This poem of Thomas Gray titled “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is one of the beautiful poems in English literature. The poet sees a country churchyard at sunset, which impels him to meditate on the nature of human mortality. He considers the fact that in death, there is no difference between great and common people. He feels that among the lowly people buried in the churchyard there might have been some natural poets like John Milton or politicians like Oliver Cromwell. Just like some rarest gems buried in the deep sea and the finest flowers spreading their fragrance in a forest, these great people might not have been discovered at all. This thought leads him to praise these dead unsophisticated poor villagers for the honest and simple lives that they lived. The poem has been presented along with a brief annotation.

A Study Guide for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

The English countryside has inspired some of the most exquisite and well-loved poetry ever composed in the language. This selection of verse includes, among others, Thomas Gray's reflective and moving meditation on mortality, 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', the soaring beauty of Wordsworth's lines on Tintern Abbey and Keats's ode to Autumn, the deceptively simple words of Emily Brontë and the personal and evocative verse of Thomas Hardy, bringing together the greatest riches of English poetry. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

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Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.

This study offers a fresh approach to the theory and practice of poetry criticism from a narratological perspective. Arguing that lyric poems share basic constituents of narration with prose fiction, namely temporal sequentiality of events and verbal mediation, the authors propose the transgeneric application of narratology to the poetic genre with the aim of utilizing the sophisticated framework of narratological categories for a more precise and complex modeling of the poetic text. On this basis, the study provides a new impetus to the neglected field of poetic theory as well as to methodology. The practical value of such an approach is then demonstrated by detailed model analyses of canonical English poems from all major periods between the 16th and the 20th centuries. The comparative discussion of these analyses draws general conclusions about the specifics of narrative structures in lyric poetry in contrast to prose fiction.