Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is written in four-line stanzas, or quatrains. Each quatrain follows the rhyme scheme abab. The meter of each line is iambic pentameter, meaning five iambs (an iamb is a two-syllable foot where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable) per line. Since Gray used it in this canonical and influential elegy, this form (iambic pentameter quatrains that rhyme abab) has come to be known as the “elegiac quatrain” or “elegiac stanza.”   

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics points out that Gray’s form is “identical” to the first three quatrains of an English sonnet (“Elegiac Stanza.” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger, Enlarged ed., Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 215). It is only using this form to explore elegiac topics that makes it an “elegiac quatrain.” Later poets will exploit this overlap between the elegiac stanza and the sonnet form to great effect. After rereading Gray’s poem many times, WWI soldier-poet Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est”—a poem that is both an elegy and a double sonnet and employs the elegiac quatrain.