Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard | Gray's Political Elegy: Poetry as the Burial of History
In the following essay, Sha encourages the reader to look beneath the surface for meaning in Gray's poem.
Thomas Gray ends his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard with an injunction to his readers not to look beyond the confines of the poem. As part of the poet's own epitaph, the enjoinder takes on the force of lapidary inscription and we are made to hear, as it were, the voice of the dead or one who speaks for the dead.
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.
But Gray also cleverly projects his future...
[The entire page is 6174 words long]
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