Gray’s speaker is, like Gray, a poet. Although it is impossible to determine the degree to which the speaker represents Gray himself, the speaker’s meditation on his own death and memorialization at the end of the poem marks a personal turn. The speaker addresses himself in stanza 24 to inquire how “some kindred spirit” might ask about his the poet’s life and death, and in a shift of roles, places the narrative in the hands of a villager who briefly recounts the behavior of the village poet, Gray’s speaker and alter ego.

The villager describes an isolated man, “now dropping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, / Or crazed with care,” who disappears one day, and having died, is being taken to the churchyard for burial. The last section of the poem is the speaker’s epitaph, which describes him as he has described the villagers in the churchyard: “to Fortune and to Fame unknown.” Gray adds an important quality, however, that points to his own conception of what makes a poet an accurate observer of life: “And Melancholy mark’d him for her own,” by which he means that the speaker has poetic sensibilities, including an understanding of the sorrows that all humankind is subject to. Last, the poet notes that his good and bad qualities are no longer worth examining because he is in God’s hands. This final section dramatizes the position of the poet, who witnesses and memorializes the lives of others while being mortal himself, as liable to fall into obscurity as his subjects. However, one can hardly read the poem today without noting that Gray, for his part, is far from forgotten.