Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a plea for remembrance for the dead, but it’s also a little bit more complicated than that because the dead in this poem haven’t left much behind by which to remember them. There are only two ways the speaker can access the lives of the lower-class people buried in the churchyard and remember them—through the imagination (stanzas 5-7 imagine the lives these farmers must have led) and through the crude tombstones in the churchyard (stanzas 20-23 describe the rough memorials of the graves).  

Even when it comes to the poet’s imagining of his own death, he offers precious little. In stanzas 25-29, a local tells what he knows of the poet’s life. In stanzas 30-32, the epitaph is read. All told, only 15 stanzas of the 32-stanza poem are dedicated to remembrance (stanzas 5-7, stanzas 20-23, stanzas 25-29 and 30-32). 

Remembering the dead is an important theme in this poem, but it’s not everything. Equally as important is, as Sacks claims: 

an attitude toward the dead, an attitude that the poet hopes will eventually be accorded to himself. This attitude includes piety, compassion, respect, and attentiveness—the kind of attentiveness we owe the mute. (Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy. Johns Hopkins University, 1985, p. 134) 

Gray cultivates this attitude first by evacuating the landscape (in the first stanza the herd of cows and the plowman go home), then by evacuating the senses.