Syntax of Death Instability in Grays Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard
Syntax of Death Instability in Grays Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard
Syntax of Death Instability in Grays Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard
Author(s): W. Hutchings
Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 496-514
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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by W Hutchings
l Warton proposes this emendation in a note on line 1oo of Pope's "Autumn" in The
Worksof Alexander Pope, Esq. in Nine Volumes, Complete. With Notes and Illustrations by
JosephWarton, 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 11has a bell "tolling a departing friend" (I.i.io3).
3Joseph Craidock, LiteraryandiMiscellaneousMemoirs, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 1, 230.
496
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, Correspondenceof 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 FromSensibility to Romanticism:Essays Pre-
sented to FrederickA. Pottle ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965),
p. i56.
7 The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale
(London, 1969), p. 116. I quote from this edition.
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).
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."
'3 Hibernicus, "Gray's Elegy: A Restored Reading," N&Q, CLXXXIV (1943), 203.
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.
15
Lonsdale, p. 114.
16 Cleanth Brooks, The Well WroughtUrn, 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 Imaginationand 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.
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
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)
19
The Poetical Worksof William Wordsworthed. E. de Selincourt, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-
9), I1, 391.
20 ThePoemsof Mr. Gray ...
by W Mason (York, 1775), pp. II0-1I.
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.
Universityof Manchester