What is the main message of An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

What is the main message of An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

The main message of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is that death renders all humans equal, no matter their respective roles in life. As the speaker muses on the ordinary folk buried in the eponymous churchyard, he reflects that they now occupy the same status as the great figures who overshadowed them in life.

What is the tone of Gray’s elegy?

The tone of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is somber and reflective, as is appropriate for a poem whose central subject is the inevitability of death in human life.

What is GREY style in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is written in heroic quatrains. A quatrain is a four-line stanza. Heroic quatrains rhyme in an abab pattern and are written in iambic pentameter.

Why do you think Gray uses so much personification?

Why do you think Gray uses so much personification? He said that Gray used too much of what he called “unnatural” language—too many metaphors, too many personifications. Wordsworth argued that regular people didn’t really talk like that, so poets shouldn’t, either.

Why is the speaker in a churchyard?

The speaker in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” may be a version of the poet Thomas Gray, given that the poem’s musings have a particular poetic character. At the same time, the overriding message of the poem is universal, and so the speaker’s position can represent anyone in sympathy with the poem’s theme.

Is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard a pastoral elegy?

The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing the poet’s grief at a loss. …

What is mood of an elegy?

About Elegy As well as referring to a mourning or pensive mood, ‘Elegiac’ can refer to a classical metre, this being a couplet of one dactylic …

What is meant by the churchyard school of poets?

The “Graveyard Poets”, also termed “Churchyard Poets”, were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, “skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms” elicited by the presence of the graveyard. …

What are some neo classical features in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

In Gray’s poem, the poet feels sad as he looks at a country graveyard, where obscure people are buried. In the neo-classical mode, the tone and the rhyme scheme of a poem are measured and even, and the stance is intellectual rather than given to emotional outburst or breaks in the cadence.

How does Thomas Gray use imagery in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

Thomas Gray begins his “Elegy” by describing nightfall. This gentle image, however, is also a symbol of death; as nightfall indicates the end of day, death indicates the end of life. The details in the first few stanzas paint an accurate and charming picture of the end of day in the country.

What is the poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard about?

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is the British writer Thomas Gray’s most famous poem, first published in 1751. The poem’s speaker calmly mulls over death while standing in a rural graveyard in the evening.

What is an elegy by Thomas Gray about?

An elegy is a poem written to mourn a person’s death. Gray wrote this elegy in the year 1742. However, he published it only in the year 1751. He wrote this poem after the death of his friend Richard West. The poem is an elegy of the common man. It is Gray’s masterpiece. The poem is philosophical and emotional at the same time.

What is Elegy of the common man?

An elegy is a poem written to mourn a person’s death. Gray wrote this elegy in the year 1742. However, he published it only in the year 1751. He wrote this poem after the death of his friend Richard West. The poem is an elegy of the common man.

What does Gray say about his life in the poem?

In the poem, Gray, the poet himself, writes the epitaph of his own. He says that his life is full of sadness and depression. However, he feels proud of his knowledge.