Elegy unto epitaph: Print culture and commenorative practice in Gray's "elegy written in a country churchyard"

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2002 by Sharp, Michele Turner

The trouble that critics have taken to locate a context for the poet's expression of grief stems, obviously enough, from the fact that the poem makes its occasion anything but clear. Indeed, previous models in the tradition of pastoral elegy invariably begin by quickly sketching a concrete occasion for utterance. In elegies by Bion, Moschus, Spenser, and Milton, the present crisis of death urges the elegiac poet to break his silence and under-- take the difficult task of commemoration. Within the logic of traditional elegy, this step is integral to the process of poetic maturation. When the poet rises to the occasion, he finds a proof of his own daring that earns him the blessing of the dead and the right to assume the laurels of song. In one way, thus, the end of the poem is implicit in the beginning, for finding the courage to speak out becomes a ground on which the poet finds within himself those resources on which his life depends. But beginning is not entirely its own end, for the poet's speech is bound by the burden of a tradition within which he is a latecomer, a belated second son, an echo of past poets and their poems. Keeping faith with the tradition confronts the elegiac poet with his own secondary status, which is also to say with his own death. Remaining within the tradition, however, and heeding its ethical injunction to remember the newly deceased also dictate that the poet break with tradition in order to frame a new context and authorize a new singer.

Within the tradition of pastoral elegy, poets rely on the urgency of the present occasion to overcome what would otherwise be an overwhelming burden. Indeed, as an inaugural genre, elegy challenges the poet to begin without requisite strength or expertise, for these credentials are gained in the song itself. Milton's imminently self-conscious elegy, Lycidas, gives explicit scope to the dilemma of beginning. Before beginning, Milton pauses to sketch the difficult task ahead of him:

Yet once, more, 0 ye Laurels, and once more

Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude

And with forc'd fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. (1-5)

With their "yet once more," these lines stress the threat of redundancy within which the poet comes to the "ivy never sere" of the tradition. Moreover, the poet's immaturity is an explicit theme. His verse will be harsh and grating, and his fingers rude upon the strings of lyric, but "bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear" move him to song: "For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime" (6, 8).

The forthright quality with which Milton's elegist addresses the difficult task incumbent on the elegiac singer, and the tenacity with which he calls the resources of the tradition into question, give Lycidas a prominent place in what Sacks identifies as a skeptical trend in elegy. But although the elegiac speaker doubts his readiness for the task, he never questions his own profound response nor that of his recipients. Edward King was an obscure clergyman and minor poet, but Milton's poem is a high stakes game in which the writer's own poetic immortality is on the table together with the fate of the corrupt clergy. The poet's strong faith in the urgency of the situation, notes Sacks, gives Lycidas its taut "sinew of address [and] compelling tone of engagement." Furthermore, writes Sacks, the "near-magical manner in which Milton keeps changing fictive addressees is ... crucial to the development of the poem, for the long passage from the personified laurels to the Genius of the shore may be read as an intensifying exercise in making up or evoking a presence where there is none-a fundamentally elegiac enterprise" (96). In other words, the speaker's faith in the depth of his response to a compelling context of loss allows him to build an expanding set of connections to potential recipients and to build their response as a core aspect of the work of mourning.