1716-1771 · English poet and scholar, author of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
About Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (1716-1771) was an English poet and scholar, educated at Eton and Cambridge, who spent most of his life as a fellow at Peterhouse and Pembroke College. Shy and exacting, he published little: a handful of odes, the Elegy and some Pindaric odes in 1757. He declined the Poet Laureateship in 1757 and became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1768. The Elegy made him the most admired English poet of his day.
“The Curfeu tolls the Knell of parting Day, The lowing Herd winds slowly o'er the Lea, The Plow-man homeward plods his weary Way, And leaves the World to Darkness, and to me.”
“The Boast of Heraldry, the Pomp of Pow'r, And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable Hour. The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave.”
“Full many a Gem of purest Ray serene, The dark unfathom'd Caves of Ocean bear: Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its Sweetness on the desart Air.”
“Far from the madding Crowd's ignoble Strife, Their sober Wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd Vale of Life They kept the noiseless Tenor of their Way.”
Gray's Elegy is a meditation spoken at dusk in a village churchyard. In the opening stanzas the curfew bell rings, the cattle wind home, the ploughman plods away, and the speaker is left alone with the darkening fields, an owl complaining from the ivied tower, and the grassy mounds where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.