Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Gray begins his elegy with a sensuous, vivid description—not of the graveyard where the speaker is standing, but of the surrounding rural landscape—and a rhyme emphasizing the speaker’s placement within the landscape: “lea” (Line 2) and “me” (Line 4). This evocative and lyric description of the countryside continues in the second and third stanzas. Gray is paying close, careful attention to the pastoral setting as such a setting is incredibly important in elegy. In what is widely considered the most important and influential English elegy, “Lycidas,” John Milton called back to a much earlier Greek tradition where shepherds sat around in the countryside and lamented the death of one of their shepherd-friends, but eventually found comfort and consolation for their loss (Milton, John. “Lycidas.” Poetry Foundation). Gray is clearly alluding to Milton’s elegy in this poem and imitating the pastoral setting of the earlier poem.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker finally begins to describe the graveyard where he is standing and writes that the “rude forefathers” (Line 16) of the small town are buried there. The speaker doesn’t mean “rude” as inconsiderate; he means “rude” as uneducated.