Abstract
My analysis of the “Elegy written in a Country churchyard” aims to point out similarities and differences between the elegiac mourning for the dead in Gray’s verses and the rhetoric of the funeral sermons, and meditations on death, which were part of the eighteenth-century encyclopaedia. Echoes of Meditations among the Tombs by James Hervey can be perceived throughout the poem. This intense intertextuality unveils a discourse on death which Gray inherited from past ages and then remoulded to express not only the sufferings of the bereaved, but also the soothing effect of memories, annals, anthems, and uncouth verses.
My second point will be that the speaking ‘I’ will try to reproduce communication in the presence of the audience and the dead, which is typical of funeral sermons.
Dramatically, the “Elegy” will end with an epitaph and a plea for silence.
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Notes
- 1.
“The knell of the parting day” (l.1). Imitation “[…] squilla di lontano/Che paia il giorno pianger, che si muore. Dante, Purg. l.8” (Mason 1775: 108). The curfew ‘ever since William the Conqueror had dictated that bells should mark the end of the day, had become synonymous with the fading of the evening and the coming of darkness’ (Suvir 2006: 279).
- 2.
- 3.
Hutchings (1984) offers a detailed list and discussion of Gray’s mis(use) of the English language, which serves to create ambiguities and hidden meanings.
- 4.
“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” (Hutchings 1984: 508).
- 5.
“Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires”. This variation of line 92 was adopted by Mason (1775).
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Dongu, M.G. (2017). Gray’s ‘Elegy’: A Polyphonous Elegy Sung to the Silence of Death. In: Parvaresh, V., Capone, A. (eds) The Pragmeme of Accommodation: The Case of Interaction around the Event of Death. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_22
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