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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Although Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is not considered to be part of the Romantic canon, its first twenty lines do advance some classic Romantic themes. Most notably, the...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The term elegy has a long history. It originally, in ancient Greece, had two meanings. The first was a sorrowful or mournful poem sung to the accompaniment of aulos (an instrument sounding like a...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Eighteenth-century literature of sentiment and sensibility was written to evoke feelings or emotions. Literary critic Ann Jessie van Sant distinguishes sentiment as describing feelings associated...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The poet/speaker is concerned with death and how it should humble people of all classes. He is genuinely pondering and even praising the humble lives represented by the lowly graves he sees, and he...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Overall, the images in the first stanza of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" create a mood of melancholy, tiredness, and finality. There are four main images here, one in each...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
A good question. The narrator does reflect on death, and that makes sense. It is logical and natural to think about death at least briefly when you see a cemetery, which the narrator does there in...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
While some elements of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray could be considered universal, others are prototypically English. The landscape, farming methods, and church bells...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The main theme of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is the inevitability of death. This is a poem that expresses the sentiment known as memento mori: a reminder of our own mortality. The...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In the first two stanzas, the speaker notes that the time of day is evening, turning to night. All activity (namely human) is done, and he is alone in the countryside. The air has a "solemn...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Although the initial inspiration for Thomas Gray's poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” may have been the 1742 death of his friend Richard West, the final version, published in 1751,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Known for his juxtaposition of established forms and novel sentiments, the energetic poet Thomas Gray combines with great skill the Neoclassical style of his own century with the Romantic ideals of...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray's powerful and evocative poem, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," employs a Neo-classical form while demonstrating poetic techniques of Romanticism. Gray's elegy is written in heroic...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Gray’s observations about the anonymity and non-fame of the persons in a rural graveyard concern both low classes and high – “whose boast of heraldry…await alike th’ inevitable hour”...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,"has earned Thomas Gray a permanent place of poetic reputation and dignity in literary history. The poem was written at the end of the Augustan Age and...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
With elements of Romanticism in his poem, Thomas Gray's first four stanzas express a communion of nature with the souls of the dead country people. For instance, the words descriptive of nature,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
"The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, >To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame." Gray is recounting...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The first stanza of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" describes a scene near the end of the day, signifying sunset and the "solemn stillness" of night and with the subsequent stanzas, an...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In the seventeenth stanza of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", by Thomas Gray, the lack of fame and opportunity for the poor is seen as both advantage and disadvantage from different...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
hello, this questio isnt very clear at all, could you please ask again more clearly? thanks
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The first line of "Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard" indicates that it is evening. This is when the curfew tolls the bell (knell) of the parting (sunset) day. The first line of the next stanza...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The speaker in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is contemplating death. He looks upon the graves in the churchyard and he ruminates on those buried there. It is quite gloomy, a "memento...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is about human mortality. This refers to the Latin phrase memento mori which means “remember your mortality.” The significance of this phrase, as it...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
This long poem, a series of stanzas treating various natural phenomena at their ends, and set in a tranquil twilight setting (itself the ending of the day), memorializes the unheralded,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Originally, in Greek and Roman poetry, the elegy, which is now defined as a poem that laments the death of a friend or a beloved public person, referred just to the meter of a poem (elegiac...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray, in Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard, treats nature with the utmost respect. According to the poem, nature holds all of mankind at the same level. The speaker considers the fact...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the speaker presents a number of different kinds of consolation or solace in the face of death. Among these kinds of comfort...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Thomas Gray's attitude toward death at first is that everyone faces the same end, regardless of their social standing or sense of importance: The paths...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The only poem that I could find which references a country church-yard is Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". This poem is historically the most famous of the 18th century elegy...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In his famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Thomas Gray uses several forms of poetic "sound devices." Here are some examples. 1. Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Well, one place to start would be to consider how this poem presents its main theme, which is that of death. The poem features a narrator, who passes by a churchyard in the countryside and...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
It is important to identify the definition of "voice" in order to address how it differs in these poems. [Voice is..] the dominating...tone of a literary work. The voice existing in a literary...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The two poems deal with the topic of death. This is the commonality that they share. However, because the circumstances of the dead in each poem are so different, the author's tone for each is also...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
I am only able to answer one question, so I will compare and contrast the themes of these two poems. The two poems deal with the topic of death. This is the commonality that they share. However,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a poem that is replete with sound devices. ALLITERATION - The repetition of the same or similar consonant sounds in words that are close...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In the famous elegiac pom "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Gray, five other allegorical terms used from line 49 to line 91 are as follows: Knowledge (Line 49) Penury (Line 51) Luxury...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The poetry of sentiment or sensibility strives to evoke sympathy in the reader, thus prompting the reader to commiserate with the feelings of the speaker and his/her suffering, or to sympathize...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
There is a good explanation of this poem right here on eNotes, at the link below. Essentially, the poem can be summed up by the following line (from the poem): The paths of glory lead but to the...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" shifts, or turns, after line 88. Up until that point, the speaker focuses on the dead in the churchyard, or cemetery. The dead in the...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Gray, or his speaker, certainly does not criticize educating the poor. His sentiment is that among the poor buried in the churchyard there may well be...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The speaker in Thomas Gray's "An Ellegy Written in a Country Churchyard" writes of things that will no longer occur for the dead in the churchyard, as well as things the dead will no longer get to...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
I would add to what has been said that it's their bad fortune, but it's also the values that society held up to the Romantic movement. Poor people were "interchangable," without the dignity of the...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
This part of the larger poem is an extended allegory. The point of the whole passage is that the poor and anonymous people who are buried in the churchyard were as good as anyone else (or at least...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Our response to poetry is subjective and every reader has a different experience. To me, whilst Thomas Gray puts forward the case of the poor in his poem 'Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard' I...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
There are two main themes to the poem in the lines that you mention. First, there is the idea that the dead people in this country churchyard were potentially just as good as famous people. It's...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
To understand this stanza, you must first understand the previous stanza and, to some extent, the whole poem. The point of the poem is that Gray is talking about how the obscure people buried in...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In the poem 'Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard' the poet Thomas Gray mourns the unremarked passing of the poor. He wonders what gifts and talents they may have had that we'll never know. It is...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray, the poet, employs an extended metaphor in the first 7 stanzas to compare the end of humans' life and the mourning for their loss to the end of a day. His use of colors such as grey,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
THE CHURCH YARD IS IN A VILLAGE AND IN A PLACE WHERE THE POET CAN SEE AND RUMINATE ABOUT THE ACTIVITIES OF THE RUSTICS..IT IS ACTUALLY IN STOCK POGES, WHERE GRAY WROTE THE POEM
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Perhaps the most salient motif of Thomas is the idea of the Latin phrase that Thomas Gray evokes, momento mori; that is, "Remember that you must die." As Gray ponders this sentiment, observing the...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The elegiac atmosphere is established immediately in the poem with Gray's description of the countryside surrounding the cemetery and the time of day that makes up the poem's setting. The day is...