Elegy Written in Country Churchyard and Other Poems

by Thomas Gray, R S. Gilbert

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Genres: Poetry, Classics, British Literature

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.

Reviews

[Piper Ogletree · Rating 4 out of 5]

If someone wrote on my gravestone “here lies the young man who was not popular” I would come back to haunt them

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up a cheap copy of this to read the titular poem. Overall a good read, aside from Pope and Gray I found the first half a mixed bag and rather repetative. The second half has poems by Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy who both surprised me, as I know them for their prose, with concise yet emotional poems. Keats Ode to Autumn I studied in high school, it is beautiful and the quintessential autumn poem. I have avoided Wordsworth in the past based on the few poems of his that I had come across. Well I was wrong. The section from The Prelude, Book Eleven Imagination, How Impaired and Restored is a beautiful rumination on memory and childhood.

Favourites
Alexander Pope - Windsor Forest
Thomas Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud & The Prelude, Book Eleven Imagination, How Impaired and Restored
Bronte - The Night is Darkening Round Me & The Bluebell is the Sweetest Flower
Hardy - The Darkling Thrush
Edward Thomas - Digging

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being new to reading poetry, this was another good collection to start with. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard deserves every bit of the praise it's received over the years. I loved the intimacy, solitude and quiet contemplation of the poem. Its themes, the reflections on life and death and one's lasting significance in the world, are relevant to every generation. There is much to like in this small book of Thomas Gray's work. Hymn to Adversity was a favorite as was Ode, on the pleasures arising from vicissitude. Gray is able to examine a theme in all its facets, both the obvious and subtle. He does so with charming images and lyrical turns of phrase.

I struggled with both the Pindaric odes: The Progress of Poesy and The Bard. Too many allusions to history and classical texts with which I am not familiar. I grasped very little of Gray's messages here and even Internet searches were not much help.

I am slowly gaining a greater appreciation for the poetic form. The study of these poems has convinced me that some sort of Introduction to Poetry class would be well worth my time.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of England's great poets writing about their English countryside and the nature it possesses. Critics for years have hailed these poets as great, and its a joy to have so many different authors side by side, spanning generations, from Alexander Pope to Thomas Hardy. The poems are well-selected and all enjoyable, but after the 10th poem on nature it begins to be slightly tedious. "What more can one have to say?" And yet more they do, surprisingly different with each author. Overall one gets the impression that nature was a calming force, almost a place of refuge for the thoughts of their mind. It is also delightfully short, easily read in an afternoon, which makes it so much more accessible than all those volumes of anthologies of poetry I have on my shelves. On a personal level, I enjoyed Wordsworth much more than I had at University. I had dismissed him as being rather frivolous, but found on this second reading a depth I had not appreciated before and was surprised that he became my favorite poet of the collection.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

ci sono alcune tra queste poesie che sono meravigliose e ogni occasione è buona per rileggerle, alleviano lo spirito