
romantic suggestions in poetry. William Blake (1757-1827) a mystic and a visionary with an apocalyptic
effusion offered a complete break form classical poetry. His Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience depict the love of the country, of simple life of childhood and home that mark him
out as a leader of naturalistic poetry on which Wordsworth was to labour later. In The Book of Thel,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is the prophetic voice of Blake which appeals to the reader. Robert
Burns (1759-96) displayed a great love for nature. William Cowper (1731-1800) described the homely
scenes and pleasures and pains of simple humans. George Crabbe (1754-1832) standing midway
between the Augustans and the Romantics remained classical in form but did not shrug off his
romantic temper.
If we recall James Thomson, William Collins, James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert Burns, William
Cowper, George Crabbe and Thomas Gray, we must also mention Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) who
conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary monk of the 15th century and had made a
very strong appeal of medievalism. His death, though attracted little notice at that time was
commemorated later by Shelley in Adonais, by Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence,
by Coleridge in A Monody on the Death of Chatterton, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Five English Poets,
by Henry Wallis in his painting titled “The Death of Chatterton," John Keats had dedicated one of his
sonnets in his name : “To Chatterton”. Keats also inscribed Endymion " to the memory of Thomas
Chatterton".
What appeals to us in Thomas Gray is that he was a recluse and produced little poetry, but, the little he
wrote is exquisite both in quality and finish. This instantly draws our admiration probably because it
stands in stern contrast to the our present day poets who produce bulks and bulks of unreadable poetry.
Thomas Gray composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in 1750, when he was only thirty –
four. It eventually became one of the best –known poems of later eighteenth century. It elevated Gray
to a considerable position of influence for the first generation of Romantics. Wordsworth himself had
singled out Gray and quoted his sonnet “On the Death of Richard West” to establish his argument in his
Preface to Lyrical Ballads that a good poem does not necessarily need to adhere to the strict principles of
a given poetic diction. His ode, “Intimations of Immortality” was much influenced by Gray's “Elegy”.
Gray's Elegy begins in a temporal space that separates the full light of day from the coming darkness ,
admirably suited to convey the sense of human mortality introduced by ‘knell’ in the very first line :
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day ,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea ,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
William Collins had epitomised this twilight state in his Ode to Evening (1747):
Now air is hushed, save where the weak-ey'd bat
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn
As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path
Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum:
This symbolic twilight time is rather condensed in Gray as the moment when darkness finally blots the
glimmering landscape out of sight :
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Having thus set the backdrop, Gray turns his attention to the foreground, to the row of narrow
graves where the ‘rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep’. Readers may frown at the word ‘rude’
today but Gray clearly used it in the sense of robust, hearty or, at the most, in the sense of rustic.
The images of nature become alive and active in the morning in contrast to the ‘drowsy tinklings’,
and ‘droning’ of the evening. The swallows twitter, the cock’s clarion call, and there’s the
‘echoing horn”. ‘Morn’ itself is a living creature calling and breathing. The poem proceeds to
reflect a while on the pastoral life, ruminates for a while on the pastoral way of life as the ideal
way of living before introducing the poem’s main theme, death, the inevitable tragedy of life. It is
because the country dwellers lived in nature they lived active lives in harmony with nature. The
harvest yielded to the sickle, and although the stubborn earth did break their furrows at times the
forest bowed to their ‘sturdy stroke’. But later in the poem we find an ambiguity creeping in
(stanza XII), as the poor are depicted as unable to realize their best potentials despite living ideal
pastoral lives :
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage ,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
On one level the poem proceeds with the poet appealing to its readers to value the modest
qualities of the good country farmers and their honest labors and not to err by reducing them by
inappropriate assessments of relative greatness, for, that i nvolves opportunities they have never
had. On another level, by the reference to the country dwellers as a Hampen or a Cromwell, a
new kind of perspective is introduced. The country dwellers are seen and valued (with the appeal
of not to be valued) through the periscope of the city life. By the references to Hampden and
Cromwell the pure pastoral heritage of their relationship with nature is altered. But again we can
say , it is only the poet who is affected with this varied perceptive, for, the poem again lets the
traditional values of pastoral life overhaul:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife ,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray ;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way .
And with,
This pleasing anxious being ever resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day”.
The implied continuance of the pastoral tradition itself is dependent on the memory of those who
live after them. The very fact that the po et can determine the ‘uncouth rhymes’ and ‘shapeless
sculpture’ in their frail memorials, along with “Their names their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d
Muse” locates the poet firmly in a world that is set apart form the simple ignorant people. The
poet is not one who is mourning the death of his companions, he is an outsider, viewing them
from outside. The epitaph that concludes the poem tells a story of a life of a simple country
shepherd.
It has often been questioned if Gray’s Elegy Written in Country Churchyard belongs at all to the kind
of elegy as per definition that involves mourning occasioned by a specific death. The original title of
the poem was “Stanzas Wrote in a Country Churchyard”. Gray is known to have later changed the
title at the suggestion of his friend William Mason who identified the alternatively rhymed iambic
pentameter quatrains as the form used in elegies. Gray’s poem is a poem of mourning even if we
overlook the specificity of remnants of his grief for Richard West (died 1742), the elegy does mourn a
particular death, along with the deaths of the obscure villagers. As is widely known, the figure of the
poet in the opening scene is derived from Milton’s Il Penseroso, a melancholic solitary figure with a
prophetic vision. Gray’s deliberate indulgence into this figure is part of mid-eighteenth century
revisitations to the melancholic.
Death is the silencing of life. It is a silencing of the sounds that are alive and active during the
morning. Throughout the elegy there is an absorbing obsession with silence as opposed to sound that
eventually leads to the epitaphic script as opposed to the living voice.
In the opening lines there is a detailed attention to the dying sounds that emerge from in the
foreground of a silence that shall begin soon. The sounds of ‘solemn stillness’. In the context of a
churchyard at nightfall, these are like lingering sounds that break out to survive death , the positive
indications to which any human will hold on to. Gray is aware that posthumous human language is
unvoiced and is dependent on the quiet meditations of an epitaphic script. The poem proceeds to
gradually introduce this quietude.
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust ,
Or flattery soothe the dull ,cold ear of Death?
The ‘silent dust’ and ‘cold ear’ are both resistant to the aggravation of voice or music. Gray educes
respect for some ‘mute’ and ‘inglorious’ Milton, for death will eventually silence all voices. Having
introduced inescapable muteness that all existence has to enfold Gray is suggestive of being in
alignment with that mute inglorious Milton himself for all his written words in the elegy.
In his The Ode on the Spring the poet observes insects, bees, gnats, butterflies, as they revel in the
sun, and pities the brevity of their life and happiness, whereupon the insects, in their turn, reply to
the lonely, obscure and solitary poet. In Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College Gray ostensibly
contrasts the carefree years of boyhood with infirmities, frustrations and disasters of mature life and
then comes the final stanza of resignation
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan;
In the Hymn to Adversity his fear of life, the dread the future, the whole burden of his age that we
recognize as melancholy overshadows the anguish of his grief over the death of his friend, West. In
the Sonnet, this grief is expressed with intensity and concentration:
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine
In The Progress of Poesy, Gray sets himself to glorify the poet's calling with exaltation but with an
allusiveness that his contemporaries were not familiar to. But it was quite a prelude to Romantic
Revival, quite a foreshadowing of Keats and Coleridge:
In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'cr ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To cheat the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.
And oft, beneath the od'rous shade
Of Chili's boundless forests laid,
She deigns to hear the savage Youth repeat
In loose numbers wildly sweet
Their feather-cinctur'd Chiefs, and dusky Loves. . . .
One of the finest precursors of romanticism, Thomas Gray, later came to be listed with Graveyard
poets along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper and Christopher Smart. Himself the very icon of
romantic alienation, his works like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich or William Turner open up
nature before us with all its delicate breathings with a lingering note of inevitable melancholy.
Notes and Reference :
1. “Thus have I endeavoured to give a critical account, with freedom, but it is hoped with impartiality, of
each of POPE's works; by which review it will appear, that the largest portion of them is of the didactic,
moral, and satyric kind; and consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry; whence it is
manifest, that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and
invention;”…
“An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope” in E n g l i s h P o e t r y 1 5 7 9 - 1 8 3 0 :
S p e n s e r a n d t h e T r a d i t i o n : Volume II. Rev. Joseph Warton, London: M. Cooper,
1756.
2. Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Sept. 1831, in Macaulay’s Life of
Samuel Johnson , by Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Schuyler , London: Macmillian ,1908
Zinia Mitra is the Head of the Department of English at Nakshalbari College, Darjeeling, India.
by Zinia Mitra
The history of Eighteenth Century poetry for all its confirmation to, what we call, the Augustan
tradition, appears to us today as the history of struggle between the old and the new forms of poetry
and the gradual triumph and acceptance of the new. On one hand there were poets who adhered to
the continuance of the Augustan tradition, to the school that Pope had popularized and brought to
perfection, and, on the other hand , there was a discernable tendency to deviate from the rigid
principles set by that school and a response to a wider range of experiences, seeking fresh subjects,
fresh forms, fresh modes of feelings and expression. When Joseph Warton in his Essay on the Genuis
and Writing of Pope (1756) held a position that Pope was a great “wit” but was not a great poet
since he allegedly lacked imaginative and emotional qualities that are fundamental to true poetry
1
and when Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), maintained that poets
must stop imitations of classical models and be sensitive to nature and the promptings of individual
genius, it was evident that a change of taste was beginning to express itself in quite an open
disapproval. Age of Johnson (1744-84) was an age of transition, innovation and varied
experimentation. The chief characteristics to which the school of Pope adhered to as the classical
school were astuteness and distinct lack of emotion and imagination. The poetry they produced were
exclusively town poetry. The poetry they produced avidly rejected romantic spirit. The style and form
were extremely artificial and formal. They adhered rigorously to closed couplet.
The reaction that I was referring to entered into poetry and modified its dry intellectuality and its
constricted didactic principles. Emotion, passion and imagination was set in. Poetry showed a gradual
increase in interest in nature and rustic life. The most significant was the interest in the growth of the
sense of the picturesque. With romanticism gradually making in there were attempts to br eak away
from the stereotyped conventions of poetic diction and to look for substitute in the simplicity of
phrase and language of nature. The superiority of the closed couplet was questioned and other forms
of verse began to be used in its place. Such reactions against the established conventions of an age
sometimes hurl in together and sometimes are independent of one another and yet sometimes they
cross one another at some crossroads resulting in great complication for the literary critics to note
down the characteristic deviations in clear-cut points.
We may conveniently begin with the change in form. The key characteristic of the reaction in
style was the rejection of the Popean couplet for experiments in other kind of verse. Thomson’s
Seasons was fashioned on Milton. Other examples of poetry not fashioned on the restrictive
poetic diction but belonging to the closing years of the age of Pope include William Somerville’s
The Chase, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Robert Blair’s The Grave, John Dyer’s The Ruins of
Rome (1740) and Dr. Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). The Age of
Johnson was as an age of transition and experiment ultimately led to the Romantic Revival.
The greatest protagonist of classicism at the time was Dr. Johnson and he was enthusiastically
supported by Goldsmith. As Macaulay points out :
He took it for granted that the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had
been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with
success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down
as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the
earlier part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant progress of
improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope had been, according to him, the great
reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination by the standard established among his
own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he
seems to have thought the Æneid a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have
thought so; for he preferred Pope’s Iliad to Homer’s. He pronounced that, after Hoole’s
translation of Tasso, Fairfax’s would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine
old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy’s fondness
for them.
2
Goldsmith was equally convinced that the classical standards of writing poetry were the best and
that they had attained perfection during the Augustan Age and that “Pope was the limit of classical
literature.”
The poets who showed romantic leanings, during the Age of Johnson, and who are today described
as the precursors or harbingers of the Romantic Revival were James Thomson, William Collins,
James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Cowper, George Crabbe and Thomas
Gray.
James Thomson (1700-1748) in The Seasons, which is a poem of empathetic depiction of nature,
follows the Miltonic blank verse. In his dream allegory The Castle of Indolence he used the Spenserian
stanza. William Collins’ (1721-1759) advocacy, return to nature, to unsophisticated simple life
eventually became the fundamental creeds of the Romantic Revival. Though his Oriental Eclogues was
written in the closed couplet, it was romantic in its feeling. In his the odes: To Simplicity, To Fear, To
the Passions, and in the short lyric How Sleep The Brave, and the exquisite Ode to Evening he valued
solitude and quietude. Much like Gray, whom we are to discuss, Collins exhibited deep feelings of
melancholy. James Macpherson (1736-1796) who became famous by the publication of the ‘Ossianic’
poems, which he claimed were translations of Gaelic folk literature, introduced melancholy and
romantic suggestions in poetry. William Blake (1757-1827) a mystic and a visionary with an apocalyptic
effusion offered a complete break form classical poetry. His Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience depict the love of the country, of simple life of childhood and home that mark him
out as a leader of naturalistic poetry on which Wordsworth was to labour later. In The Book of Thel,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is the prophetic voice of Blake which appeals to the reader. Robert
Burns (1759-96) displayed a great love for nature. William Cowper (1731-1800) described the homely
scenes and pleasures and pains of simple humans. George Crabbe (1754-1832) standing midway
between the Augustans and the Romantics remained classical in form but did not shrug off his
romantic temper.
If we recall James Thomson, William Collins, James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert Burns, William
Cowper, George Crabbe and Thomas Gray, we must also mention Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) who
conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary monk of the 15th century and had made a
very strong appeal of medievalism. His death, though attracted little notice at that time was
commemorated later by Shelley in Adonais, by Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence,
by Coleridge in A Monody on the Death of Chatterton, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Five English Poets,
by Henry Wallis in his painting titled “The Death of Chatterton," John Keats had dedicated one of his
sonnets in his name : “To Chatterton”. Keats also inscribed Endymion " to the memory of Thomas
Chatterton".
What appeals to us in Thomas Gray is that he was a recluse and produced little poetry, but, the little he
wrote is exquisite both in quality and finish. This instantly draws our admiration probably because it
stands in stern contrast to the our present day poets who produce bulks and bulks of unreadable poetry.
Thomas Gray composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in 1750, when he was only thirty –
four. It eventually became one of the best –known poems of later eighteenth century. It elevated Gray
to a considerable position of influence for the first generation of Romantics. Wordsworth himself had
singled out Gray and quoted his sonnet “On the Death of Richard West” to establish his argument in his
Preface to Lyrical Ballads that a good poem does not necessarily need to adhere to the strict principles of
a given poetic diction. His ode, “Intimations of Immortality” was much influenced by Gray's “Elegy”.
Gray's Elegy begins in a temporal space that separates the full light of day from the coming darkness ,
admirably suited to convey the sense of human mortality introduced by ‘knell’ in the very first line :
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day ,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea ,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
William Collins had epitomised this twilight state in his Ode to Evening (1747):
Now air is hushed, save where the weak-ey'd bat
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn
As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path
Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum:
This symbolic twilight time is rather condensed in Gray as the moment when darkness finally blots the
glimmering landscape out of sight :
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Having thus set the backdrop, Gray turns his attention to the foreground, to the row of narrow
graves where the ‘rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep’. Readers may frown at the word ‘rude’
today but Gray clearly used it in the sense of robust, hearty or, at the most, in the sense of rustic.
The images of nature become alive and active in the morning in contrast to the ‘drowsy tinklings’,
and ‘droning’ of the evening. The swallows twitter, the cock’s clarion call, and there’s the
‘echoing horn”. ‘Morn’ itself is a living creature calling and breathing. The poem proceeds to
reflect a while on the pastoral life, ruminates for a while on the pastoral way of life as the ideal
way of living before introducing the poem’s main theme, death, the inevitable tragedy of life. It is
because the country dwellers lived in nature they lived active lives in harmony with nature. The
harvest yielded to the sickle, and although the stubborn earth did break their furrows at times the
forest bowed to their ‘sturdy stroke’. But later in the poem we find an ambiguity creeping in
(stanza XII), as the poor are depicted as unable to realize their best potentials despite living ideal
pastoral lives :
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage ,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
On one level the poem proceeds with the poet appealing to its readers to value the modest
qualities of the good country farmers and their honest labors and not to err by reducing them by
inappropriate assessments of relative greatness, for, that i nvolves opportunities they have never
had. On another level, by the reference to the country dwellers as a Hampen or a Cromwell, a
new kind of perspective is introduced. The country dwellers are seen and valued (with the appeal
of not to be valued) through the periscope of the city life. By the references to Hampden and
Cromwell the pure pastoral heritage of their relationship with nature is altered. But again we can
say , it is only the poet who is affected with this varied perceptive, for, the poem again lets the
traditional values of pastoral life overhaul:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife ,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray ;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way .
And with,
This pleasing anxious being ever resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day”.
The implied continuance of the pastoral tradition itself is dependent on the memory of those who
live after them. The very fact that the po et can determine the ‘uncouth rhymes’ and ‘shapeless
sculpture’ in their frail memorials, along with “Their names their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d
Muse” locates the poet firmly in a world that is set apart form the simple ignorant people. The
poet is not one who is mourning the death of his companions, he is an outsider, viewing them
from outside. The epitaph that concludes the poem tells a story of a life of a simple country
shepherd.
It has often been questioned if Gray’s Elegy Written in Country Churchyard belongs at all to the kind
of elegy as per definition that involves mourning occasioned by a specific death. The original title of
the poem was “Stanzas Wrote in a Country Churchyard”. Gray is known to have later changed the
title at the suggestion of his friend William Mason who identified the alternatively rhymed iambic
pentameter quatrains as the form used in elegies. Gray’s poem is a poem of mourning even if we
overlook the specificity of remnants of his grief for Richard West (died 1742), the elegy does mourn a
particular death, along with the deaths of the obscure villagers. As is widely known, the figure of the
poet in the opening scene is derived from Milton’s Il Penseroso, a melancholic solitary figure with a
prophetic vision. Gray’s deliberate indulgence into this figure is part of mid-eighteenth century
revisitations to the melancholic.
Death is the silencing of life. It is a silencing of the sounds that are alive and active during the
morning. Throughout the elegy there is an absorbing obsession with silence as opposed to sound that
eventually leads to the epitaphic script as opposed to the living voice.
In the opening lines there is a detailed attention to the dying sounds that emerge from in the
foreground of a silence that shall begin soon. The sounds of ‘solemn stillness’. In the context of a
churchyard at nightfall, these are like lingering sounds that break out to survive death , the positive
indications to which any human will hold on to. Gray is aware that posthumous human language is
unvoiced and is dependent on the quiet meditations of an epitaphic script. The poem proceeds to
gradually introduce this quietude.
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust ,
Or flattery soothe the dull ,cold ear of Death?
The ‘silent dust’ and ‘cold ear’ are both resistant to the aggravation of voice or music. Gray educes
respect for some ‘mute’ and ‘inglorious’ Milton, for death will eventually silence all voices. Having
introduced inescapable muteness that all existence has to enfold Gray is suggestive of being in
alignment with that mute inglorious Milton himself for all his written words in the elegy.
In his The Ode on the Spring the poet observes insects, bees, gnats, butterflies, as they revel in the
sun, and pities the brevity of their life and happiness, whereupon the insects, in their turn, reply to
the lonely, obscure and solitary poet. In Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College Gray ostensibly
contrasts the carefree years of boyhood with infirmities, frustrations and disasters of mature life and
then comes the final stanza of resignation
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan;
In the Hymn to Adversity his fear of life, the dread the future, the whole burden of his age that we
recognize as melancholy overshadows the anguish of his grief over the death of his friend, West. In
the Sonnet, this grief is expressed with intensity and concentration:
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine
In The Progress of Poesy, Gray sets himself to glorify the poet's calling with exaltation but with an
allusiveness that his contemporaries were not familiar to. But it was quite a prelude to Romantic
Revival, quite a foreshadowing of Keats and Coleridge:
In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'cr ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To cheat the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.
And oft, beneath the od'rous shade
Of Chili's boundless forests laid,
She deigns to hear the savage Youth repeat
In loose numbers wildly sweet
Their feather-cinctur'd Chiefs, and dusky Loves. . . .
One of the finest precursors of romanticism, Thomas Gray, later came to be listed with Graveyard
poets along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper and Christopher Smart. Himself the very icon of
romantic alienation, his works like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich or William Turner open up
nature before us with all its delicate breathings with a lingering note of inevitable melancholy.
Notes and Reference :
1. “Thus have I endeavoured to give a critical account, with freedom, but it is hoped with impartiality, of
each of POPE's works; by which review it will appear, that the largest portion of them is of the didactic,
moral, and satyric kind; and consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry; whence it is
manifest, that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and
invention;”…
“An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope” in E n g l i s h P o e t r y 1 5 7 9 - 1 8 3 0 :
S p e n s e r a n d t h e T r a d i t i o n : Volume II. Rev. Joseph Warton, London: M. Cooper,
1756.
2. Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Sept. 1831, in Macaulay’s Life of
Samuel Johnson , by Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Schuyler , London: Macmillian ,1908
Zinia Mitra is the Head of the Department of English at Nakshalbari College, Darjeeling, India.
