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First page of Dodsley's illustrated edition of Gray's Elegy with illustration by Richard Bentley. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. [1] The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742.
Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London.His father, Philip Gray, was a scrivener and his mother, Dorothy Antrobus, was a milliner. [3] He was the fifth of twelve children, and the only one to survive infancy. [4]
The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse ...
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
Gray's Elegy (1750) [74] Thomas Gray was a regular visitor to Stoke Poges, which was home to his mother and an aunt, [ 75 ] and the churchyard at St Giles is reputed to have been the inspiration for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard , though this is not universally accepted. [ 76 ]
"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" is an 18th-century ode by Thomas Gray. It is composed of ten 10-line stanzas, rhyming ABABCCDEED, with the B lines and final D line in iambic trimeter and the others in iambic tetrameter.
In a similar vein, Brooks analyzes Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". The message of this poem seems straightforward and was duplicated by many other "graveyard" poems of the late eighteenth century. Therefore, according to Brooks, what makes it one of the most famous in the English language cannot be the poem's message.
William Thomas Beckford: art collector who purchased "William Blake's drawings for Gray's Elegy" (this would be one of several examples of famous illustrated editions of the Elegy) Dewitt Miller : book collector, includes the comment "news came of the splendid sum fetched by Gray's Elegy at the Hoe sale" (a few details of how collectable ...