COUNTRY CHURCHYARD,a country churchyard summary,a country churchyard lyrics, elegy written in a country churchyard lyrics

 ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY :

 CHURCHYARD (1751) Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyardhas been considered as the most enduringly famous, fluent and diversified of all 'graveyard" poems. Ant the term Elegy, as you already know, has been defined as any poetic meditation on the death of an individual or upon death itself. Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyardbroadly meditates on the obscure destinies of the unknown and undistinguished villagers buried in the country churchyard and culminates i the celebrated comment on unfulfilled greatness; "village Hampdens, "mute inglorious Miltons and "guileless Cromwells", who have in the village had bot their talents and their potentials confined by a lack of opportunity. But Gray is not making a political protest on behalf of the meek or the downtrodden. He is merely siding with the passive placidity of rural rhythm a rustic verse. The poetry of sophistication complements the unsophisticated rhymes on the grave-stones. The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard intermixes the poetry of country retirement with a self-reflective nocturnal musing on the egalitarian nature of mortality.

 The unnamed "hoary headed swain" at the end of the poem becomes a memorializer of an inconspicuous bard. He speaks not in "uncouth rhymes", but in the smooth closing quatrains which form an epitaph, and renders the melancholy poet one with the dead villagers. So the Elegy finally focuses on a solitary poet, a man of "humble birth" and a stranger to "national glory, to fortune, and to fame," Now let us look more closely at the poem itself. The Elegy begins with a quatran that sums up the very mood and thematic content of the whole poem: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,. And leaves the world to darkness and to me The curfew mournfully tolling the end of a day, the lowing herd winding slowy over the lea, the tired ploughman plodding his way home - all go to build up a dark and dismal mood that artistically prepares one for the dark thoughts aboul come in the Elegy. And when the world is left over to darkness, the poet mentions himself in identification with this natural scene of a dusk being overtaken by the darkness of the night. The poet has introduced himself right n the very opening quatrain as a part of the natural landscape. Such an identification between the poet and the natural landscape is later to emerge in the Romanticism of William Wordsworth. The Elegy Writen in a country Churchyand next goes on to the Churchyard itsc "Beneath those rugged elms, that few tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap. Each in his narrow cell for ever laid The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep".