Here, resting his head in the dirt, lies a young man that had neither wealth nor fame.

He
had no education because he was born to common people. His life was defined by sadness. Even
so, he had great gifts and an earnest mind. Heaven repaid him in plenty for these gifts and his
suffering. He gave all he had to his misery, which was a single tear. In return, Heaven gave him
the only thing he'd ever wanted: a friend. Don't try anymore to talk about his strengths and gifts,
or to bring his weakness back from the dead. Both his strengths and weakness lie in the grave in
a state of quivering hope. He is now with his Father, God.
Themes
The main idea of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a simple one: everybody
dies. Sitting in a graveyard as the sun begins to set, the speaker mulls over the fact that death is
universal. He thinks about the many kinds of lives that death cuts short, emphasizing the fact no
amount of wealth, power, or fame can save people from death. At the heart of the poem, then, is
the blunt fact that death comes for everyone: the rich, the poor, and the speaker himself.
Since an “elegy” is a poem written to lament someone’s death, the poem's title signals its
themes right away. This elegy, it becomes clear soon enough, is for everyone who is buried in
the “Country Churchyard,” the graveyard attached to a rural church. It’s also for everyone who
will be buried there which includes the speaker himself! In fact, the poem might as well be for all
mortals, for whom the poem reminds readers’ death is inevitable. This is a bleak sentiment to be
sure, and the darkness that descends over the churchyard captures this sense of looming,
inescapable mortality. Church bells signal the "parting day," leaving the speaker alone as night
falls. Standing in the graveyard as the light fades, the speaker sees death everywhere, as if it
suddenly envelops the world itself.
Contemplating the humble graves all around him, the speaker is further struck by the fact
that people die whether they’re rich or poor. The graves in this churchyard might look like moldy
mounds of dirt, but, the speaker insists, it's not like a rich person’s more beautiful grave would
somehow call them back from the dead! The speaker reflects on the elaborate burials of the rich
and powerful in order to hammer home the fact that death is universal. Some people may have
“trophies” on their tombs, “urn[s]” and “bust[s]” that represent all their accomplishments, yet
these things cannot “call the fleeting breath” back into the dead person’s body. The “dull cold ear
of Death” doesn’t listen to “praise” for the dead person; even fame and "glory" can’t defeat
death, and when someone dies, the speaker implies, they’re dead for good.

The speaker even describes his own death, imaging how he will be buried “beneath yon
aged thorn,” under an old tree. The poem in fact ends with the speaker’s imagined epitaph! From
the gloomy omens at the beginning to the speaker’s demise at its end, then, the poem is saturated
with death universal, inescapable, and final.

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The Value of Commemorating the Dead
The speaker insists that death is universal and final that it comes for everyone and can't
be undone. At the same time, however, the poem speaks to the value of honoring, remembering,
or even just imagining the lives of the dead. Doing so, the poem suggests, is a meaningful act of
memorial for those whom the rest of the world, and history itself, has forgotten. What's more, the
poem implies that such acts of commemoration may be a way to help people confront their own
mortality. Memorializing the dead thus also helps the living. The people buried in the churchyard
don’t have elaborate memorials. The speaker describes their graves as “moldering heap[s],”
mounds of dirt without the ostentatious decorations of rich people's marble tombs. At most, their
graves have their names and the years they were alive.
Still, their simple graves have a profound effect on the speaker, who starts imagining
what kinds of live these people might have led. He imagines them woken by the call of a rooster.
He pictures them “[driving] their team” of oxen over the land, cheerful as they plow the soil. He
speculates that one of them may have stood up to “the little tyrant of his fields” (i.e., a greedy
landlord). In contemplating the lives of these people, he honors them. He sees their lives as full
of meaning and authentic emotion. And this, in turn, illustrates the profound effect that even the
simplest traces of the dead can have on the living.
These simple gravestones also lead people to contemplate their own deaths. The speaker
describes how simple rural people often have poetry or Bible verses ("many a holy text") carved
on their graves in order to "teach the rustic moralist to die." In other words, people like to carve
sayings that provide some wisdom about death and dying. Visiting someone’s grave isn’t just
about remembering someone’s life, but about confronting death itself, and perhaps finding some
way to accept it.The poem ultimately suggests there are two reasons to commemorating the dead:
remembering and honoring those who are gone, and facing up to the fact of death itself.

Anonymity vs. Fame

As the speaker contemplates death, he focuses on all the common people who have died
without fame, power, or wealth. In particular, he realizes that many people could have been great
and famous if only they had grown up under the right circumstances. Rather than lamenting this
fact, however, the speaker suggests that these people led less troubled lives than those in elite
society. The speaker rejects wealth, fame, and power, and instead celebrates regular people
living ordinary lives. Anonymity, the poem suggests, is better for the soul. The speaker imagines
all the kinds of fame and power common people might have achieved if they’d been born in a
higher class. First, the speaker represents this idea in metaphorical terms: “Full many a flower is
born to blush unseen.” In other words, many flowers bloom with nobody to look at them. The
same goes for common people, whose skills and powers may well go unrecognized.
Next, the speaker imagines this potential in terms of past famous people. For instance, he
imagines “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest": that is, someone buried in this graveyard

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might have been as great a genius as the poet John Milton. However, because the dead here were
illiterate and confined to a rural trade, they never had the chance to write any glorious poems
rendering them metaphorically “mute,” or unable to speak. All this wasted potential sounds
pretty sad, until the speaker starts thinking about all the horrible people who have gained power
throughout history. For instance, he mentions Oliver Cromwell, a dictator who ruled England in
the middle of the 17th century. Someone buried in this churchyard might have had the same
potential for injustice, yet because of his anonymity he never had the chance and is “guiltless of
his country’s blood.” In this sense, the lives of common people prevent them from becoming
monsters.
Their “lot,” or place in their world, “confined” their “crimes.” Someone can’t “wade
through slaughter to a throne” if they’re just a simple, unknown farmer living from one harvest
to the next. All things considered, the speaker doesn’t think wealth, power, or fame is worth it,
preferring common people's "sober wishes." Regular folks want simple, understandable things
like food on the table and a roof over their heads the speaker says, and thus are never driven to
“the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” to the grotesque conflicts of the powerful. Commoners,
according to the speaker, live in “the cool sequestered vale of life.” They keep their heads clear
and find a measure of happiness.
Finally, the speaker reveals that he identifies with this anonymity. In the epitaph at the
end of the poem, the speaker imagines himself as a young man who never received an education
and died without fame or wealth. Although he dies full of “Melancholy,” or sadness, he also
found a measure of peace in his anonymity. “His soul was sincere,” and he dies without being
polluted by wealth or fame. Life might not be happy, the poem implies, but at least anonymity
grants people the chance to live and die in peace without empty striving or cruel ambition.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Lines 1-4
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" begins by setting the scene and mood. A
"Country Churchyard" is a graveyard that is, a burial area connected to a church in a rural area.
The speaker is standing in this rural graveyard as the day ends. He describes in simple, clear
details the various sights and sounds that mark the end of the day in a rural English village in the
mid-1700s: the church bell rings, cows are herded back to the farm, farmers trudge home from
the fields, and darkness envelops the land.
This is an atmospheric beginning to a poem that announces itself, from its title, as an
"Elegy" a poem that mourns someone's death. Death is on the reader's and speaker's minds, then,
throughout these opening lines. As "the curfew tolls the knell of parting day," it's easy to imagine
a funereal sound to these bells. After all, "parting" is often a euphemism for death. The
sorrowful-sounding "lowing" of cattle, like the cries of mourners, mixes with the ringing of the
bells. And finally "darkness," a classic symbol of death, descends over the world. Everyone has
gone home and the speaker is left in isolation, perceiving death everywhere.

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 By beginning with accurate, evocative descriptions of the natural world, Gray
immediately places his poem within a new kind of nature poetry, one that evolved throughout the
1700s. In comparison, much poetry of the time tended to focus on allegory, in which abstract
qualities were personified in imaginary scenes. Although Gray will turn to this type of writing in
this poem as well, he deliberately begins the poem by describing concrete images in the real
world. It's easy to imagine the speaker as a flesh-and-blood person observing an actual scene in
this rural village.