SOURCE: "Gray's Churchyard Space," in Preromanticism, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 42-8.

… Space has always been recognized as a problem in Gray's "Elegy." The speculation concerning the location of Gray's churchyard is as idle as that concerning Goldsmith's Aurora, yet also as natural. For it reflects the tension that runs through the poem between particular place and universal space. In the early stanzas the repeated possessives drive toward local dominions, and so indeed do the definite articles.⁶ At twilight the private consciousness faces dormancy unless it is rescued by positioned singularities ("Save where," "Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r"). Dominion is ubiquitous: in the owl's "solitary reign," the children's envied sire, the war to subdue nature to cultivation. It is not by chance that the three model figures named in the fifteenth stanza were all politically involved in bloody tyranny, nor that the body politic provides the standard for judging the village's emulation or privation. In the "precincts of the … day" presence always commands, however limited its terrain, and funeral monuments compete to prolong the paternal domination of the forefathers. If they cannot demand homage, they can at least implore "the passing tribute of a sigh." If nothing else survives, the heaving turf of line 14 remains a literally posthumous assertion of territoriality. In country and city alike, action stratifies mankind into levels of domination, and, discomfortingly, identity remains conceived as place in the scale of being. Hence the promptings from the poem itself toward finding the churchyard. It has no power if it has no location, and no reality or truth if it has no power.

On so imperious a mentality Gray casts a light too cool to be called irony. Its ideal is a repose that the noises of the place disturb. Thus, the erotically charged gem and flower retain their purity only so long as their unnatural locations protect them. ("Ray serene" is properly a sky phrase—"serene" means "of evening"—doubly displaced, in a cave and under water.) Though Ambition errs in mocking "useful toil," Gray's own tone becomes condescending when he reaches "homely joys, and destiny obscure"; though Grandeur shouldn't smile at annals so "short and simple" that they are heard rather than read, Gray himself seems to discredit the poor when he calls them "noiseless," not audible at all. This is, one notes, a poem of the day, not of the year: properly speaking, these poor can have no annals, but only an "artless tale."⁷ Gray hovers constantly, as in this phrase, on the brink of oxymoron (fires living in ashes, "mindful of th' unhonour'd"), which it is easy to interpret as rejection, as if for Gray "any mode of 'life' is finally unacceptable."⁸ No doubt about it, the poem expresses reservations about rich Cromwells and poor, mute Miltons alike.

Still, reserve is to be carefully distinguished from criticism.⁹ Gray had previously appeared in public representing three versions of minimalism: the insects of the "Ode on the Spring," the children's games of the Eton College ode, and the bath-os of the "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat." The "Elegy" keeps a more even tenor than any of these, striving for a sublimity of the subliminal variety that Gianni Scalia has called "the sublime of depth."¹⁰ It wants to take a stand without asserting any pride of place. Its fundamental principle is a return to the ground: a combination of regression and leveling most clearly seen in the seventh stanza, which retreats from harvest through plowing to setting out, and then concludes, in less conflictual language, with the hewing of wood. Negations are as plentiful as possessives, yet they are typically oblique or postponed so as not to cancel out the strong diction and heroic images. The poem works as hard to compare rich and poor as to contrast them. They share life as well as illusions. Death destroys the illusions: "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, / And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave." But it does not put out the flame of life, which survives, perhaps only in epitaphs and in "trembling hope," but which is assuredly there: "Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, / Ev'n in our Ashes live their wonted Fires."

The animals, the muttering poet, the lisping children, and the "still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground" (Eton College manuscript, line 83) are all forms of the voice of nature that is forever speaking. For as heartlessly as the poem criticizes social existence—all forms of social existence—even as firmly is it attached to natural life. It is not a poem written in blackness like the "Ode on the Spring" ("Thy sun is set," line 49) or confirming blackness like the Eton College ode, where the speaker faces "shade" (the rhyme word in line 4 and again in line 11), only imagines the children whom Father Thames is supposed actually to "ha[ve] seen," and eventually views "black Misfortune's baleful train" and "The painful family of Death." Rather the "Elegy" is situated at twilight and with its eye on "the warm precincts of the chearful day." Death is mute and deaf (lines 43-44); the Epitaph is the text of life.

But it is life in its most general form, reinterpreted so as to speak to mankind generally. Where all men are comparable, consciousness seeks a universal voice. The poem's one "me" (line 4) adjoins its one "now" (line 5), but immediately gives way under the impulse of Gray's conception to "all" (line 6, changed from "now" in the Eton College manuscript). As there is no place, no individual who is the subject of the Epitaph, and no year, so there is also no day in the poem, but rather an eternal, timeless moment. Gray's resignation purges the dross of anxiousness out of our pleasing being, leaving the intimacy of a heavenly "friend" and the passivity of a "trembling hope." It is a successful quietism that transmutes the restless, heaving turf of the beginning into the concluding "lap of Earth." At eve-ning, as contours dissolve, the universal eye looks beyond individual destinies—why should we know their fate?—toward the enveloping space of earth and heaven. Man leaves the turbulence of (urban) society and (rural) family in order to reenter his general home in the friendship of spirits and the protection of Mother Nature and Father God. In itself death is privation, but for Gray relationship persists and enlarges at the end of life.¹¹

In diction, imagery, and argument, then, Gray presses in this poem toward a universal consciousness.¹² Beginning in a compound of obscurity and contradiction, the poem veers stanza by stanza from silence to noise, high to low, dark evening to bright morn, field to home, peace to conflict, poor to rich. These are gestures toward comprehensiveness in a world whose totality is composed of parts. The poetical youth is an outsider to this entire psychosocial economy. "His wayward fancies" (line 106) are constitutionally placeless, and the antique language that describes him belongs nowhere. A youth in a world of hoary-headed swains and aged thorns, a figure of morning (and noon) in a poem for which morning exists "No more" (line 20), a being born, it seems, only to die,¹³ he negates all the earlier contradictions and classifications: "nor yet beside the rill [nature], / Nor up the lawn [gentry], nor at the wood [laboring peasantry]." In pointing out the lines summarizing the youth's "fate," the "hoary-headed Swain" takes a step beyond the silent, "hoary Thames" at Windsor, yet without achieving prophetic authority, since he is illiterate, enjoys a merely conjectured existence, and discerns only part of the youth's fate. Perplexity better describes the tone of the swain's speech, with its grave puns ("pore," "lay"); in it the youth escapes capture, a figure alien yet ubiquitous. The Epitaph shifts abruptly yet again; after the vivid personifications in the body of the elegy and the exotic Spenserianism of the swain's speech, the poem ends in grayly looming abstractions. It has the pallor of a language for which differences no longer exist.

After so many appeals to voice and so many failures of merely metaphorical reading (Knowledge's "ample page" ne'er unrolled, history not "read … in a nation's eyes," the babbling brook listlessly pored over), after the bookish language of the swain's speech and his curious designation of the Epitaph itself as a "lay," this arrival at a plain-style written text functions as a release. The reader's muted voice neither can nor needs to say much, but his brevity is accompanied by a settled clarity, completion (a large bounty as largely recompensed), and universality ("all") that subsume all the foregoing partitions and contradictions. For once the eighteenth century gives us the image of something known fully and in itself, rather than partially and relationally. The knowledge is purchased with the loss of power and position: the contents are impoverished, the knower undefined. One could hardly say, finally, who the youth is, since neither his merits nor his frailty are disclosed. Only metaphysicals remain definite here ("the lap of Earth," "the Bosom of his Father and his God"), and the four indefinite articles stand in striking contrast to all the abstract definite articles of the main text. Thus, it is not that someone comes in the end to know someone or something. Yet the poem still evokes the possibility of a language and a consciousness beyond station, beyond definition, and beyond identity.¹⁴

It is far from obvious to take the "Elegy" as a poem about the mind.¹⁵ One's primary impression is, perhaps, that it is a remarkably physical poem. Movement is everywhere, in the plowman's way, the paths of glory, the genial current of the soul, the noiseless tenor of the villagers' way, the passing tribute of a sigh, the parting soul, the roving youth. For so traditional a society, it is a remarkably restless existence. The villagers' ardor is more than tinged with sexuality—"Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire"—and so is that of city dwellers:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

This stanza, which praises the city indirectly by describing how impoverished rural life is, proves on reflection to be obliquely sarcastic about urban culture as well. For it is followed immediately by the famous gem and flower stanza. With its "spoils of time," we may infer in retrospect, the city ravages the sweetness of desert flowers, and its warm "current," while "genial," may not protect the serene purity of pearls so well as the "unfathom'd caves of ocean." Passions lurk in both environments, and they are distinctly not those of the mind alone.

Yet they act on the mind. What George Wright calls the poem's Berkeleyanism lies in the fact that passions seek less an object than a receptor, whether it be the owl's moon, the politician's listening senates, or the sigh that responds to the frail memorial. The poem may recognize a sexual dynamism to knowledge—despoiling time, unrolling her ample page—but its vector is antiphysical. Owl and moon preside over the churchyard in an alliance of wisdom and chastity aiming to protect a bower from molestation. While the verbs are active, inversions and syntactic ambiguities damp their noble rage. Of the three exemplary villagers, it is the mute, inglorious Milton who is specifically said to "rest" (as Hutchings points out, "Syntax of Death" [in Studies in Philology 81 (1984): 505]), allying him with another poet, the youth of the artless lines. At the end, death mysteriously consumes passion: one day the youth is lovelorn, the next he has vanished. Gray clear-sightedly concedes the omnipresence of bodily impulses, yet his message is that the only fruition and repose are of the mind.

Critics have written of the instability of Gray's poetry, its constant self-criticism and inability to ground the self.¹⁶ This is true to a point, but it is to condemn Gray to the "narrow cell" of the forefathers and to deny him the "large … bounty" of the poetic youth. In the main body of the "Elegy," to be sure, the quasi-sexual violence of fathers and forefathers is omnipresent—molesting owls, felling trees, ogling the spoils of Knowledge, secreting "The struggling pangs of conscious truth," and quenching "the blushes of ingenuous shame"—yet the Epitaph imagines as a surrogate a family romance of purest ray serene. Merits and frailties rest hand in hand in the androgynous lap-bosom of Nature-God, in a utopia purged of sexual desire (since the youth wished only "a friend") and of the turbulence of "fame and fortune." "Fair Science" retains the merest tinge of a purified eroticism, as does the single tear, while the youth as unknown knower becomes a figure of objectless, apathic cognition. The "Elegy" gives a voice that can be perceived without being uttered and an abode that needs neither a local habitation nor a name. "Common place" is the perfect term for the churchyard in whose grave lines all may rest.¹⁷

For a poem often thought to be a paean to rural laborers, the "Elegy" has a startlingly impoverished notion of work. Rather than conceiving it as a cooperative and constructive process—of which Adam Smith was to give so powerful an account in The Wealth of Nations—Gray's partitive consciousness divides work into periods ("evening care," line 22), repetitious events ("Oft," line 25), impersonal encounters ("Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke," line 26), and synecdochic reductions ("How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!" line 28). None of the associated adjectives—"busy," "jocund," "sturdy"—implies comprehension, and "toil" (line 29) is, precisely, thoughtless, primitive effort. Gray eliminated in revision a stanza containing the phrase "our Labours done," for rural labor knows no finality. Urban life, by contrast, is imaged as finality without effort: "the pomp of pow'r" without the struggle, "The paths of glory" without the conquest, "the rod of empire" that sways without earning the right, "the spoils of time" without the battle, "Th' applause of list'ning senates" without the victory, distribution ("To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land") without production. The widely separated smiles of disdainful grandeur (line 31) and of the people (line 63) suggest the city's detachment from the producing substratum, while the competition among the farmer's children for "the envied kiss" (line 24) signals that the rural struggle has no end. Such partitioning of the spheres of life both ironizes and idealizes: ironizes because all spheres are incomplete segments of a whole present only in the mind of the poet, idealizes because each element is absolutized as a changeless essence. What is systematically excluded is the order of appropriation—work that, by making something, makes it one's own.¹⁸

That is how Gray manages to convey a spatial imagination—with a full complement of divisions, locations, and affinities—that nevertheless remains universal. It is a world of possession without property. Possessives designate actions ("plods his weary way," "wheels his droning flight," "ply her evening care," "their sturdy stroke"), commonalities ("Their furrow," "their team"), parts of living beings ("their eyes," "Their name," "its old fantastic roots"), usurpation ("her secret bow'r," "The little Tyrant of his fields"), death's domain ("his narrow cell," "their lowly bed"). Only once—before the Epitaph, where all the conditions are changed—does the poem single out an object of possession, and then only in an affective relationship: "his fav'rite tree" (line 110). Nothing is owned, and hence nothing concrete can be imparted: "And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave," "He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear." Everything and nothing is shared with all and none in a world that is everywhere and nowhere. Life is emptied of its contents in order to make of the universe one vast container.

Critics often write as if the "Elegy" stays put and meditates on a particular, though unidentifiable, place. We do it more justice if we assume that the poem—like every work of art, I believe—acts to transform its initial conditions. The indefinite articles of the Epitaph should teach us at last how precise is the indefinite article of the title. We must learn not to seek knowledge of a particular place, as if to possess it mentally, but instead to accept a settled consciousness without a founding gesture or explicit starting "point." Rather than defining a social ideal, the poem turns away from social aspirations in order to evoke the transcendental basis of all experience….

Notes

…⁶ The definite article implies, first, belonging to an already known world (the curfew, vs. a which would anticipate subsequent clarification) yet, second, general rather than particular (the vs. this). On the kinetics of the definite article see Weinrich, Sprache in Texten 163-76 and 186-98, and Guillaume, Langage 143-66.

⁷ Cleanth Brooks points out the impropriety of the word "annals" in The Well Wrought Urn III. The proper, altogether unpretentious term is "journals." Cf. Spectator, no. 317 (3: 156): "One may become wiser and better by several Methods of Employing ones self in Secrecy and Silence, and do what is laudable without Noise or Ostentation. I would, however, recommend to every one of my Readers, the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week." The poem gives us, of course, only one, unwritten and truncated journal, in the swain's account of the youth.

⁸ Edwards, Imagination and Power 128-29. I follow, rather, Hutchings, "Syntax of Death."

⁹ In his Criticism on the Elegy 40, John Young nicely holds Gray's "whiggish prejudices" responsible for the "fairy land" aura of poetic vagueness in the political stanzas.

¹⁰ Scalia developed the notion of the "sublime in basso" in unpublished remarks at the conference "II Sublime: "Creazione e catastrofe," Univ. of Bologna, May, 1984. See the related discussion by Franci in the published proceedings ("Sulla soglia").

¹¹ Cf. the interesting Freudian account of Gray in Jackson, "Thomas Gray and the Dedicatory Muse." Jackson argues persuasively that "the generative ground of vision [is] death" (287), but he imposes too dialectically negative a sense of death on Gray, for whom "death is a shaper" that "provides a dynamic impetus," with no "suggestion of a misanthropic or 'misbiotic' attitude" (Nemoianu, A Theory of the Secondary 121). There has to be a self—in the full romantic sense—before there can be, as Jackson says in his essay, a "betrayal of the self" (286). Cf. also Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot 34, apropos of Rousseau's Confessions: "To imagine one's self-composed obituary read at the Judgment Day constitutes the farthest reach in the anticipation of retrospective narrative understanding. It is one that all narratives no doubt would wish to make." With the greater generality of the lyric, the "Elegy" satisfies this yearning, but in the form of a narrative of no one in particular in an unbounded space that is liberated from "the geometrical sense of plotting" (Brooks 24). Gray's spatializing can be highlighted by contrasting the "Elegy" to the time-saturated imitation by J. Cunningham, "An Elegy on a Pile of Ruins," in Chalmers, English Poets 14: 443-45, esp. lines 133-36: "Vain then are pyramids, and motto'd stones, / And monumental trophies rais'd on high! / For Time confounds them with the crumbling bones, / That mix'd in hasty graves unnotic'd lie."

¹² See Wright's Berkeleyan reading ("Stillness and the Argument of Gray's Elegy"), which finds an ironic reversal in death, weakly overruled by the Epitaph—another suggestive account that goes astray by treating (eighteenth-century) continuity and flux as (romantic) dialectical contradiction.

¹³ I owe to Steve Dillon the observation that "born[e]" in the funeral procession, line 114, is an ironic echo that undermines the positive associations of birth in the gem and flower stanza, lines 54-55.

¹⁴ Cleanth Brooks's reading, "Gray's Storied Urn," in The Well Wrought Urn 105-23, attempts to salvage his notion of a poem as a self-contained organism by using the first 116 lines to contextualize the Epitaph. He is perceptive enough to concede that "I am not altogether convinced" (121), for, indeed, the Epitaph breaks free of all such bounds. He is answered by Bateson ("Gray's 'Elegy' Reconsidered," in English Poetry 127-35). Bateson gives the best compact account of the poem's inconsistencies in structure and ideology, concluding that the familiar, revised ending betrays Gray's genuine position "in the central social tradition of his time" (56). My analysis of flux in the poem is intended to show how it can seem both organic and inorganic, romantic and Augustan, strong and weak: its conclusion transforms the conditions of thought, but not yet the contents of thought. In a thought-provoking though sketchy essay ("Gray's 'Elegy'"), Bygrave calls this "a kind of repressed dialectic of self and society" (173) whose "displaced name … is not death but 'Romanticism'" (174).

¹⁵ Rzepka, however, takes the "Elegy" as the founding text of his study, The Self as Mind 2-9, in a section called "The Body Vanishes: Solipsism and Vision in Gray's 'Elegy.'" Rzepka discusses well the persons in the poem as personifications of the speaker's psychic state. But though he sees the poem's task as "to reunite inner and outer" (8), he sees inwardness and "visionary solipsism" (9) as its sole subject. He overlooks the tradition—from Berkeley to both Kant and Coleridge—for which outness is as much a mental construct as inwardness.

¹⁶ On Gray's instability see Cox, Stranger 82-98, and (in passing, about Gray as a typical figure of the period) Blom, "Eighteenth-Century Reflexive Process Poetry."

¹⁷ Observing the poem's prevailingly negative rhetoric, the disappearance of the "I," and the persistent sense of passing, Anne Williams (Prophetic Strain 93-110) reads its mood as resignation to "passing on," i.e., to mortality. Yet she sees a movement at the start through fadings and endings toward "a kind of resurrection" in stanza 4 (100). I take that movement of release to be general and fundamental in the poem. Sacks, in his brief and reluctant treatment of the "Elegy" (The English Elegy 133-37), berates it as a "poem about the dying of a voice" (136) that leaves the poet "enshrined in a highly literary, even divine obscurity" (137). My discussion may help to clarify why Gray's masterpiece is refractory to the experiential, individual psychology that forms the basis of Sacks's book. Sacks begins, it may be further noted, by questioning Gray's relevance to his topic, since the title "Elegy" (rather than the original "Stanzas") was due to Gray's friend William Mason. Why mention this, since "elegy" appears in the title of no other poem that Sacks interprets? Perhaps Gray's impersonality, so forcefully acknowledged by Sacks's resistance, should be understood in terms of generic self-reference—an elegy on the elegy, and specifically on indulgence in grief and mourning, whose travails are one of the labors that Gray's ease ("haply," "one morn I missed him") conspicuously spares us.

¹⁸ This exclusion is the unrecognized reason why, as Empson says in his commentary on the poem, "one could not estimate the amount of bourgeois ideology 'really in' the verse of Gray" (Some Versions of Pastoral 5)….