Shades of Gray

In the footsteps of Thomas Gray, author of the famous elegy

The graveyard at Malmesbury Abbey. Photo by me.

Dear Supporters

Thank you as ever for your support of the still-fledging English Republic of Letters. It means a lot to the Founding Father (me). 

Just as I had written in my previous Sidebar post for you, I find myself going back to Samuel Johnson’s words as used by Virginia Woolf as her epigraph to The Common Reader and the inspiration for its title. 

The original context for Johnson’s remarks was his “Life” of Thomas Gray, a brief portrait of a poet who’s perhaps barely read outside universities these days (if, indeed, even there). It was part of Johnson’s series of Lives of the Poets, for which he was paid 200 guineas in 1777. He was, of course, the man who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Anyway, Gray is mostly famous now—if we can call survival on faculty library shelves fame—for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. (1751). Having re-read Johnson’s quote in Woolf’s book, such is the swift spatial and time travel allowed in the English Republic of Letters, I quickly found myself standing in Gray’s churchyard.

I confess I’d spent quite a bit of time there before. If you’ve ever enjoyed the quiet of a graveyard and spent a few moments reflecting on the lives of those interred in one, you’ll understand the attraction. The poem is a perfect companion for such interludes, or indeed for any period of silent reflection. This is quiet literature that nevertheless continues to stir the heart nearly 300 years after it was written. 

We have the poem to thank for the phrase “the madding crowd” that Thomas Hardy would go on to use the following century in one of the catchiest titles among his novels (it certainly has a more attractive ring to it than Jude the Obscure). But rather than dazzling phrase-making, it is the cumulative effect of the rhythmical and sonorous lines and their tone of genial reflection that gives Gray’s poem its special quality.

Portrait of Gray 1747–1748 by John Giles Eccardt.