Lit202

Romantic desire to escape to the country.

Gray's speaker seems to enter this scene as an outsider. The title suggests this, the Church yard is a country church yard. It consciously draws attention to the relative uniqueness to the poet and the presumed reader. How do we know that? Because a man born and raised in the country would not refer to his church yard as a country church yard.

The title refers to the poem and what someone may write about him (the poet) in the church yard one day.

The poem is the poet's own elegy.

when we elegise someone we mournfully commemorate them. The elegy is traditionally a song, and it has come to be associated with a poem.

He is lamenting his death. It mourns those whose bodies lie in the church yard and he commemorates them. He imagines their lives.

The movement from afternoon to evening, day to night is a conventional image of life to death, activity to rest.

The lines describes a descending movement of perspective. The curfew tells...

Cosmic, to the animal, to the anonymously human, and then to the individual.

Sybillance - solemn stillness holdS

This is indeed a solemn poem. And the poet is held by this solemn stillness. Contrasted by the movement in stanza 1.

Sight and sound juxtapose each other. Sight gives way to sound - Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight.

Although these sounds suggest life holding out against death, movement against stillness, activity against slumber, instead it does the opposite. "The distant folds are lulled by the drowsy tinklings" Sensory perception and indeed the sounds, become acute in the fading light. The details of life are thrown into reflection as the day is ending. As visual perception disappears the character starts to notice all these interesting and quaint sounds.

The beetle's flight goes unnoticed in a day of activity. This is important - it explicates the recognition of those that we normally overlook. So as stillness comes, we begin to ponder on the lives of these people who are overlooked.

Moping suggests inactivity. Indulging in melancholy, as it were.

An important theme to consider is, solitude. The man, like the owl, is alone. But in the case of the owl, solitude is its preferred case of being. We suspect, however, that the man alone is in fact loneliness.

A bower is an enclosed space, a sanctuary. And there is some irony here - that the setting of the poem is the ultimate place of rest - a graveyard. The solitary reign of the owl is precisely the reigning over of the night time and over the dead and she is complaining to the moon that this is being interrupted. and we can assume that this interruption is the speaker.

The elm tree has long symbolised strength and ruggedness. These trees have a symbolic overtone but they are also normal fixtures of an English graveyard - nonetheless, their symbolism which is perhaps derived from their association with graveyards is known to the poet. These trees stand for life that is still going on - standing above what is below them, death. From these dead people they take their life.

Life and death, inactivity and activity - beautifully intertwined in line 2, stanza 4.

Stanza 5 is all about life and throws into relief the theme of death, sleep, inactivity.

Stanza 6 re-iterates that theme. Here also is an example of the good life. Celebrated by the Ancients, Virgil, (georgics) right through to the present day.

The senates

They are denied of doing great things, and also from doing terrible things. They weren't given a chance because of their lot in life.

The last lingering look on life the dying have as they leave life.

"hasty steps brushing the dews away" The sense of vibrancy in a new day. This solitary figure, the speaker, imagines being remembered as one who went to meet the sun as one who looked at the babbling brook, who poured over it, who experienced it. He is consumed by feeling, this pleasing anxious being, as he calls it.