This presentation is prepared for the use of B A English first year students. The first two stanzas of the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is discussed in detail here. Thomas Gray first named the poem as "Stanzas Written in a Country Church Yard. It was written in 1750. Please share it and comment.
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Elegy written in a country churchyard for the use of B A English first year students
1. Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard
Thomas Gray
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2. Introduction
The speaker is hanging out in a churchyard
just after the sun goes down. It's dark and
a bit spooky.
3. He looks at the dimly lit
gravestones, but none of the grave
markers are all that impressive—
most of the people buried here are
poor folks from the village, so their
tombstones are just simple,
roughly carved stones.
4. Then he shakes his finger at the
reader, and tells us not to get all
snobby about the rough
monuments these dead guys have
on their tombs, since, really, it
doesn't matter what kind of a
tomb you have when you're dead,
anyway.
5. The speaker starts to imagine the
kinds of lives these dead guys
probably led.
6. And guys, the speaker reminds us,
we're all going to die someday
7. But that gets the speaker thinking
about his own inevitable death,
and he gets a little freaked out.
8. He imagines that someday in the
future, some random guy (a
"kindred spirit") might pass
through this same graveyard, just
as he was doing today.
9. And that guy might see the
speaker's tombstone, and ask a
local villager about it.
And then he imagines what the
villager might say about him.
10. At the end, he imagines that the
villager points out the epitaph
engraved on the tombstone, and
invites the passer-by to read it for
himself.
12. STANZA 1
Lines 1-4
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
13. So, right off the bat we have some
vocab to sort out in this poem. The
"curfew" is a bell that rings at the
end of the day, but a "knell" is a
bell that rings when someone dies.
So it's like the "parting day" is
actually dying. Sounds like
a metaphor.
14. The mooing herd of cows makes its
winding way over the meadow
("lea" = "meadows")
And the tired farmer clomps on
home.
15. Now that the cows and the farmer
are out of the picture, the speaker
gets everything in the world to
himself (he has to share it with the
growing darkness, but that's not so
bad).
16. Notice that the speaker refers to
himself in the first person right
away in that first stanza: the
parting farmer and cows leave "the
world to me."
17. This would be a good time to note
that the poet often removes
vowels and replaces them with an
apostrophe, like "o'er" instead of
"over" in the second line.
18. If you ever notice an odd-looking
word with an apostrophe in it, try
replacing the apostrophe with a
letter to make a familiar word.
19. Gray makes these contractions to
make the number of syllables fit
the iambic pentameter.
20. Iambic PentameterDefinition:
Probably the single most useful technical term in poetry (and in drama, too)., if you learn one
term in poetry, let it be the old I.P. Or maybe metaphor.
An iamb is a metrical foot that consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one—
daDUM.
Penta- means five.
Meter refers to a regular rhythmic pattern in poetry.
So iambic pentameter is a kind of rhythmic pattern that consists of five iambs per line, almost like
five heartbeats: daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM.
Let's try it out on the first line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:
If music be the food of love, play on.
Just read that line aloud to yourself, and you'll be sure to hear those daDUMs.
Of course, though many poets use this rhythm, it might get pretty stinkin' boring after a while if
they didn't shake it up a bit. So while a ton of poems are written in iambic pentameter, you'd be
hard pressed to find one that follows the meter perfectly. Poets like to mix it up with metrical
variations like extra syllables or out-of-order stresses.
Iambic pentameter has some majorly early roots, dating back to Latin verse and Old French,
but Chaucer is considered the pioneer of the verse in English and used it for his
famous Canterbury Tales. it's been around that long.
21. While we're talking about form,
we'll also point out the rhyme
scheme here—it's ABAB.
23. Lines 5-8
Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
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25. So what's happening, exactly? The
"glimm'ring landscape" is fading
from the poet's sight.
26. Must be sunset, but we knew that
from the first stanza.
The air is quiet, too, except for the
buzz of the occasional beetle and
the tinkling bells hanging around
the necks of livestock in their
"folds" (a.k.a. barns).
28. There are some interesting literary
devices in these lines, too: "solemn
stillness" is a great example
of alliteration, and the
speaker personifies the "tinkling"
of the bells when he says that
they're "drowsy."
29. ALLITERATION
Definition:
Alliteration is a term used to describe the repetition of initial
consonant sounds. More simply put, alliteration is what
happens when words that begin with the same consonant
(the letters that aren't vowels) get all smashed together to
great effect. As in, "Carol constantly craves cornflakes." As you
may have guessed, you'll find alliteration in many a tongue
twister, but it's also just about everywhere in literature, too.
For a sample of the sonic power of alliteration in literature,
check out Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" and Edgar
Allan Poe's poem "Ligeia