Gray, Thomas | Andrew Dillon (essay date 1992)
Andrew Dillon (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Depression and Release," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 128-34.
[In the following essay on the "Elegy," Dillon comments on Gray's identification with the deceased farmers of the poem.]
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 to the Eton manuscript of the "Elegy," he filled the new ending with far more intimate feelings.
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