stunk and littered in St. Paul’s.’ To his Augustan word-play and polish, Gray joined
the proto-Romantic tastes shown in his letters.
Gray put the Ode, a neo-classical form imitated from the Greek lyric poet Pindar,
to new purposes. It is easy to like ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in
a Tub of Gold Fishes’: the heroi-comic idiom of Pope is used to refine sentiment,
ending in a mock-serious warning to the ladies:
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters gold.Johnson thought the Odes a misapplication of talent. The moral of the Eton Ode –
‘where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise’ – is almost too well-turned to be
taken as seriously as Gray meant. His two most ambitious Odes imitate Pindar both
in form and in their lofty, condensed and allusive style.The Progress of Poesy shows
the Muses migrating from a conquered Greece to the free England of Shakespeare
and Milton. From the sublime Milton to Gray himself there is a decline. Pindar, ‘the
Theban eagle’, had soared high. Gray aspires to ‘keep his distant way / Beyond the
limits of a vulgar fate, / Beneath the Good how far – but far above the Great.’ Pope
had condescended to ministers, but knew them; Gray’s Poesy distances herself from
Power; Sterne dedicated his novel to William Pitt, the new Prime Minister.
According to Pope, English verse had improved from correctness to noble energy:
‘Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join / The varying verse, the full-
resounding line,/ The long majestic march and energy divine.’ In Gray’s Pr ogress
the sublime is remote in time or place: Helicon, the frozen North, or ‘Chili’s bound-
less for ests’. His note reads: ‘Extensive influence of poetic Genius over the remotest
and most uncivilized nations: its connections with liberty, and the virtues that natu-
rally attend on it (See the Erse, Norwegian, and Welch Fragments, the Lapland and
American songs.)’Gray interested himself in the remote origins of British poetry,
and in Parry, a blind Welsh harper who visited Cambridge. In The Bard,a Pindaric
Ode set in 1290, the last Welsh oral poet prophesies the ruin of the invader, Edward
I, and the return of poetry to Britain under the (Welsh) Tudors. His appearance is
dramatic:
On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood
(Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air) ...Gray believed that Edward had ordered all bards to be killed. The bard’s last words
to the king are: ‘ “Be thine Despair, and scept’red Care, / To triumph, and to die, are
mine.” / He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height / Deep in the roar-
ing tide he plung’d to endless night.’Poesy has an epigraph from Pindar:fwnaˆnta
sunetoˆısin: e
,
~ de; to; paˆn eJrmhne ́wn catı ́zei:‘speaking to the intelligent alone – for
the rest they need interpreters’.
The Odes succeeded, and for the first time difficult poems about poetry became
fashionable. ‘Nobody understands me, & I am perfectly satisfied,’ Gray wrote to
THE EMERGENCE OF SENSIBILITY 207