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Building Background

Literary InfluencesGray’s Elegy shows the influence of two types of poetry popular in the 1700s. One type was the elegy, a poem that laments a death or some other great loss. The elegy was common in classical Greek and Latin poetry, to which Gray and other poets of his time looked for models. The other type was “landscape” poetry, in which the speaker’s natural surroundings evoke melancholy musings on life and death. Gray’s Elegy belongs to a subdivision of this type, “graveyard” poetry, in which the evocative scene includes trappings of a cemetery.

Allusions in Gray’s Elegy Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard contains several allusions. Allusions are references to real or fictional people, places, or events that readers are expected to find familiar. In deciding which allusions to use, Gray, like other writers of the time, could have referred to the Bible or to ancient Greece or Rome. Instead, Gray alludes to events from recent history and the culture of his own time.

Gray: A Literary BridgeLike many of his contemporaries, Gray studied classical literature. However, he also loved the folk literature of Britain and Scandinavia. Drawing on all his literary interests as he crafted his poetry, Gray proved to be a bridge between Neoclassicism and the next artistic trend, Romanticism. Emphasizing emotion and imagination, Romantic writers would explore nature and folk tradition. In doing so, they would expand on ideas that were hallmarks of Thomas Gray’s poetry.

Poetic form: elegy

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is one of the most famous English elegies. An elegyis an extended meditative poem in which the speaker reflects on death—often in tribute to a person who has died recently—or on an equally serious subject. Most elegies are written in formal, dignified language and are serious in mood and tone. Consider these lines from Gray’s poem, which describe a cemetery:

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,

Each in his narrow cell forever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

As you read this elegy, think about who the dead are, how the speaker pays tribute to them, and what observations are made about death.

Reading skill: make inferences

To understand this poem you must make inferences,or logical guesses, about the dead who are described and about the speaker who describes them. Use details from the poem to infer ideas not stated outright. For example, what would you guess about the lives of the people portrayed in this stanza?

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

From the words harvest, sickle, and furrow, you can infer that they were farmers. Oft (“often”) suggests that they were hardworking; jocund (“merry”) suggests that they were happy in their labor.

What would you guess are the speaker’s feelings toward these people? Positive images of strength—a harvest yielding to the sickle, the woods bowing beneath an axe stroke—suggest that he admires them. As you read, record your inferences about the dead and the speaker, and clues that led to your inferences. Use a chart like the one shown.



 


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 816


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Before Reading Meet Thomas Gray (17716-1771) | Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
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