Syntax of Death: Instability in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Author(s): W. Hutchings
Source: Studies in Philology , Autumn, 1984, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 496-514
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4174190

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Studies in Philology

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Syntax of Death:
Instability in Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

by W Hutchings

The curfew tolls! the knell of parting day!

J OSEPH Warton's startling emendation of one of the most famous

opening lines in English poetry looks like the work of a rather too
eager enthusiast.' He may, however, have simply wanted to tidy
up what Gray had left oddly unclear. He has removed the transitive
function of "tolls" and established "the knell of parting day" as the
same as the "curfew" by putting the phrases in apposition to each
other. As Gray wrote the line, the object was, in effect, much the
same as the subject: "knell" acts as a cognate object, repeating the
meaning of both "curfew" and "tolls." Indeed, all the major words
in the line ("curfew," "tolls," "knell," "parting day") enforce, rather
than qualify, one another's meaning. The tolling of a bell had, by
Gray's time, accumulated almost inescapable associations with the
passing-bell.2 Since the day is that which is being tolled for, "parting"
is, it might be argued, redundant, especially as the time has already
been fixed by "'curfew." According to Joseph Cradock, Oliver Gold-

smith once pla"led at mending the poem "by leaving out an idle word
in every line>." His emended version of the first line ran "the curfew

l Warton proposes this emendation in a note on line 1oo of Pope's "Autumn" in The
Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. in Nine Volumes, Complete. With Notes and Illustrations by
Joseph Warton, D.D. and others (London, 1797), I, 82.
2 OED gives 1526 as the earliest date for tolling the passing-bell; the quarto text of
Henry IV Part 11 has a bell "tolling a departing friend" (I.i.io3).
3Joseph Craidock, Literary andi Miscellaneous Memoirs, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 1, 230.

496

? 1984 The University of North Carolina Press

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W. Hutchings 497

tolls the knell of day." Just as possible, semantically and rhythmically,

would be "The curfew tolls for parting day"; or, more simply, "The
curfew tolls the day"; or, simplest of all, "The curfew tolls."
This last version takes us back to Warton, whose emendation ex-
cuses the tautology by having an exclamatory speaker (ludicrously
unsuitable though this is for the rest of the poem). But he also clari-
fies the line by making the "curfew," more naturally than in the origi-
nal, intransitively toll: a curfew is what is tolled, rather than tolling
something else. Gray's probable sources do not accord to the curfew
or bell such a transitive function.4 As George Watson has noted, the
verb "tolls" in Gray's line seems to want to be both transitive and
intransitive: such verbs, he comments, "have the odd property of
facing both ways."5 The curfew tolls something; and yet what it tolls
is, in effect, itself.
Other curious uncertainties are present in the opening quatrain.
The third line, "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,"
presents us with a transferred epithet which invites a return to its
semantic home. "The weary ploughman homeward plods his way"
retains rhythm and rhyme, losing only some euphony, but gaining in
precise sense. If word-order is loose enough to allow of such alter-
ation, so too is line-order. Ian Jack has turned the quatrain into two
couplets, claiming that the result is "respectable verse," although the
poem's "great suspended chords" are thereby destroyed.6 But we can
retain the elegaic stanza, as well as perfect sense, if we exchange the
first and third lines:

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

If a curfew can be allowed to toll a knell, it can easily leave the world
to someone. Indeed, as Gray writes the quatrain, the curfew acts as a

4 In ll Penseroso, 74, the curfew is heard intransitively sounding; while the lines from
Dante (Purgatorio, viii, 5-6) which Gray acknowledged as a source (letter to Beding-
field, 27 August 1756, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard
Whibley, 3 vols. [Oxford, 19351, II, 477) have a bell being heard and seeming to mourn
over the day which is dying. Henry IV Part II, quoted n. 2, is the closest to Gray.
5 George Watson, "The voice of Gray," CritQ, XIX (1977), 53.
6 Ian Jack, "Gray's Elegy Reconsidered," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Pre-
sented to Frederick A. Pottle ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965),
p. i56.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
498 Instability in Gray's Elegy

possible subject of "leaves." Each of the first three lines is a self-

enclosed unit, each signifying parting, the end of a day. They are
complementary even to the extent that they are syntactically parallel.
The last line, which changes the pattern by introducing a conjunction
and omitting a subject, thus invites any of these lines to contain its
subject. Everything which is parting, a bell ending its tolling, a herd
winding away, or a ploughman plodding home, is leaving the world
to the elegist.
It might be claimed that the subject of the second line, "herd," is
plural, and therefore cannot be the subject of "leaves." But there is
yet more uncertainty about this very point: in the first seven quarto
editions published by Dodsley, the verb in the second line was the
singular "winds." Although, as Roger Lonsdale says, Gray "signifi-
cantly 'corrected' the 3rd and 8th," the verb only became plural in
the latter edition. "Herd" is one of those collective nouns (like "gov-
ernment" or "parliament") whose number is ambiguous. Gray's deci-
sion to change "winds" to "wind" may have been suggested by the
following word, "slowly": when read aloud, the "s" of "slowly" tends
to slide over to "wind" and occupy an indeterminate area between lZl
and lsl. Complete transference is never made in a reading, but it is
worth noting that, if it were, the result would be highly appropriate:
the herd would wind lowly like the humble villagers. As it stands,
the line contaiins a play between "lowing" and "slowly," and the ele-
gist is to write that the rude forefathers will never again be raised
from their "lowly bed" (20).
Gray was, of course, a good classicist. What he is doing in this
quatrain is opening up his syntax in a manner found more in Latin
than English. This has been noted in connection with line 35 by a
writer to Notes and Queries who, in pointing out that more than one
nominative can still take a singular verb, quotes Horace Odes 1, 24:

ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor

urget? cui Pudor et Iustitiae soror,
incorrupta Fides, nudaque Veritas,
quando ullum inveniet parem?
(5-8)

7 The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale
(London, 1969), p. 116. I quote from this edition.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W Hutchings 499

Does, then, the sleep that knows no waking lie heavy on Quintilius! When
shall Honour, and Justice' sister, Loyalty unshaken, and candid Truth e'er
find a peer to him?8

Another classicist, Milton, copies the effect at the opening of Lycidas,

an elegy like Horace's ode:

Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,

Compels me to disturb your season due.
(6-7)
The effect of such grammatical license is to enforce the singularity of
each of the subjects while suggesting the collective singularity of all
the subjects. With the death of Quintilius neither honor, nor faith,
nor truth will easily find his equal; and, in so far as these are all
virtues, virtue has lost its great exemplar. In Gray's Elegy, the curfew,
the herd, and the ploughman each retires from the scene, leaving the
world "to darkness and to me"; and the overall concept of life (as
represented by the sound of the end of the day, and the spatial de-
parture of animal and human life) leaves.
Now it may be objected that to treat Gray's quatrain in this manner
is to subject a serious poem to fanciful playing. But the nature of
Gray's syntax has invited just such playful tampering from such read-
ers as Joseph Warton, Oliver Goldsmith, and Ian Jack. There is an
extraordinary degree of instability about this poem, one which often
expresses itself by making its syntax fluid, even indeterminate. Far
from being something to be amended or ignored, this quality is the
key to the Elegy.
The most notorious example of Gray's apparent inability to make it
clear exactly what he means comes in the second quatrain:

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds.
(5-6)
If this were Latin, all would be perfectly clear, but using Latin word-
order for uninflected English has produced confusion. Of course,
eighteenth-century poetry often employs this kind of classicism for
the purposes of dignity (or mock-dignity). But the careful poet will

8 V. R., "Gray's Elegy: A Restored Reading," N&Q, CLXXXIV (1943), 102-3. I quote
from Horace: The Odes and Epodes trans. C. E. Bennett (London, 1914).

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
500 Instability in Gray's Elegy

ensure that either grammar or semantics ascertains which is the sub-

ject and which the object. When Swift writes that "A coming Show'r
your shooting corns presage," the plural form of the verb dictates the
meaning. When Pope says of the monster Chimaera that "Her pitchy
Nostrils flaky flames expire," it is rather unlikely that flames should
be exhaling nostrils.9 Even in more ambiguous instances, the sense
generally demands that we choose only one subject and one object:

But our lewd tastes her lawful charms refuse,

And painted art's deprav'd allurements choose.10

If the line is taken in isolation, our tastes might refuse her charms
("she" is Nature), or her charms might refuse our tastes; but the
second line indicates that the former is the more likely meaning,
and the larger context determines this. In the case of "all the air a
solemn stillness holds," however, neither grammar nor meaning dic-
tates which is the subject and which the object. It is not clear whether
it is more likely that an abstract noun should hold or be held by
something which is insubstantial. The verb is an oddly tactile word
to apply to either case. The effect of this indeterminacy is to create
interchangeability between subject and object, a lack of syntactic
definition.
The last line of this quatrain, "And drowsy tinklings lull the distant
folds," is quietly uncertain in a different way. "Folds" could be either
literal or metonymy for the sheep contained within them (as in Col-
lins' "From eairly dawn the live-long hours she told, / Till late at silent
eve she penn'd the fold"11). If taken in the latter sense (and it seems
at best pointless to lull the actual enclosures), the word contributes to
a circular idea: the tinklings which lull the folds are created by the
folds themselves. "Drowsy," of course, could be taken as a trans-
ferred epithet after the manner of "weary" in the first quatrain. Since
"drowsy" means both "sleepy" and "soporific," both the tinklings
and the folds are drowsy. This kind of circularity supports Gray's
syntactic ambiguity: we are in a world where subjects and objects are
losing their fixity, where stability is being undermined.
George Watson has drawn attention to the way in which Gray
plays with some of his verbs in the Elegy; but the poem's indetermin-

' Swift, A Description of a City Shouwr, 9; Pope, Iliad, vi, 223.

" Young, Love of Fame, v, 235-6.
1 Collins, Persian Eclogues, iii, 11-12.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W Hutchings 501

acy is more wide-spread and fundamental than he suggests, and its

implications go far beyond those of a game. Although instances will
be found throughout the poem, the effect is especially prominent at
the beginning: Gray, far from being simply vague, is establishing a
key for his meditation. The impression thus created is one of radical
insecurity. This is the more startling as the apparent subject-matter
had, by the time the Elegy was published, become fashionable to
the extent of cliche. The chief source for eighteenth-century solitary
nocturnal contemplations is II Penseroso, but Parnell's A Night Piece
on Death had brought the form into the century, while the 1740S saw
a proliferation of gloom with Young's monumental Night Thoughts,
Blair's The Grave, and Hervey's prose Meditations among the Tombs.
Gray, ever alert to the possible use and inversion of conventions,
would have known that he was tapping a familiar vein. So he pre-
sents to the reader a lulling familiarity of subject-matter (his church-
yard abounds with the regular props, an ivy-mantled tower, a mop-
ing owl, and so on) but shot through with an uneasy indeterminacy
of syntax. Gray's matter tells us that we know exactly where we are:
his manner sets in doubt that confident assurance.
It is also at the beginning of the poem that the elegist for the only
time refers to himself in the first person. As Watson notes, that line
("And leaves the world to darkness and to me") is strangely close to
zeugma: it yokes together, without a trace of violence, darkness and
the self. As the world of life and light recedes, Gray's syntax intensi-
fies the isolation of the elegist before absolute blankness. The dark-
ness is both immediately physical and a warning image of the final
darkness of death, the poem's central preoccupation. But the obscur-
ity Gray is creating is also infiltrating his language, loosing his hold
on stable syntax. As night falls, as the world fades on the sight, re-
ality can no longer be firmly and clearly perceived. It is a time when
distinctions become blurred, when objects cannot be surely grasped,
but only held as nebulously as stillness the air, or air the stillness.
On one level, Gray is insisting on shaking a reader's security upon
seeing a poem with this title. Evening, for Gray, is not just a time for
fashionable, self-congratulatory poetic musing: it is a time of real iso-
lation and real disturbance, both for itself and for its symbolic ap-
proximation to death. Further, Gray is subtly preparing his ground
for the poem's own profound, and highly original, meditation. Once
the opening setting of evening has been achieved, Gray's immediate

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
502 Instability in Gray's Elegy

subject is the blurring of distinctions. When the elegist rehearses the

lives of the dead villagers, Gray carefully picks up earlier ideas:

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,

The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

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!
(17-28)

The blazing hearth reminds us of the true meaning of curfew, the

hour for extinguishing fires (from the Old French "covre-feu"): with
the villagers' final curfew their blazing hearth is for ever quenched.
The "lowly bed," in taking up the "lowing" of stanza one, expresses
the logical extreme of rural man's humility. "Glebe" complements the
"lea" o'er which the herd wind slowly, the arable land of the plough-
man alongside the pastoral land. The "furrow" is the work of an
earlier ploughman before he plodded his weary way home for the last
time. His lowly bed is now the churchyard where "heaves the turf in
many a mouldering heap" (14): he who ploughs the earth ends in
earth. We see here one of the effects of Gray's peculiarly circular writ-
ing: the furrow which breaks the glebe is actually the result of the
ploughman's breaking of the glebe.'2 A furrow is formed by action,
but is left behind when he homeward plods his weary way. Life is
a circular pattern, so that the "woods" which once bowed beneath
sturdy strokes appear in the present scene as "those rugged elms,
that yew-tree's shade" (13) overlooking the churchyard. This series of
connections links the lives (and deaths) of the villagers to the present
expression of evening with its associated syntactic disturbances. Indi-
viduals share with evening the extinction of life and light. They are

12 Note how, in this line, Gray is careful to avoid what would have been a comically
inappropriate use of fluid syntax by making the meaning determine subject and object:
contrast, say, "Their harrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke."

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W Hutchings 503

reduced to eternal solitude, so unlike the ideal family community of

lines 21-4, to the state of being "me" confronting darkness.
Death affects everyone, with no distinctions. So the elegist turns to
consider how this universality blurs temporary differences between
people:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
(33-6)
The paths of glory lead to the grave as surely as does the humble
ploughman's weary plod. Significantly, this, the poem's most reso-
nant statement of death's destruction of individuality, follows one of
Gray's most subtle syntactic confusions. As with "wind" in the first
quatrain, the verb here is even affected by textual uncertainty, but
of a more radically troubling kind: the very text of this poem is an
object of tenuous stability. "Awaits" was the form found in the early
editions, but "await" crept into the ninth quarto and is the form used
for the printing of Dodsley's Collection in 1755 and William Mason's
1775 collected edition of his friend's poetry. This intrusion of the plu-
ral furnishes a good example of how the pressure of Gray's syntax
pushes in two directions. The plural reading responds to the natural
feeling that the two preceding lines, with their multiple phrases,
should provide the subject. But it is the singular form, though the
less natural for an English reader, which reveals the full meaning.
The sentence could be seen as inverting its normal word-order, so
that it is the "inevitable hour" which is the true subject; or, as in the
first stanza, the list of singular subjects could be seen as leading to a
singular verb. As another correspondent to Notes and Queries puts it
in the course of a debate on this stanza, "the question is whether the
hour of death is conceived as lying in ambush or marching to at-
tack."''3 He quotes as a Latin parallel Horace's famous "omnes una
manet nox" (Odes 1, 28, 15), where night is given the active role of
subject, and yet this role consists of lying passively in wait: it is the
human race which moves towards one still, dark point. Gray, by con-
fusing subject and object in a way that an uninflected language can,
creates a wider range of meanings: the hour of death, as "active"

'3 Hibernicus, "Gray's Elegy: A Restored Reading," N&Q, CLXXXIV (1943), 203.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
504 Instability in Gray's Elegy
subject, waits passively for man's display, power, beauty, and wealth
to come to it; each of these qualities of life waits for the hour which
will extinguish it; and the conmbined quality of man's pride similarly
attends the arrival of death. The result of such confusion of subject
and object, of active and passive (and this is where the implication
goes beyond that of a merely pedantic debate) is that the attributes of
life and the inexorability of death are inextricably intertwined. Living
is an action, but an active movement towards inaction. Death is pas-
sive, and yet acts to destroy action. As the elegist lives, now, in the
graveyard, so life exists within the setting of death, as the end of each
day is emblematic of the end of life, our final plod to death.
Death destroys distinctions between the great and the poor; and,
more disturbingly, between the good and the bad. If the Elegy were
straightforward eighteenth-century retirement verse, the moral quali-
ties would be strictly and distinctly distributed:

For rural virtues, and for native skies,

I bade Augusta's venal sons farewell,

writes Shenstone in the first of his elegies.'4 But, for Gray's Elegy,
such easy demnarcation is inappropriate: evening, death, and now life
dispel the definite. Power is taken to exist in an ambiguous relation-
ship with man; a common enough view, but here expressed in the
characteristic mode of the poem, through insecure syntax:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
(45-8)
Ostensibly this, like the following stanzas, is a lament for the waste
of talent, of potential achievement caused by the confinement of
the poor to their limited environment. But power is something which
is both wielder and wielded: the hands might have swayed the rod
of empire, but so too might the rod of empire have swayed the
hands. "Sway" as transitive verb provides the idea of wielding an
emblematic rod of empire and of being controlled by that desired

14 J. Fisher, "Shenstone, Gray, and the 'Moral Elegy,'" MP XXXIV (1937), 273-94
argues that Gray might have seen Shenstone's elegies in manuscript form before the
publication of his Elegy.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W Hutchings 505

authority. Subject and object are interchangeable. The following line

resolves the syntax: poetry is clearly susceptible of control by the
individual, whereas public "action" is ambiguous. The question im-
plied is whether man has the capacity to govern his own life, to act as
the stable subject of a transitive verb.
Stanza fifteen's list of examples continues this uncertainty by play-
ing between the worlds of retirement and action:

Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
(57-60)

As in the "rod of empire" line, the village-Hampden's relative clause

holds its verb back until the end of the clause (and, in this case,
employs the impersonal "that" rather than the more normal "who"
or "whom," which would have clarified the syntax) and thus makes
uncertain the identity of the subject. If Hampden withstood the ty-
rant, so too did the tyrant withstand Hampden. Hampden met his
death on the battle-field in 1643, six years before the execution of
Charles I. As in stanza twelve, the poet-figure is the one who is ac-
corded syntactic security, and, here, the softness of "rest," a verb
which belongs to all three examples but is directly joined to some
"mute inglorious Milton." With Cromwell comes a complete reversal:
though one may lament the lack of opportunity afforded the villag-
ers, in this case such limitation avoided destruction, both physical (of
his countrymen) and moral (of himself). Even if one manages to sway
the rod of empire, the effects are as uncertain as the boundary be-
tween authority and tyranny. One's "lot"(65) knows no distinction
between good and bad, between circumscribing a virtue and confin-
ing a crime.
At this point, after line 72, we are offered alternative endings by
the published text and the Eton College manuscript. The latter shows
a briefer original conclusion by way of four stanzas which instruct
the poet to cease his "anxious Cares" and pursue his retired exis-
tence "thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of Life." This offer has nearly
tempted some critics into injudicious disagreement with Gray who,
after all, decided to reject the brief ending for a longer, more involved
one. Thus Roger Lonsdale remarks that, in its original form, "the

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
506 Instability in Gray's Elegy

Elegy is a well-constructed poem, in some ways more balanced and

lucid than in its final version."15 But lucidity is precisely that which is
denied in this remarkable study of the nature of life and death. We
can now see that the original ending is entirely inadequate to the
poem's meaning, and inappropriate for its method. To resolve the
elegist's choice of life is to make a clear decision, to differentiate be-
tween opposites: to do this is to ignore the poem's radical questioning
and blurring of distinctions. The kind of life one leads is irrelevant to
the major issue of death: any human action, any attempt to be an
agent, is doonmed to ultimate failure and pointlessness in the grave's
unyielding passiveness. To resolve the poem is to present action as
both possible and desirable. It is to create a clear syntax for a poem
whose repeated use of irresolute syntax denies the stability of action
(and of the normal categories of retirement verse).
Gray's clear decision (the poem, we recall, has accorded clear syn-
tax to poets in their function as such) to end the Elegy as he does is
ruthlessly correct: rather than opt for a vale of life, the elegist contin-
ues that path which leads but to the grave. The elegist yields his
pleasurable vision of retired, sequestered life to the villagers, and
the replacement passage (stanzas 20-3) explores the idea that, when
each of us dies, each requires someone to remember him, or some-
thing to stir recollection or sympathy. The elegist has been re-creating
the lives of the dead: the poem's logic demands that he too, as a
mortal man, will require the thoughts of a living human being.
The nature of death has been implied throughout: it is to turn a
subject finally into an object. The act of writing a poem, as the elegist
is doing, is to be active; but its subject in this case, death, is one
which confuses and ultimately reduces that agency to passiveness.
Who, then, will meditate in a churchyard and write an elegy for him?
Who, that is, will take over the role of subject when the elegist has
been finally transformed into an object? Another of the poem's ambi-
guities, one which has been most fully discussed by Cleanth Brooks,
now fits into place.'6 This involves stanza 22:

15 Lonsdale, p. 114.
16 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, rev. ed. (London, 1968), p. 94. Thomas R.
Edwards, in one of the most interesting essays on the Elegy ("The Politics of Solitude:
Gray's Churchyard and Goldsmith's Village," in Imagination and Power [London, 19711),
comments that the life of the poem is made "a preliminary kind of dying" (p. 126). My
disagreement with Edwards is that, while he sees the poem as about life, I see it as
about death.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W. Hutchings 507

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
(85-8)

The center of the problem is the question of whether "dumb Forget-

fulness" is an attribute of life or death. Is the elegist asking what
person, about to yield up his or her being to the oblivion of death,
ever did so without casting one longing lingering look behind; or is
he asking whether anyone could be so insensible in life as to give it
up without casting one longing lingering look behind? If the latter is
the case, any such insensibility will, in any event, soon be confirmed
as the reality of death. To be so passive in life is to behave in a man-
ner premonitory of death, to anticipate unconsciousness.
Any notion of immortality is strikingly absent at this stage of the
poem. Gray himself noted that line 92, "Ev'n in our ashes live their
wonted fires," is indebted to a Petrarch sonnet which Gray had trans-
lated into Latin. The context, however, is significantly different. In
Petrarch (and Gray's Latin version makes this even clearer) the point
is that the poem itself will live on, the ardor enshrined in the poet's
"rime diffusi" capable of inflaming thousands,

ch' i' veggio nel penser, dolce mio foco,

fredda una lingua et duo belli occhi chiusi
rimaner dopo noi pien di faville.

For in my thoughts I see, 0 my sweet fire, a tongue cold in death and two
lovely eyes closed, which after us will remain full of embers.17

Gray's adoption of the imagery of fire takes up the earlier curfew and
blazing hearth, whereas Petrarch's image continues the familiar idea
of the flames of love. Where Petrarch bums with passion, even if it is
unrequited ("Lasso, ch' i'ardo" or "Uror io" as Gray's version begins),
the fires in the Elegy are going out forever.The elegist makes no claim
for his poem (it is just "lines" relating the villagers' artless tale), nor is
there any vibrant relationship to immortalize. It is only in the re-
sponse of the living that the dying find any answer to their needs, in
the "pious drops" required by the "closing eye" (go). But the elegist's
total isolation, established in the very first stanza, leads him to the

17 Le Rime, 203. I quote from Petrarch's Lyric Poems ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge,
Mass., 1976).

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
508 Instability in Gray's Elegy

obligation to create for himself such a living person. He has no com-

panion who, after his death, will think of him as he has of the villag-
ers. The chain of life requires that, when the elegist becomes an
object as the villagers have been objects for his meditation, a new
subject should keep him syntactically present: even a passive object
has some life in a sentence.
So, at line 95, he summons up a "kindred spirit," another lonely
contemplative figure who, perchance, will pass his grave as he has
those of the rude forefathers. In this poem devoid of certainty, even
this severely limited form of immortality is emphatically conditional:

For thee who, mindful of the unhonoured dead,

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say....

(93-7)

The tale may be artless, but the telling is highly artful. The syntactic
confusion of subject and object has been used to render the nature of
death. Now the elegist himself enters into this inexorable pattern.
The subject who relates the tale of the rude forefathers is transformed
into "thee," distanced, and an object. The role of subject is then taken
over by the kindred spirit. But the process does not stop here, for the
distancing of the self is carried to extraordinary, but very logical,
lengths. If the elegist is now conceiving of himself as the poem's
object rather than its subject, then he must hand over the narration to
someone else. This is precisely what happens with the entry of the
hoary-headed swain, who takes over the poem. The elegist's transfor-
mation into object appears complete. It is emphasized by the fact that
the only time in the poem that the first person singular pronoun
occurs in the nominative is in the swain's narration: "One morn I
missed him on the customed hill" (log). The elegist who, diffidently,
began as an indirect object to whom the world was left is now a direct
object. The Elegy's uncertain relationship between subject and object
allows us to accept that the writer of a poem could end up as its
object. The fact of death's inevitability demands that such a transition
take place.
Yet that transition is not a simple affair. There is the obvious irony

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W. Hutchings 509

that the learned poet who has been writing about the poor villagers is
now one of their number. Further, the language in which the swain
talks of the poet is highly omate, ostentatiously conventional. The
image of the elegist so presented is that of the currently fashionable
melancholic man of sensibility:

'There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

'That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
'His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
'And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
(101-4)

The pose is reminiscent of that in the Ode on the Spring, a poem which
is set at noon, "Noon-Tide," indeed, being its original title. If we
recall that Gray there makes the poet who moralizes on the great and
the proud as he sits by "some water's rushy brink" beneath a "rude
and moss-grown beech" (13-15) become at the end of the poem the
object of the flies' moralizing, then we shall be prepared to see the
poet-figure in the swain's account as even more definitely an object.
The process in the Elegy is, as befits the nature of the whole poem,
more complex and extreme than in the Ode on the Spring. The process
of the disintegration of the self as subject is not one which the elegist
can make abruptly. In this section of the poem he is casting "one
longing lingering look behind" at himself as poet. No hoary-headed
swain would speak like this: the poet is putting words into the mouth
of his creation rather than completely yielding the narration to him.
This is hinted at in the introduction to the speech, where "haply" is a
word of hoary literary usage, and even the description of the swain
as "hoary-headed" is part of current poetic jargon. For example, Rob-
ert Blair in The Grave, that archetypal sensationalist poem, writes of a
sexton as a "hoary-headed chronicle" (453). 18 The pose and the lan-
guage are fashionable and literary.
Gray, ruthless as ever, destroys this vestige of the poetic subject by
moving the narration on to death itself, as the swain tells of how two
moms (the "poetic" language lingers on) passed without the poet
being seen at his customary, conventional haunts:

18 The date of composition of the Elegy is a vexed matter, but Blair's The Grave was
published early enough (1743) for Lonsdale to regard it as a source for "hoary-headed"
(p. 135)

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
510 Instability in Gray's Elegy

'The next with dirges due in sad array

'Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne.
(113-14)

Death dissolves the poeticisms even as it dissolves the elegist. Inver-

sion and ostentatious alliteration ("dirges due") and poeticism ("ar-
ray") give way to the simple, direct, largely monosyllabic account of
the funeral procession. The language here may not be quite a selec-
tion of that really used by swains, but even Wordsworth exempted
the inversion of "in my breast the imperfect joys expire" from his
attack on Gray's widening of "the space of separation betwixt Prose
and Metrical composition" in the sonnet on the death of Richard
West."9 The brevity of the funeral's description contrasts with the
poetic amplitude of the description of the poet when alive. That the
line contains a reference to the title of the poem reinforces the man-
ner in which the elegist has been subjected to inversion: as he has
pondered in a country churchyard on how the paths of glory lead but
to the grave, so is he borne along a church-way path.
Gray's eventual decision to omit the "redbreast stanza" should now
be explicable. This is the stanza which intervened between stanza
29 and the epitaph in the Eton College manuscript and some early
editions:

There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the Year,

By Hands unseen, are show'rs of Violets found;
T he Red-breast loves to build and warble there,
Aknd little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.

William Mason, though finding the lines "beautiful," "exquisitely

fine," wrote that Gray "thought (and in my opinion very justly) that it
was too long a parenthesis in this place."20 The parenthesis, indeed,
would disrupt the poem's remorseless logic. To return to such lan-
guage (Thonmson's celebrated robin in "Winter" acts as an unavoid-
able literary antecedent) is wrong precisely because it makes, in Ma-
son's words, a "very beautiful stanza." The swain tells the kindred
spirit to approach and read the epitaph: to interrupt this approach to

19 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth ed. E. de Selincourt, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-
9), I1, 391.
20 The Poems of Mr. Gray ... by W Mason (York, 1775), pp. II0-1I.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W Hutchings 511

the grave with a return to a very literary life is wrong because the
elegist is now, for the purposes of the poem, dead.
Without the "redbreast stanza" we are directly confronted with the
epitaph. Here, we might expect, all tension will be finally resolved.
But a comforting epitaph would imply certainty about the nature of
death, the function of the complete object. Gray even avoids this
certainty:

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth.

(117)

This is the conventional epitaphic "hic jacet": the head reposes peace-
fully upon the consoling lap of mother earth. But take this line to-
gether with the next, and the result is disturbing:

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth

A youth to fortune and to fame unknawn.
(117-18)

The head which is the subject of the first line taken in isolation be-
comes the object of the two lines, "rests" being converted from an
intransitive to a transitive verb, and "youth" taking over the role of
subject. Of course, that which is being rested is a part of that which is
doing the resting: at the end of the poem we are again close to the
confusing effect of "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." The
youth who is actively placing his head upon the earth is also pas-
sively resting on that earth.
Bertrand H. Bronson argues that the point is that "rests" is actually
a transitive verb, whereas it looks at first as if it is intransitive. Gray's
purpose is to deny the convention: "It is not a mere Hic jacet. A more
willing submission is implied: not simply lies but lays to rest."21 But
Gray's fluid syntax is there to avoid the definite. The verb "rests"
hovers uneasily between transitive and intransitive, so that we are
uncertain of the extent of active or passive being implied. This con-
tinues the whole poem's concern with the possibility of action; but
now the action is within the realm of death. Is the youth actively
resting his head, or is his head passively resting? This uncertainty
alerts us to the fact that this is to be no conventional epitaphic state-

21 Bertrand H. Bronson, "On a Special Decorum in Gray's Elegy," in From Sensibility

to Romanticism, p. 173.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
512 Instability in Gray's Elegy

ment, either of the kind which asserts immortality or the kind which
ignores such an issue.22
The good Christian's assurance of an after-life seems present in the
last line, "The bosom of his Father and his God." Yet the build-up to this
line is far froml assured:

Large uws his bounty and his soul sincere,

Heaven did a recompence as largely send:
Hi gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
Hi- gained from Heaven ('tuas all he wished) a friend.
(121-4)

Conventional talk of heaven and the departed's humility accompa-

nies a little problem. Is the single friend he gained a human being or
heaven itself? The line can be read in both ways, and the implication
continues the questioning of immortality. One sense makes the ele-
gist's only solace a human life (one which is, therefore, as transitory
as he himself is), the other makes eternal life a solace for a life of
solitude. It is worth adding here that one of the most familiar bio-
graphical speculations about the Elegy is that it was initiated by the
death of Richard West in 1742.23 The sonnet which is definitely about
that death is remarkable, not least for its absence of any hint of belief
in immortality. A conventionally Christian context in the Elegy's epi-
taph allows Gray to sustain the uncertainty.
The final stanza of epitaph and Elegy appropriately hovers in sus-
pension of certainty:

22 Contrast, for example, the following epitaph by William Shenstone, in which one
sees both the conventional hic jacet formula and a bland religious assertion:

Here, here she lies, a budding rose

Blasted before its bloom,
Whose innocence did sweets disclose
Beyond that flower's perfume.
To those who for her death are griev'd,
This consolation's given;
She's from the storms of life reliev'd
To shine more bright in Heaven.
(Epitaph iri Halesouen Churchyard, on Miss Anne Powell)
Shenstone's efficient epitaph is typical of the clarity and certainty common to this type
ofx oem. Gray's tension is the more apparent when set alongside such examples.
See, for example, Odell Shepard, "A Youth to Fortune and to Fame Unknown,"
MP, XX (1922--3), 347-73.

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 W. Hutchings 513

No farther seek his merits to discl

Or draw his frailties from their d
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
(125-8)

That the elegist's merits and frailties alike wait tremulously continues
the duality of good and bad at the heart of the stanzas about the
villagers' limited lives. But, in addition, the play between active and
passive is still present. "Repose" is intransitive, a word of passive-
ness; and yet "hope" implies mental activity. Even that activity is
"trembling," a word which expresses the epitaph's hovering uncer-
tainty; even that apparently clear last line occupies an uncomfortable
syntactic role. Not only does it recall the earlier "lap of earth," but it is
also in apposition to "dread abode": the comforting bosom is also a
place of fear. It is entirely appropriate that a parenthesis about trem-
bling should mediate between fear and comfort.
The epitaph, then, is still making us think, still disturbing us, even
as it uses the language of conventional Christianity and conventional
epitaphs. Gray does not want to round his poem off neatly, because
death is an experience of which we cannot be certain, but also be-
cause the logic of his syntax demands continuity rather than comple-
tion. The elegist invoked a kindred spirit to inquire after him, and it
is that kindred spirit whom the swain tells to read the epitaph. This
then comes at the end of the poem which we have been reading. This
invented character thus becomes us, the readers, who approach the
epitaph through the Elegy.24 As in the Petrarch sonnet quoted earlier,
the poet's tongue is now cold, so that any embers can only glow
within the poem itself. The obvious syntactic way of expressing the
relationship between author and reader would be to say that the lat-
ter is indirect object, the former subject: the writer writes, the poem
is the object written, the reader is the person to whom that object is
left. The elegist began as the person to whom the world was left; and
then actively imagines the life of the villagers before envisaging his
own death. As kindred spirits (if we were not we should not be read-
ing the poem in the first place), we are invited to ponder the elegist's
life, since he is now what the villagers were in the poem. Whether or

24 Cf. Cleanth Brooks, who comments that "the poet has prepared us, the readers,
to be the 'kindred Spirit' if we wish" (p. 99).

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
514 Instability in Gray's Elegy

not there is a God, and whether or not He is punitive or forgiving, at

least an object can make sense if put into a sentence structure with an
appropriate stubject. To that extent the elegist lives when we read his
poem.
Gray's poetry elsewhere searches for an audience. In the sonnet on
West, the emotional center is that the death of his friend has removed
from Gray the only reader who could properly appreciate his poem;
and yet that poem would not exist if West had not died. The paradox
is total and cruel: there is no audience, no reader, and the poet writes
in a void. Gray never published that sonnet, and only published the
Elegy when it was clear that a copy was to be printed without his
approval. In the Elegy, Gray creates an audience which is completely
absent in the sonnet; but this can only be achieved by turning the self
into an object for another's contemplation. The elegist invents his
appropriate reader because he needs him as the closing eye requires
some pious drops. As the poet accepts his own death, so his reader
fulfills the role of keeping alive in his ashes their wonted fires. We
then become what the elegist was to the villagers. Logic moves us
remorselessly on: we in tum shall need a kindred spirit to act in this
way for us. The West sonnet closes with "in vain," the phrase with
which it opens, thereby enforcing its hopeless circularity: the sonnet
goes round and round, turned in on itself, because there is no exter-
nal audience. The Elegy creates that audience within the poem, so
that its circularity is of a different kind. As subject dissolves into
object, so only a new subject can sustain the syntax of life and death.

University of Manchester

This content downloaded from

106.211.35.89 on Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:08:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms