Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray

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Introduction

The speaker is hanging out in a churchyard just after the sun goes down. It's dark and

a bit spooky.

He looks at the dimly lit gravestones, but none of the grave markers are all that impressive—

most of the people buried here are poor folks from the village, so their

tombstones are just simple, roughly carved stones.

Then he shakes his finger at the reader, and tells us not to get all

snobby about the rough monuments these dead guys have

on their tombs, since, really, it doesn't matter what kind of a

tomb you have when you're dead, anyway.

The speaker starts to imagine the kinds of lives these dead guys

probably led.

And guys, the speaker reminds us, we're all going to die someday

But that gets the speaker thinking about his own inevitable death, and he gets a little freaked out.

He imagines that someday in the future, some random guy (a "kindred spirit") might pass

through this same graveyard, just as he was doing today.

And that guy might see the speaker's tombstone, and ask a

local villager about it.

And then he imagines what the villager might say about him.

At the end, he imagines that the villager points out the epitaph

engraved on the tombstone, and invites the passer-by to read it for

himself.

So basically, Thomas Gray writes his own epitaph at the end of this

poem.

STANZA 1

Lines 1-4

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,The plowman homeward plods his weary way,And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

So, right off the bat we have some vocab to sort out in this poem. The "curfew" is a bell that rings at the end of the day, but a "knell" is a

bell that rings when someone dies. So it's like the "parting day" is

actually dying. Sounds like a metaphor.

The mooing herd of cows makes its winding way over the meadow

("lea" = "meadows")And the tired farmer clomps on

home.

Now that the cows and the farmer are out of the picture, the speaker

gets everything in the world to himself (he has to share it with the growing darkness, but that's not so

bad).

Notice that the speaker refers to himself in the first person right

away in that first stanza: the parting farmer and cows leave "the

world to me."

This would be a good time to note that the poet often removes

vowels and replaces them with an apostrophe, like "o'er" instead of

"over" in the second line.

If you ever notice an odd-looking word with an apostrophe in it, try replacing the apostrophe with a letter to make a familiar word.

Gray makes these contractions to make the number of syllables fit

the iambic pentameter.

Iambic PentameterDefinition:

Probably the single most useful technical term in poetry (and in drama, too)., if you learn one term in poetry, let it be the old I.P. Or maybe metaphor.

An iamb is a metrical foot that consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one—daDUM.

Penta- means five.

Meter refers to a regular rhythmic pattern in poetry.

So iambic pentameter is a kind of rhythmic pattern that consists of five iambs per line, almost like five heartbeats: daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM.

Let's try it out on the first line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on.

Just read that line aloud to yourself, and you'll be sure to hear those daDUMs.

Of course, though many poets use this rhythm, it might get pretty stinkin' boring after a while if they didn't shake it up a bit. So while a ton of poems are written in iambic pentameter, you'd be hard pressed to find one that follows the meter perfectly. Poets like to mix it up with metrical variations like extra syllables or out-of-order stresses.

Iambic pentameter has some majorly early roots, dating back to Latin verse and Old French, but Chaucer is considered the pioneer of the verse in English and used it for his famous Canterbury Tales. it's been around that long.

While we're talking about form, we'll also point out the rhyme

scheme here—it's ABAB.

STANZA 2

Lines 5-8

Now fades the glimm'ring 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;

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STANZA 2 - SUMMARY

So what's happening, exactly? The "glimm'ring landscape" is fading

from the poet's sight.

Must be sunset, but we knew that from the first stanza.

The air is quiet, too, except for the buzz of the occasional beetle and the tinkling bells hanging around

the necks of livestock in their "folds" (a.k.a. barns).

Sounds peaceful and sleepy, like everything is winding down.

There are some interesting literary devices in these lines, too: "solemn

stillness" is a great example of alliteration, and the

speaker personifies the "tinkling" of the bells when he says that

they're "drowsy."

ALLITERATION

Definition:

Alliteration is a term used to describe the repetition of initial consonant sounds. More simply put, alliteration is what happens when words that begin with the same consonant (the letters that aren't vowels) get all smashed together to great effect. As in, "Carol constantly craves cornflakes." As you may have guessed, you'll find alliteration in many a tongue twister, but it's also just about everywhere in literature, too.For a sample of the sonic power of alliteration in literature, check out Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" and Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Ligeia

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Babu Appat