Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Sibaprasad Dutta

===============================================================
Elegy which owes its origin to Greek ‘elegos’ is a song of lamentation occasioned by the
death of a person whom the poet loved or admired. In Classical literature , an elegy was
any poem written in elegiac metre – distichs ( Gk: two rows. A pair of metrical lines of
different lengths , usually rhymed and expressing a complete idea. Often it consisted of
dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter.) which means alternating
hexameter and pentameter lines. The subjects in Classical Greek and Roman literature
elegies were death, war, love and similar themes. Till seventeenth century poems written
on the transience of all worldly things were called elegies. Donne’s elegies , twenty in
number, were mainly love poems, but since they emphasized mutability and loss, they
were recognized as elegies. In the 17th century the term elegy began to be limited to its
most common present usage: a formal and sustained lament in verse for the death of a
particular person, usually ending in a consolation. The old English poems, The
Wanderer, The Seafarer, A Husband’s Lament, A Maiden’s Complaint, The Ruin’d
Burgh were classified as elegies. In the mediaeval age, The Pearl and Chaucer’s Book
of the Duchesse written in the mode of dream allegory belonged to this group.
Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy on the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam.
More recent is W. H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1940). Occasionally, the term
is older and broader sense for sombre meditations on mortality such as Thomas Gray’s
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1757) and the Duino Elegies (1912-22) of
the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on the transience both of poets and of the earthly
objects they write about.

Gray’s Churchyard which is not really a long and complex poem like Tennyson’s In
Memoriam occupied his creative hours during perhaps six years. It is the greatest of
Gray’s poems, possibly the greatest of his century. Though probably motivated in part by
sorrow over the death of West, the poem is not ‘particular’: it is an elegy for Man or at
least for all ‘average’ and obscure men who lived and died away from glare and were laid
at rest in a country churchyard.
The poem begins musically with a description of the setting, the evening time, when the
church bells ring out the day and the ‘plowman homeward plods his weary way’. The
glimmering twilight is fading, and a ‘ solemn stillness’ fills all the air. The only sound
that is heard is that of the beetles and of the moping owls. The poet now passes on to
describe the churchyard which is dotted with elm trees and where most of the tombs have
crumbled down. The sorrowful atmosphere created, the poet goes on to tell the lives of
the ‘rude forefathers’ of the hamlet who now sleep in the yard, each in his narrow cell.
The lamentation deepens as the poet points out that they will not wake up to the breezy
call of the fragrant morning or the twittering of the swallows or the shrill clarion of the
cocks. Our heart wrings in pain as he narrates that now that they are inside the grave
forever, the blazing hearth will not burn for them nor will the housewives , on their
husbands’ return from work, will be busy to entertain them. No children will run to lisp
their sire’s return nor will they vie with one another for the first kiss. They were common
villagers who worked in the field, cut wood, and tended cattle. Their joys were homely,
their destiny was obscure. No grandeur they had and their annals were short and simple,
poor men as they were. The poet, however, suddenly becomes philosophical and glorifies
the annals of the poor. In a mood of generalization , he focuses on the stark truth of life :
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
All that beauty, all that wealth ever gave;
They pass on to the inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Even though memorials are raised, anthems in their praise swell the cathedral hall, no
dead soul can be brought back to life. Songs of glory cannot induce the silent dust to
resuscitate them nor can any amount of flattery prevail upon Death to release them out of
its prison.

The poet again swings back to the lives of the poor villagers who lay at rest in the
neglected spot that the churchyard was. The men were poor and humble, but some had
hearts pregnant with celestial fire, some would even make good emperors, some even
were great connoisseurs of lyre which filled them with ecstasy. But as chill penury
repressed their noble rage, and froze the genial current of their soul, they did not have
access to knowledge and their potentiality could not flourish, and they remained hidden
in the privacy of their glorious darkness. They remained obscure and away from the
glare of eminence like the gems of purest ray serene that remain under the deep ocean or
like the sweet flowers that blush and waste their sweetness in the desert. Some of them ,
if given scope, could have becomes Miltons and Cromwells, but their promise did not
sprout as their lot forbade. The poet, however, is not remorseful that they remained
unknown Miltons and unsung Cromwells because basically they were simple people who
shunned ambition and who avoided the gory path that leads to power. They lived far from
the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, away from the shrines of Luxury and Pride. Their
wishes were sober, and they lived quietly , avoiding fuss. The pity of their life becomes
more touching when the poet mentions that some friends in order to protect them from
ignominy erected frail memorials on the graves with epitaphs in uncouth rhymes. Those
who pass by these shapeless sculptures cannot but heave a sigh of tribute to these humble
children of God. They have gone, preys of dumb forgetfulness but they are still
remembered by their folks still alive. The tone of pathos becomes deeper when the poet
describes how they vanished, one after another. To a question, a hoary-headed swain
would say that here was the man who would hastily walk at the peep of dawn through
the dewy grass to meet the sun upon the upland lawn. That man would occasionally
stretch out his body at the foot of a nodding beech tree to cool his tired nerves at noon,
and with wonder watch the brook that babbled by. Sometimes, he would be seen by the
wood with a scornful smile on his face, muttering wayward fancies. When old, he was a
drooping frame, a man afflicted with cares or crossed in hopeless love, a woeful wan,
now deserted by all. One morning he would be missing from his favourite haunts – the
heath, the tree, the hill, the lawn or the wood. Instead, he would be seen being borne
through the church-way path with mourners singing dirges. His body is now in the grave
under the stone covered with thorns.

On the stone is written an epitaph that tells that the man in the grave was a youth, to
fortune and fame unknown, who lived a difficult life, who was deprived of the benefit
‘fair science’. But he was a large-hearted man, a sincere soul whom God, in lieu of a tear
shed in woe, gave him a friend which only he wanted. There is no use discussing farther
his merits or his frailties as he like his team-mates in the graveyard is now anxiously
waiting to be taken into the bosom of his Father and his God.

The poem in its attempt to work thus in universal terms and in its unrivalled purity,
propriety and harmony of diction is a great realization of the ideals of its day : in its
placid melancholy and rustic setting, it is perhaps slightly romantic. Although in its
treatment of the common man it is heroic and even majestic, it has not the tone of
Wordsworth. The poem is compact of what Tennyson called “ divine truisms”, and these
are universally, if decorously, affecting. Among poems embodying the noble ideal of

What oft was thought but never so well expressed

the Elegy must always rank high. Persons with an aversion to reflective commonplaces in
poetry may, as T. S. Eliot has done, question the subtlety of the Churchyard ; but critics
who admit both clarity and subtlety as merits will be content with the noble and finished
transparency of this poem. Its achievement is , of its very nature, the opposite of facile :
“divine truisms” are not so easily come by !

************************************************************************************