Mason, but his sublime meaning was so misunderstood that he had to provide notes.
Gray later translated from The Goddodin, a Welsh poem ofc.600, and the Old Norse
Edda. He also went on solo walking tours: in the Lake District, in 1769; and in
Scotland,turning back at Killiecrankie, where the wildness of the Highlands became
less pleasing.
The Elegy, by contrast, is about death, not the death of poets or poetry but of the
rural poor: ‘Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / The rude Forefathers of the
hamlet sleep.’ They had not had Gray’s chances: ‘Knowledge to their eyes her ample
page / Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll.’ Yet
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.The poet half-envies their obscurity:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Choice and placing of adjectives, and control of pace and phrasing, are finely judged.
For Johnson, the poem’s merit lay in its enforcement of moral truths. He concludes
his Life:
In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the
co mmon sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements
of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical
honours. The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and
with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning Ye t
even these bones, are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet
he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray
written often thus, it would be vain to blame, and useless to praise him.The four stanzas ask whether any one has ‘Left the warm precincts of the chearful
day, / Nor cast one longing ling’ring look behind. / On some fond breast the part-
ing soul relies ....’ Johnson’s fear of ‘something after death’ responded. At the poem’s
opening, the plowman leaves the world to darkness and to Gray, whose isolation
quivers in an exquisite word: ‘Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight’. In
the imagined ending, an illiterate rustic recalls the now buried poet as a craz’d soli-
tary. The poem ends with a reversed perspective. The Elegy’s quiet exposure of poet
and reader to the darkness of death has come home to many later poets and readers.
The Elegy’s turn from the death of others to the death of the self is symptomatic
of the Romantic change to the private and personal, a clue to the minor scope of
nearly all late 18th-century verse. The exceptions, Christopher Smart, Robert Burns
and William Blake, were not central to English writing. But this is to anticipate, and
it is necessary to note some further instances of sensibility.Pre-Romantic sensibility: ‘Ossian’
A pre-Romantic sensibility is visible in Milton, but by the time of Pope’s death it was
everywhere. Poetic role-models changed: ‘What are the Lays of artful Addison,/208 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790