Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard | Depression and Release: The Journey of the Spirit in Thomas Gray's "Elegy"
In this essay, Dillon explores the reasons behind Gray's rewriting of the poem's ending.
The "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" can be read as a journey of recognition, conceived in dusk and worked out—not in a miasma of depression—but in the light of a symbolic self-destruction. The poem contains a drama of identification with the buried farmers of the village of Stoke Poges; however, this identification yields the poet a brief delivery from his rather narrow life. Moreover, the development of the poem has a quasi-heroic quality, for it grows out of a shorter early version that is a more emotionally distanced study of man's final destiny. When Thomas Gray returned...
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