"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" - An Old Poem, a New Artwork

The elegy is a poetry form with roots in Classical Greece and Rome. It is a poem of loss and mourning, but it often ends with some sense of hope. Traditionally, it has three sections – lament, tribute, and consolation. Some of the best elegies have a musical sense about them; the elegies of the ancient Greeks were usually accompanied by the playing of lutes. 

The best-known elegy in contemporary times is one written some 280 years ago. It’s the best known because so many of us studied it in high school, and, for a long time, it was also a popular poem for students to memorize. Thomas Graypublished “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” about 1742 after a friend “leaked” a copy to a few others. It was immediately popular, even among Gray critics like Samuel Johnson. The surprise, perhaps, is that it remained popular for such a long period of time. 

 

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Thomas Gray and the Elegy

I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin’s new collection of poems, Finding My Elegy (more on that next week), and you can’t see a word like “elegy” without thinking of the most famous elegy of all in the English language.

If there is any poet with whom we associated the elegiac form, or elegy, it is Thomas Gray. The form dates back to Greek and Roman times, and was far broader in subject matter than what we associate with elegies. The ancients used elegiac couplets to describe the mythological, the erotic, the satirical, the playful – and occasionally for epitaphs on tombs. Examples exist of the elegiac form during medieval and later times; John Milton wrote several, for example.

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