connection between night and death. There is a "solemn stillness" in the air, preparing the reader for the speaker's reflections.

The setting is further filled out by the presence of certain animals, namely a beetle and a “moping owl.” These isolated animal presences underscore the presiding stillness and solitude of the scene.

One more element of the setting is the “rugged elms.” The looming, tall elms—and their “rugged,” tough quality—contribute to the setting and tone of the poem, as they can be read as a reflection of the hearty people buried beneath them whom death has come for.

The speaker is the poet himself, Thomas Gray. He is memoralizing the lives of the gone and otherwise forgotten villagers. The isolation of their village,the oppression of the rulers, and their own poverty and ignorance prevented them from achieving any greatness in life. It also perhaps reflects his own desire to be remembered when he is gone.

Good question! The short answer is, we don't know for sure, because it is never explicitly stated.

The slightly longer answer is, there are some clues in the poem itself we can use to draw tentative conclusions. Look first at the complexity of the speech. This is definitely an educated speaker. By definition, then, it is not one of the "mute inglorious Miltons" buried in the graveyard. It is also not the "plowman" or one of the fellow villagers. They don't have the psychic or psychological distance to see things from this point of view, nor, to be blunt, enough energy. They've been farming all day, and they are tired.

Given the setting (a churchyard), the language, and the perspective, I say we have two or three options.
1) An educated outsider, like, well, Gray, especially a Romantic poet given to seeing the rural settings as poetic.
2) A dead person. (It is a churchyard, after all.) I think this less likely.
3) Some supernatural being (again, churchyard, and sees things no one else does). This seems unlikely as well, because the speaker has questions, not answers.

So, I'm going with the limited answer of #1.

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, does not focus on mourning for any one particular person, but instead is an example of a more general meditation concerning mortality, reflecting what Virgil expressed in the seminal line in Aeneid I.462, "Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt."

The first three stanzas set a general mood of melancholy, invoking an image of the setting sun as foreshadowing mortality; just as the sun sets, so too does human life end. Starting at line 13, Gray imagines the inhabitants of these graves as farmers, housewives, shepherds, and other members of rural or village society, living a simple pastoral life. 

In the subsequent lines, Gray requests the sympathy of the reader for the lives of the ordinary people buried here, suggesting that just because they were not famous, they were no less valuable as human beings than those born to wealth or fame who had a wider scope for their actions. He even suggests that many of the people buried in this graveyard may have been as talented and impressive within the small world of their village as people whose deeds are better known:

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

In the final lines, Gray contemplates the possibility of his own death, and thus ends with the implication that in mourning for the people buried in the country graveyard, he is also mourning for the death that awaits both himself and his readers.

It is quite possible that the speaker of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is the poet himself, Thomas Gray, or a poet who represents a fictionalized version of Gray. One piece of evidence for this conclusion is the tone the speaker employs in his meditation, which is decidedly lush and literary, rich with allusions and sonorous turns of phrase. In addition, the speaker's imagine epitaph suggests that "Melancholy mark'd him for herown," a statement that underscores the impression of the speaker as a brooding bard. And given what scholars know about Gray himself, this description fits him aptly; he is known to have had a melancholy, contemplative cast of mind. Besides, the churchyard of the title is almost certainly based on a real place—a churchyard in the small English village of Stoke Poges—that meant a great deal to Gray personally and which most probably inspired him to write his most famous poem.

However, some critics have suggested that the speaker could be just about anyone, as long as they have sympathy with the poem's overriding message. There's an element of truth to this. The message that Gray wishes to convey is indeed universal, which is undoubtedly one of its main strengths. But while the speaker's chosen theme is indeed universal, there is a particularity to the speaker's consciousness, a proclivity to muse on the great questions of life and death while walking through a rural churchyard at night.

The poem is written in the first person, which means that the words that we read come from the speaker. He is standing in an old country churchyard as the sunlight fades and as the plowman plods his weary way home after a hard day's work. Once the speaker has been left alone with the churchyard all to himself, he begins to muse on the subject of death, which forms the basis of all elegies.

In a standard elegy, it is customary to pay tribute to a deceased person, a specific individual whose legacy is to be immortalized in verse. However, Gray departs from this tradition by musing on the death of the ordinary folk whose bodies lie mouldering beneath the graves in the churchyard. He goes on to pay fulsome tribute to these "mute, inglorious Miltons" who, in another life, may well have gone on to achieve the same heights of poetic brilliance as the great man himself.

In the democracy of the dead, all may be equal. And yet there remains an enormous discrepancy between the posthumous reputations of the great and the good and those ordinary country folk, the "rude forefathers of the hamlet." (In this particular context, rude means common or unrefined.)

The speaker, in composing his elegy, hopes to make amends by enjoining us to think of the countless millions of down-to-earth folk who went to their graves without leaving behind any trace of their existence, save for the inscriptions that now fade upon their gravestones.

Thomas Gray may have began writing "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" as early as 1742, but scholars believes that it is more likely that the poem was written between 1745 and 1750. Gray completed the poem by June of 1750, which is when he sent the manuscript of the poem to his friend Horace Walpole, a writer and art historian who was a member of the British Parliament at the time and who circulated the poem among his friends.

In a letter to Walpole, dated June 12, 1750, which accompanied the poem, Gray wrote,

I have been here at Stoke a few days (where I shall continue good part of the summer); and having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately send it you.

This letter to Walpole supports scholars' contention that Gray wrote the poem over a considerable period of time but that he had completed the poem no later than the time he sent it to Walpole in 1750.

The "Stoke" to which Gray refers in his letter is the village of Stoke Poges, located about twenty-five miles west of London, which was the home of Gray's mother and his aunts Mary and Anne. Gray visited there in the summers while he was at Cambridge University, where he studied for a law degree, though he eventually studied ancient Greek history and literature instead. Gray was buried in his mother's vault at Stoke Poges after he died in London in 1771.

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published by Gray anonymously in February 1751, after the publisher of the Magazine of Magazines wrote to Gray that he intended to publish the poem in the next edition of the magazine. Gray hurried his poem into print to forestall the pirated publication of the poem in the magazine. The published poem is prefaced with an "advertisement" written by an equally anonymous editor, which states that "The following Poem came into my Hands by Accident."