125 No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,) The bosom of his Father and his God. ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. NOTES. Line 1. Gray himself annotated this line by quoting an exquisite passage from the opening of the eighth canto of Dante's Purgatorio: Squilla di lontano, Che paia il giorno pianger che si muore. The translation of the whole passage is: ""Twas now the hour that pierces the new pilgrim with love, if from afar he hears the chimes which seem to mourn for the dying day." Curfew: From "couvre-feu": a bell rung during the middle ages about eight o'clock, to bid people cover their fires and put out their lights. A few years ago, the curfew could still be heard in some parts of England. 2. Wind: Another reading is "winds," but "wind" is better. Gray wants us to see the cattle meandering over the meadow, as their habit is when homeward-bound, rather than going in a straight file. Lea: An old word for meadow. 3. Why did Gray use so many long o's? E. g., "tolls," "lowing," "slowly," "homeward." 5. Glimmering: This is the only time that Gray uses this word, though at one other point he has "glimmerings." "Glittering," on the other hand, is a great favorite with him. 6. What is the subject of "holds"? Watch Gray's habit with regard to inversions. 8. As the darkness grows, we begin to hear more than we see. Note the drone of the beetle, the "drowsy tinkling" of far cowbells, the hooting owl. Gray, like Wordsworth, knew how many sounds that would escape attention in daylight seem, as dusk gathers, to fill while they do not interrupt the silence. 13. yards. Yew-tree's shade: Yews are common in English church- Old Yew, which graspest at the stones O not for thee the glow, the bloom, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom. Perhaps the finest yews in English poetry are Wordsworth's "Fraternal Four of Borrowdale," in Yew-Trees A pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries,-ghostly Shapes May meet at noon-tide; Fear and trembling Hope, And Time the Shadow. 16. Rude, in the sense of "humble," "low," "uncivilized," "unpolished." 17. Note how the sounds of this lovely stanza contrast with those that preceded. Gray presents his dawn, like his twilight, through sound rather than sight impressions. Paraphrase incense-breathing. The word was absent from an early version. What do we gain from it? 21. Compare with the picture suggested in this stanza that elaborated by Burns in The Cotter's Saturday Night. the next stanza but one as a motto for his poem. Burns used 22. Ply her evening care: "Whether the phrase be good or bad, It is the kind of diction against which Wordsworth vigorously protested. When he had occasion to describe a similar scene, he wrote: She I cherished turned her wheel It is good exercise to go through the Elegy distinguishing the places where Gray uses the concrete language native to poetry from those in which he slips into the generalized and abstract speech common to his age. 26. Glebe: "The cultivated land belonging to a parish church or ecclesiastical benefice." 27. 29. Drive their team afield: See Milton's Lycidas, line 27. Do you like the personifications? 33. The boast of heraldry: The pride of rank. Birth, force, beauty, and wealth are of course four things most valued by the world they lead to glory as a climax. 35. Awaits is often printed "await." But Gray wrote the word as in the text. He was steeped in Milton and had learned from his master a love of inversions. 36. This is the passage quoted by General Wolfe on his way to take Quebec and die: "For two full hours the procession of boats, borne on the current, steered silently down the St. Lawrence. The stars were visible, but the night was moonless and sufficiently dark. The general was in one of the foremost boats, and near him was a young midshipman, John Robison, afterwards professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He used to tell in his later life how Wolfe, with a low voice, repeated Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard to the officers about him. Probably it was to relieve the intense strain of his thoughts. Among the rest was the verse which his own fate was soon to illustrate : "The paths of glory lead but to the grave.' 'Gentlemen,' he said as his recital ended, 'I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec.' None were there to tell him that the hero is greater than the poet." Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, II, 285. This story has lately been investigated and substantiated. 39. Fretted: A fret is an architectural ornament, made by carving, cutting or embossing. 41. Storied: "Storied windows richly dight." Il Penseroso. Stained glass picturing stories, from saint-legend or scripture. 43. Provoke the silent dust: Provoke in the etymological sense of "call forth." 51. Rage: What sort of "rage" deserves the epithet "noble"? Gray broods more calmly over the possible waste of genius entailed by "chill penury" than we do today. 52. Genial may mean "warm, kindly," or "native, inborn." 53-56. Platitudes, but perfectly put. 57. There is an interesting early version to this stanza. Gray, fine classical scholar that he was, first wrote: Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breath, Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood. The change to the English names was a bold act in those days of literary convention. It gives much more reality to this picture of an English Churchyard. The new form has an added force when we realize that Hampden, the patriot of the days of Charles I, lived in the county of the Churchyard, and that Milton finished his Paradise Lost only a few miles away. Gray's allusion to Cromwell reflects the general attitude of the eighteenth century. It was not till Carlyle wrote that Cromwell came to be appreciated at his true value. It would be well for the student to compare the ancients of the first version with the moderns of the second and to explain why in each case one name could fill the place of the other. 61. Here begins a long periodic sentence, quite in the Latin manner. But the continuity between stanzas affords a pleasant variety to the ear. 71. Gray is thinking of the adulation given to noble or royal patrons by literature. Cf. the mass of flattering verse addressed to Queen Elizabeth. At this time, the system of patronage was dying hard. See Johnson's Letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gray's first manuscript, the poem continued with the four following stanzas, with which, as Mason, Gray's friend, tells us, it was meant to conclude. Note how carefully Gray wove the phrases which he liked best in these lines into the final version: The thoughtless world to majesty may bow, But more to innocence their safety owe, Than pow'r or genius e'er conspired to bless. And thou who mindful of th' unhonor'd dead To wander in the gloomy walks of fate; Hark, how the sacred calm, that breathes around, No more, with reason and thyself at strife, 73. Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife: Madding means not maddening, but acting madly. 76. 81. Tenor: From the Latin tenor, a holding-on. There is a mis-spelled epitaph on a tomb-stone under the very yew pointed out as standing in Gray's time in the grave-yard of Stoke Pogis, which is the scene of the Elegy. 86. Pleasing anxious: Note the fine epitome of human experience in these two words. 93. The abrupt turn at this point gives a new and personal interest to the generalizations of the poem. But Gray's reticence still preserves a little veil by his device of apostrophizing himself in the third person. 95. Chance: Perchance. 97. The Hoary-headed swain walks out of an eighteenth-century pastoral, not out of a real village. Wordsworth would never have used this phrase. 99. See Paradise Lost, V. 429. 100. After this stanza, in the first version, followed four lines: it is hard to see why they were omitted, since, as Mason says, they have "the same sort of Doric delicacy which charms us peculiarly in this part of the poem," and as he also points out, they complete the account of the poet's day: Him have we seen the greenwood side along, 101. If any proof were needed that Gray has himself in mind in this pathetic portrait of the young poet, it may be found in the following passage from a letter written by him to Walpole in September, 1737. The wood described is that containing the famous Burnham beeches: "I have at the distance of half a mile through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . "At the foot of one of these squats ME; (I, II Penseroso) and there grow to a trunk the whole morning." 116. Here came, in the original version, an omitted stanza which almost everyone wishes that Gray had retained; for there is none more beautiful in the Elegy. His reason for leaving it out was to have the Epitaph follow directly the invitation to read. But he hesitated, constantly inserting the stanza and then omitting it again, so that Mr. Gosse says that we need not regard it as finally cancelled: There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are show'rs of violets found; |