16th February 2014

On this day in 1751, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was published. Gray was a reclusive gentleman-poet and he did not write many poems, but this one brought him immediate fame and became the most reprinted poem of the 18th century. It was written when England was on the up-slope of its mercantile and imperial power; it is a vanitas vanitatum reminder, a tribute to those county folk who chose other than “to wade through slaughter to a throne” or to “heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride”:

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 tenor of their way.

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die. . . .