Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard
Thomas Gray
Issue 70
July 20, 2018
One of the best known of English poems is Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard by Thomas Gray (1751). It is pretty long, pre-industrialization story about ordinary people who live ordinary, rural lives and who don’t get much notice from the rich and aristocratic. But the poem was pretty well known in its time and did have some lines that still show up a century or two later. From the point of view of those who earn their bread struggling against the ill-chosen literary practices of the day, the fading away of poems like Gray’s Elegy is cause for great regret, and all we can do as we sink into the swamp of modern culture is wave a few lines from the old poems and hope that Whisper readers and other sensitive people pay attention to the power of words. Thus a few verses from here and there in Gray’s Elegy. (You could read the whole thing, of course.)
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike th’ inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their noble wishes never learned to stray;
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure.
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Can Honor’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?
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.
At the foot of yonder nodding beech,
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as molest her ancient, solitary reign.