Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Daniel E. White

Gleckner's challenge in reading Gray's career through these two narratives is to bring them together convincingly, and in this he succeeds admirably. I will offer the barest of sketches to illustrate the kind of synthesis he is able to craft through the explication of Gray's allusions. According to Gleckner, Gray was almost unique in the mid-eighteenth century for his recognition of the "satanic" nature of Milton's intention in Paradise Lost "with no middle flight ... to soar / Above th'Aonian mount" in pursuit of "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." "Up led by thee," Milton invokes his heavenly muse Urania at the beginning of Book 7, "Into the heav'n of heav'ns I have presumed ..." (12-13). At the end of The Progress of Poesy, a poem in which Gleckner demonstrates the parallels between Gray's portrait of Milton and Milton's portrait of God in Book 3, Dryden's "less presumptuous" verse, while celebrated, is all but dismissed as a vehicle worthy to succeed Milton's achievement. Gray himself, the "daring spirit" of the final stanza, will ostensibly follow Milton's ambitious ascent: "Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way / Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate" (121-22). But the poem 'waffles uncertainly" (36) between Miltonic daring and the lesser presumption of Dryden, settling finally if temporarily on Gray's vague and middling "distant way," a way that would collapse in Gray's final encounter with Milton's ghost at the end of The Bard. The Miltonic sublime for Gray, then, is more than a matter of a style to be imitated; it is a presumptuous transgression for which, in The Progress of Poesy, Milton is anxiously rejected and recompensed with blindness: "He saw; but blasted with excess of light, / Closed his eyes in endless night" (101-2), and it is this last phrase Gray uses to describe Milton, a phrase in fact written by West, that will serve to illustrate Gleckner's method.

If Gray's ambition to follow Milton is both dangerous and transgressive--"as God and heaven were to Milton, so Milton and poetic immortality were to Gray" (28)--equally so is the subtextual subject of Gray's attempts to sing with Milton's voice, his homosexual love for West and his extended mourning over West's death. In West's Ad Amicos, which West sent to Gray in a letter dated July 4, 1737--"unquestionably a turning point in Gray's life" (68)--West prophesies his own approaching end. Concluding, West solaces himself with the elegiac reflection that his parting soul could yet cast one "longing ling'ring look behind" to "some fond breast," Gray's: "Yet some there are (ere spent my vital days) / Within whose breasts my tomb I wish to raise" (Correspondence of Thomas Gray 64). The parenthetic remark, however, was not West's but Gray's; Wests original phrase, "ere sunk in endless night," Gray replaced with "ere spent my vital days" (altering the next line as well) long after he transcribed the original poem into his commonplace book, saving West's words for Milton's blindness in The Progress of Poesy and for his own ending in The Bard years later: "Deep in the roaring tide he sunk [altered later to "plung'd"] to endless night." According to Gleckner's narrative, this allusive "finishing" (the title of Gleckner's Conclusion) to The Bard was also the figurative finishing to Gray's Miltonic career, an admission of failure that led to no pastures new but rather to his "abortive foray into Welsh and Norse antiquarianism" (158). As Milton's transgression blasted his sight, closing his eyes "in endless night," Gray's curtailed relationship with West sunk Gray into an endless night of mourning, announced in The Bard by the poet's final fatal plunge. Gray's poems, then, only refigure West's prophetic wish and Milton's satanic trespass, making of Gray the tomb in which lie both his transgressive but failed ambitions, to be a Miltonic-inspired poet (Gray settles for a series of "middle flights") and to love West (Gray can only "fruitless mourn to him, that cannot hear"). Gleckner's Gray, then, can only be excavated by attending to the subtextual narratives Gray simultaneously revealed and obscured through careful encoding and demandingly significant allusions.