Analyse the elegiac characteristics of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard with special reference to the theme and style of the poem.

Analyse the elegiac characteristics of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard with special reference to the theme and style of the poem.

An elegy is a mournful, melancholic poem, a funeral song or lament for the dead. Thomas Gray's elegy written in 1750 has the Spenserian tone of sober melancholy. The subject of this elegy is an evening meditation in the church yard of an obscure village. The popularity of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard can be measured from the fact that it is reprinted millions of times and there are over 150 imitations of it.

Noted English poet William Shenstone says "I have seen Whitehead's Ode to the Bristol-Spring; which I don't much like; and the Verses in the country Church-yard which (as the Hagley-gardener said of my Grove) I like too well." about the elegy.

It connects the reader to English history and to European literature: Dante, Milton, the classical writers. Its ideas about society and education are deeply relevant today.

The elegy is full of imagination and sentiment. The poem begins with the author walking over the graves of the villagers in a melancholy manner. The first stanza is a visual masterpiece with an impressive array of sound-effects. It's particularly audible in the first four lines, where the mournful, vowel-heavy sounds of the cattle lowing and the bell's tolling are grounded by the earthier throb of tired, heavy, mud-caked footfall.

In stanza two, the sky has darkened, and the sounds have become lighter, fainter, yet somehow more intense: the beetle's "droning flight", the high, faint and silvery "tinklings" of sheep-bells. The poet goes on to describe how underneath the elms the villagers lie undisturbed by noises around them. He is their chief mourner, and the recording angel of their rustic life........................................................

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