preview

The Pastoral Ideal in Thomas Gray's Elegy (Eulogy) Written in a Country Churchyard

Better Essays

The Pastoral Ideal in Thomas Gray's Elegy (Eulogy) Written in a Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray’s "Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard" portrays the pastoral ideal through many different images. The traditional pastoral notion of idyllic life changes in this poem to form a connection with people themselves. The speaker of this poem creates a process by which laborers come to symbolize the perfection of the pastoral through their daily toils. These people come to represent the ideal form of pastoral life. In this poem, however, Gray consigns these people and their lifestyle to darkness and death in order to save them from a world whose changing ideals support their idyllic lifestyle.

This poem can be broken into four parts. These …show more content…

The images of nature portrayed before line 29 show a very active setting. Owls and beetles interact with each other, and birds make themselves heard. This is put into friendly opposition with the images of the "rude Forefathers" (16) There is no kind of opposition between these images of nature, and the people who used to interact with them. Instead, Gray shows us a lifestyle which was firmly imbedded within the pastoral tradition. The active feature in this section is the use of the past tense. Although these farmers had a good relationship with nature, they are all "sleep[ing]" (16) now. Though a pastoral lifestyle was once alive and flourishing in this country area, the human element has since died out--leaving only nature in its wake. This first section deals with the pastoral ideal as a natural way to live one’s life. These people did not choose to live his way, they did not have to work for this interconnectedness, instead they were given this life because of who they were. Because they lived in nature, they lived with nature. The notion of free choice in this matter never comes into the equation. The working people had the harvest yield to their sickle (25) and had the forest "bow [to their] sturdy stroke" (28). This type of relationship does not call for either side, human or nature, to give up any type of freedom. The people who worked the land never call into question the type of relationship they have with nature. The

Get Access