ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD Definition & Meaning

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

noun

a poem (1750) by Thomas Gray.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

(1751) An enduringly popular poem by the English poet Thomas Gray. It contains the lines “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air,” “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and “far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray.”

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As Thomas Gray writes in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a poem I used to teach my high-school students: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

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I especially loved the famous prefaces to classic books and the poetry — Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” rings in my ears still.

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I thought of the Bible, but in the end decided poetry might be more soothing, so I brought an anthology from my room and read Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

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The phrase subtly alludes to another meditation on unrealized genius, “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,” from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

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Forget Hamlet's soliloquies about this mortal coil of ours; forget Hieronymus Bosch's comic hellscapes; forget Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

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