An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard is a poem by Thomas Gray published in 1751. As evening falls over a village churchyard, the poet reflects on the humble lives of the poor buried there, whose talents were never known. It is one of the best-known and most quoted poems in English.
The poem
The poem is written in quatrains of iambic pentameter with alternating rhymes. It opens with the image of a ploughman going home at dusk.
The speaker imagines the villagers' lives and says that among them may lie unknown poets or leaders, whose gifts poverty kept hidden.
An epitaph
The poem ends with an imagined epitaph for a young poet, perhaps the speaker himself, who died unknown.
This turn from the general to the personal gives the poem much of its emotional power.
Its success
Gray worked on the poem for several years, probably beginning in the mid-1740s. It was published in February 1751 and was immediately popular.
Many of its phrases have entered the language, and several novels have taken their titles from it.
Anecdotes
Wolfe at Quebec
According to a well-known story, General James Wolfe recited the Elegy on the eve of the battle of Quebec in 1759, saying he would rather have written it than take the city.
Stoke Poges
The churchyard is usually identified with that of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, where Gray himself is buried.
Frequently asked questions
When was the Elegy published?
In 1751.
Where is it set?
In a country churchyard at dusk.
Where is Gray buried?
At Stoke Poges, in Buckinghamshire.