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Thomas Gray's Elegy. Throughout ... time. Gray's Elegy contrasts the simplicity
and virtue of the past with the vain and boastful present. ...
Addison's "Campaign" and Gray's "Elegy". Addison's "Campaign" and Gray's "Elegy".
(Joseph Addison)(Thomas Gray) Rodney Stenning Edgecombe. ...
Elegy. Critics ... Readers whose memories have made Gray's "Elegy" one of the most
loved poems in English seem unfazed by these questions. What ...
... An elegy is a poem of lament, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a
particular person; also, a meditative poem in plaintive or sorrowful mood. ...
Eulogies. An elegy is a poem that reflects upon death. ... It makes others think.
An elegy to some people, is very depressing to read. ...
Submitted by vimuk_in on July 16, 2007
Category: English
Words: 1525 | Pages: 7
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Critics have spent entire books interpreting Gray's "Elegy." Is it ironic, as Cleanth Brooks would have us believe, or is it sentimental, as Samuel Johnson might say? Does it express Gray's melancholic democratic feelings about the oneness of human experience from the perspective of death, or does Gray discuss the life and death of another elegist, one who, in his youth, suffered the same obscurity as the "rude forefathers" in the country graveyard? Should Gray have added the final "Epitaph" to his work?
Readers whose memories have made Gray's "Elegy" one of the most loved poems in English seem unfazed by these questions. What matters to readers, over time, is the power of "Elegy" to console. Its title describes its function: lamenting someone's death, and affirming the life that preceded it so that we can be comforted. One may die after decades of anonymous labour, uneducated, unknown or scarcely remembered, one's potential unrealized, Gray's poem says, but that life will have as many joys, and far fewer ill effects on others, than lives of the rich, the powerful, the famous. Also, the great memorials that money can buy do no more for the deceased than a common grave marker. In the end, what counts is friendship, being mourned, being cried for by someone who was close. "He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear, / He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend" (123-24). This sentiment, found in the controversial epitaph, affirms what the graveyard's lonely visitor says earlier: "On some fond breast the parting soul relies, / Some pious drops the closing eye requires" (89-90). Gray's restraint, his habit of speaking in universals rather than particulars, and his shifting from one speaker to another, control the powerful feelings these lines call up. They frame everything at some distance from the viewer.
The poem opens with a death-bell sounding, a knell. The lowing of cattle, the droning of a beetle in flight, the tinkling of sheep-bells, and...
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