"Elegy" revisited

                I enjoyed reading Gray’s “Elegy.”  I found it an excellent example of the high and low culture juxtapositions we’ve been discussing in class – the comparison is certainly vividly present.  Because of this emphasis, it is also a lovely example of the period as a whole, which dealt with questions of urbanization, a rising middle class, and class consciousness beginning to unravel into nostalgia for the pastoral.  Yet I also enjoy the poem for what it is in itself: beautiful writing and a tender tribute to the life of those often forgotten.  Beyond its place in history, “Elegy” is a remarkable piece of literature.

                I wonder how often I’ve missed appreciating works when I get too caught up in seeing them as symbols of the time.  Sometimes I even find myself frustrated with a text for not containing just the right statement I need to prove in a paper that the text supports my argument about the historical setting.  I suppose that’s only natural – after all, the homework must be completed.  Yet in this class, we have read so much that is rich and meaningful and beautiful.  It would be a shame not to pause and recognize the beauty (or the humor, or the humanity, or any compelling feature) when it appears.  In “Elegy,” I love the little phrase, “One morn I missed him on the customed hill, along the heath and near his favorite tree” (109-10).  This sentence certainly does allude to urbanization, the problem with enclosure laws, and the disappearing rural life.  Yet also, it describes vividly the tenderness of the setting.  It places the concern for a disappearing way of life in a personal context.  “One morn I missed him,” it says – this way of phrasing the fact that the man does not appear recalls not just lament for his demographic or what he represents, but for him.   And that, perhaps, is the power of poetry: to say something larger (like the political scene) without overriding the immediate sense of the words.  The images created enhance the larger meaning, and they also stand alone and work together with that meaning.  This poem accomplishes both tasks – both layers of meaning – remarkably well.