One of the most important facts about Thomas Gray (1716–1771) is that he
was the only one of his parents’ twelve children to survive into adulthood,
and survival is a recurrent theme in his poetry. The “Elegy” is spoken by a
solitary man who turns the poem into his own epitaph.
The “Ode on a Distant
Prospect of Eton College” depicts its “little victims” as happily ignorant of
the world that awaits them, into which they might prefer not to grow up; it is
preoccupied with the “fearful joy” of breaking bounds, yet the boys
“disdain/ The limits of their little reign” only to come up against the
unavoidable border between life and death. The sonnet (famously, and
unfairly, censured by Wordsworth) on the premature death of Gray’s closest
friend, Richard West—who was also his parents’ only surviving
child—laments the desolation of the bereaved person surrounded
by heartlessly burgeoning Nature. “The Bard” narrates an
encounter between Edward I and the last living Welsh bard, whose
fellows have all been slaughtered at the king’s command, and who,
having prophesied the overthrow of Edward’s Plantagenet
successors, commits suicide with the words “Be thine Despair,
and scept’red Care,/ To triumph, and to die, are mine.” Death is
triumph because it brings poetic immortality, the only survival
on which we can depend. “You see,” Gray wrote to West in 1742,
referring to his studies, “that I converse, as usual, with none
but the dead: they are my old friends, and almost make me