🪦 the brilliance of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]He talks about what he wants to do in poetry. He says, "Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself. Shakespeare and Milton may have been great creators in their way, and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden." What he's saying is that great poets, they create words and phrases, they create language. And that's why it takes him 10 years to complete this poem because he is constantly revising it and trying to find the right words that leads him to these phrases like Far from the Madding Crowd or The Paths of Glory. And I think one of the things you realize when you read the poem is just how dynamic and active the language is in in every single stanza. I think some of the signature tricks he plays are that as you come into it, there is nobody on the scene except him, right? He's got nothing but himself and a churchyard, and he's got a challenge.

[00:00:52]How do I make this dynamic? And the way he does it is by making inanimate objects very dynamic agents. The curfew tolls, drowsy tinklings lull, the turf that the bodies are buried under heaves, the harvest yields, and the wood bows.

[00:01:10]So, we've got these very dramatic verbs or active verbs being delivered by very passive objects. Lumps of earth are heaving >> I love that. or or the harvest is yielding. He's finding a way to make the language of solitude and introspection dynamic, which I think is completely brilliant, and I think it's part of why this poem was so successful at the time.