Celebrating the Simple Life: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Thomas Gray's Beloved Poem

Photo by Hannah Wernecke on Unsplash

Open the pages of a local newspaper and your eyes are likely to fall upon an obituary that includes lines like these: “John was a responsible citizen, a loving father, and a good neighbor. He was always ready to help, especially with handyman jobs. But his real passion was the outdoors, especially hunting and fishing. And he loved to root for his Packers.”

Just a few splashes of ink mark out a man’s 80 or 90 years on earth, explain how he spoke, moved, and the things that put a glint in his eye. They try to explain the moments large and small, successes, and failures accumulated across the decades. A few stale syllables articulate in dry words the longings, pleasures, and regrets—only ever half-understood by the man himself—that welled up and overflowed his heart. There aren’t enough words to sum up the miniature cosmos that is a human soul and life, and so, with limited newspaper space, we settle for 200 of them.

The people described in 200 words aren’t the world’s great celebrities, politicians, or military leaders—the people marked for elaborate funerals with their names in history books. These are “ordinary people,” if such a category exists. But 18th-century poet Thomas Gray suggested that such folk deserve memorializing and elaborate elegies as much as the prominent figures in our society, whose fame is often ill-gotten.

A portrait of Thomas Gray, 1747–1478, by John Giles Eccardt. Oil on canvas; 15 7/8 inches by 12 7/8 inches. National Portrait Gallery, London. Thomas Gray was a shy British poet who published only 13 poems over his lifetime. His most famous is "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." (Public Domain)

Country Cemetery, Eternal Significance

Thomas Gray’s much-beloved and perennially popular poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” celebrates the beauties of a simple life. In an incomplete and fragmented way, it manages to reflect the living flame of a human life, however obscure it may be. As literature professor William Harmon wrote in “The Classic Hundred Poems,” “This elegy concerns the deaths of a whole class of people, who have been just the sort that nobody bothers to write elegies about.”

Gray worked on the poem on and off for years, but likely began it around 1741. Critics agree that the graveyard referenced in the title, which provides the setting for the poem, probably belongs to the church of St. Giles in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. It was a town Gray frequented because his mother lived there. The “Oxford Companion to English Literature,” 5th Edition, informs us that “the poem ... contains some of the best-known lines in English literature,” and critic A.L. Sytton Sells believes that no other similar, brief poem has received the same attention and won the same popularity as this “Elegy.”

The poem, in four-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, reflects on the lives of the unassuming country folk buried at St. Giles, the emptiness of worldly ambition, and the poet’s own uncertain future. It belongs to an 18th-century poetic school known as the “Graveyard School,” a collection of meditative reflections on mortality that often take place in cemeteries.

But in spite of the dismally titled “Graveyard School” to which it belongs, Gray’s poem isn’t particularly morbid. It begins with a peaceful nightfall in the countryside:

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.

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;

                             . . . 

The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand‘ring near her secret bow’r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.

These rich, evocative lines set a serious tone, but not a dark one. They’re filled with life expressed through animal sounds: lowing of cattle, humming of insects, hooting of the owl. The owl’s voice, though tinged with eeriness, is not an unpleasant thing to hear on a calm night, especially alongside the peaceful lowing of cattle. Most of us have experienced such an evening and the quiet calm that comes on certain summer nights when all the work is done.

The poet, sequestered in the gathering dark, has set the stage for his reflections. He first thinks of the “rude forefathers of the hamlet” who lie buried in the graveyard. He pictures what their lives were like—simple, though shot through with love and meaning. In a few exquisite lines, the poet captures in a snapshot the entirety of a man’s life, especially the beauty of ordinary moments:

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Then the poet imagines the “useful toil” of their days: harvesting with their sickles, furrowing the fields, and felling trees in the forest.

Ambition, Recognition, and Notoriety

This leads directly to Gray’s reflections on ambition. We shouldn’t pity these poor farmers their “destiny obscure,” because, first, the mighty and lowly both end the same way—asleep in the graveyard. Second, the men and women sleeping in the country churchyard might easily have possessed the same greatness of heart and character, even the same potential talent and genius, as more prominent people, but their circumstances prevented these things from ever appearing to the outside world.

Peoples’ intrinsic character—whether good or bad—isn’t determined by the size of their deeds. An unknown laborer might stand up to “the little tyrant of his fields” with the same degree of courage as a soldier facing a more formidable foe. In a pair of brilliant contrasting metaphors, Gray compares these country folk, with their hidden potentialities, to gems in underwater caves or flowers in the midst of deserts, neither of which are ever seen by human eyes.

The final equality death bestows on all is a motif that runs throughout the poem. Using poetic inversion that adds to the memorability of the lines, Gray writes:

“Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?” 

A Poet’s Epitaph

The theme recurs at the poem’s end when Gray envisions his own death as related by an uneducated worker speaking to the reader. The contrast between the learned and unlearned is erased as both kneel down inside the cemetery.

Gray puts into the mouth of the “hoary-headed swain” (rural laborer) some of the poem’s most beautiful lines with vivid sensory details. Very few farmhands would speak with this man’s poetic flourish, but his gorgeous poetic lines emphasize how class distinctions aren’t the determining factor when it comes to the refinement of the character or the soul. Maybe the workman couldn’t articulate the beauty of what he’s seen, but that doesn’t mean he’s any less sensitive to it than the Cambridge poet.

The Swain, who is a youth buried in the cemetery, says,

There at the foot of younger nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

Here, the beautiful alliteration and consonance of the stanza’s final line mirrors and evokes the bubbling sound of the stream it describes.

But who is this youth that the laborer is describing, the man he used to see walking the fields in an agitated state? Harmon explains that he is actually Gray himself, who is envisioning someone, in the future, asking the locals about the solitary poet they used to see wandering the countryside. Thus the speaker of the poem merges with those in the cemetery he has been describing.

The final stanzas may be read as Gray’s epitaph for himself. “The Oxford Companion to English Literature” states that critics view the closing stanzas as an expression of his anxiety about his own poetic future along with his memories of a friend who died young, Richard West. Gray’s reflections throughout the poem on the emptiness of ambition may have been an attempt to soothe his own disappointments as a poet who lacked fame.

The following lines could certainly be the sentiments of a frustrated young poet:

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And melancholy marked him for her own.

However, the youth who is memorialized in the epitaph—whether that be Gray himself, his friend West, or some combination of both—seems to have found peace in a simple, unnoticed life by the end of the epitaph:

He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear, He gained from Heav’n (‘twas all he wished) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose), The bosom of his Father and his God.

Earlier in the poem, Gray noted all people’s desire to be remembered, at least by our loved ones, if not by the world. Similarly, the aspiring poet laments that he is to “Fame unknown.” Yet, with those very words—and all the magic lines of this poem—Gray succeeded in winning for himself remembrance as a poet of remarkable skill—while at the same time reminding us of the value of every human life, especially the hidden ones.