English Literature / Unit 11 ENL 1026 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Thomas Gray's Elegy
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The idea
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," published in seventeen fifty-one, meditates among village graves on the obscure, unrecorded poor and on death, which awaits all. Written in cross-rhymed quatrains, it ends with an epitaph and has inspired more imitations than any other English poem, one commentator argues.
In practice
A churchyard, the forgotten dead.
Where people slip
The Elegy honours obscure lives.
Your place on the trail
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