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Poetry after Pope
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Thomas Gray’s Elegy is considerably different in emphasis, although
suffused with a gently humanist melancholy. It is, in some senses, a
life-affirming reconsideration of rural values, although the ending is
often read as involving the poet’s suicide. The elegaic element concerns
the passing of the poet’s own life, and the consideration of ‘loss’ in
the village’s lack of ambition:
Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.
A realistic pastoral in four-line verses, quatrains, echoing some of
Pope’s classically inspired eclogues, the Elegy’s affirmation of simple
lives and their value – in unadorned language – met the mid-century
mood and became hugely popular.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
The Elegy can be read as a poem against mourning, anticipating
Wordsworth’s concern with agricultural life and ‘useful’ labour; finding
meaning in the life lived, rather than in the death feared. In the concluding
Epitaph, however, many readers identify the ‘youth’ with the poet himself:
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Gray, an unassuming man, refused public acclaim and the Poet
Laureateship. The real continuation of the graveyard school’s influence is
more to be found in the imaginative terrors of the Gothic novel, rather
than in the ‘village-life’ writings which came to be seen as ‘pre-Romantic’.
James Thomson’s The Seasons, published season by season between 1726
and 1730, can be seen as the first eighteenth-century work to offer a new
view of nature. Written largely in blank verse, Thomson’s vision of nature as