The ELEGY

When Gray began writing the ‘Elegy’, he was in his mid-twenties and neither wealthy nor famous. On its publication, in 1751, he achieved an immediate poetic immortality that did not require embellishment, even from the greatest hero of his age.

The ‘Elegy’, published anonymously but immediately attributed to Gray in piracies and claimed for him in Richard Bentley’s landmark illustrated edition of Six Poems by Mr T. Gray (1753), has since been one of the most frequently reproduced poems. Within Gray’s lifetime, it was translated into French, German, and Latin. Since his death, Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, Armenian, Russian, and Japanese versions represent some of the more surprising forms in which the poem has appeared.

Multiple translations exist in several languages, notably Italian. Already anthologised in revolutionary America, it grew in popularity in the early Republic. Coupled with the work of Robert Blair and other graveyard poets, it was frequently included in collections. Its success has made it a regular subject for printers, illustrators (including photographers), and even binders, who were trying out new techniques or seeking to achieve striking effects, from the time of William Blake or Giambattista Bodoni, through the work of John Martin, Owen Jones, or Richard Lucas, to that of C.R. Ashbee, Julius John Lankes, Nicholas Parry, or James Brockman.

The ‘Elegy’ has appeared in all manner of formats and sizes and been sold cheaply and extremely dear. Much parodied, the poem has not been diminished by imitation. The full extent of its bibliography remains unknown.

From 1742, Gray’s mother and her sisters lived at Stoke Poges, and his aunt, Mary Antrobus, was buried there in the churchyard of St Giles in 1749 (where Gray himself would later be interred). Gray had begun writing on the theme of mourning after the death of Richard West, in 1742, and worked on a more substantial and wide-ranging poem than the sonnet that he composed in memory of his friend (which was not published until 1775).

The final poem, in which Gray drew self-consciously on Dante and Petrarch, maintains a tension between the rustic moralism and native, Gothic virtue celebrated in many of its stanzas and the elevated sentimentality of its concluding epitaph. Rich with naturalistic references, it is in fact liberated from any location, and balances a sense of national pride with a strong and repeated call to virtue as embodied in the liberty of the village republic. As such, it draws as much on Spenser and Milton as it does on Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, or Theocritus.

In a manuscript now at Peterhouse, Gray summarised the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763) that concluded the Seven Years’ War, beginning ‘England demands… Canada… including Lake Superiour & the Riv: Ouabachi West down to the Conflux of the Ohio & Missisippi South… with the Gulph of St Laurence & all its Islands & Dependencies.’ Four years earlier, during the night before the decisive battle for North America, the British general, James Wolfe, reconnoitred Quebec from the St Lawrence river, repeating the lines of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ under his breath: ‘I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow.’ Wolfe, whose death in battle was presaged in Gray’s line ‘the paths of glory lead but to the grave’, probably read the ‘Elegy’ when it was first published. His own copy (the ninth edition, published in 1754, and now in Toronto) is annotated alongside the line ‘A youth to fortune and to fame unknown’ with the question ‘Yet were he on this score less happy?’

When Gray began writing the ‘Elegy’, he was in his mid-twenties and neither wealthy nor famous. On its publication, in 1751, he achieved an immediate poetic immortality that did not require embellishment, even from the greatest hero of his age.

The ‘Elegy’, published anonymously but immediately attributed to Gray in piracies and claimed for him in Richard Bentley’s landmark illustrated edition of Six Poems by Mr T. Gray (1753), has since been one of the most frequently reproduced poems. Within Gray’s lifetime, it was translated into French, German, and Latin. Since his death, Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, Armenian, Russian, and Japanese versions represent some of the more surprising forms in which the poem has appeared.

Multiple translations exist in several languages, notably Italian. Already anthologised in revolutionary America, it grew in popularity in the early Republic. Coupled with the work of Robert Blair and other graveyard poets, it was frequently included in collections. Its success has made it a regular subject for printers, illustrators (including photographers), and even binders, who were trying out new techniques or seeking to achieve striking effects, from the time of William Blake or Giambattista Bodoni, through the work of John Martin, Owen Jones, or Richard Lucas, to that of C.R. Ashbee, Julius John Lankes, Nicholas Parry, or James Brockman.

The ‘Elegy’ has appeared in all manner of formats and sizes and been sold cheaply and extremely dear. Much parodied, the poem has not been diminished by imitation. The full extent of its bibliography remains unknown.

From 1742, Gray’s mother and her sisters lived at Stoke Poges, and his aunt, Mary Antrobus, was buried there in the churchyard of St Giles in 1749 (where Gray himself would later be interred). Gray had begun writing on the theme of mourning after the death of Richard West, in 1742, and worked on a more substantial and wide-ranging poem than the sonnet that he composed in memory of his friend (which was not published until 1775).

The final poem, in which Gray drew self-consciously on Dante and Petrarch, maintains a tension between the rustic moralism and native, Gothic virtue celebrated in many of its stanzas and the elevated sentimentality of its concluding epitaph. Rich with naturalistic references, it is in fact liberated from any location, and balances a sense of national pride with a strong and repeated call to virtue as embodied in the liberty of the village republic. As such, it draws as much on Spenser and Milton as it does on Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, or Theocritus.

A Cambridge parody began: ‘The Curfew tolls the hour of closing gates,/With jarring sound the porter turns the key,/ … Save that in yonder cobweb-mantled room,/ Where lies a student in profound repose/ Oppress’d with ale, wide-echos thro’ the gloom/ The droning music of his vocal nose.’ Duncombe was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and references some of his political and ecclesiastical patrons in the parody. The poem was, however, later reprinted as ‘an Oxonian’ parody of Gray.

One of the most famous series of illustrations were by William Blake. Shown here from a facsimile edition, Number 96 of 518 copies, sponsored by Paul Mellon, of a book that he owned containing 116 inlaid pages from Gray’s Poems (1790), illustrated by William Blake (1757-1827) in watercolour in 1797-8. John Flaxman had commissioned Blake to paint a series of watercolour illustrations as a birthday present for his wife, taking as a model the deluxe edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, which Blake had illustrated for the bookseller Richard Edwards a few years before. Blake’s version of Gray was never intended for publication.

The Golden Cockerel Press edition of the ‘Elegy’ (London, 1946), produced by Christopher Sandford. Printed in Caslon Old Face by F.J. Newberry at the Chiswick Press (pressman: A. Curran). The edition consisted of 750 copies of which this was copy 31 (of 80 that were specially bound). Illustrated by Gwenda Morgan.