Stillness and the Argument of Gray's "Elegy"

Author(s): George T. Wright

Source: Modern Philology , May, 1977, Vol. 74, No. 4 (May, 1977), pp. 381-389
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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Stillness and the Argument of Gray's Elegy

George T. Wright

A special decorum perhaps attends the controversies of scholars. That which rages
around The Turn of the Screw has often been shrill, deep, and personal, like the
story itself. Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard inspires more tranquil
disagreement. The hysteria of James's governess and the calm of Gray's earnest
ruminant are equally infectious. Where the story's passionate energy rushes its
analysts into feverish examination of lines, tones, paragraphs, and single words,
the critics of Gray's milder poem seem relatively passive and listless. Though they
charge its argument with the sin of obscurity, they rarely examine it in detail, and
although the diction and images are often very knotty and complex, the language
of the poem has still not been closely studied.'
As a result, it seems to me, critics often misread the central argument. Since
the contrast between the poor and the great is undeniably important to the poem
and easy to grasp, unwary readers have taken it as Gray's central point. Clearly,
they say, Gray is aligning himself with the simple poor against the haughty great,
and the epitaph with which the poem concludes shows Gray's modesty, his
repudiation of pretension ("No farther seek his merits to disclose"). Like the poor,
he too will renounce ambition and commit his soul into the hands of God.
Yet this reading of the poem has obvious weaknesses. Gray does not, in fact
choose a simple "unlettered" epitaph for himself but one that is cast in sophisti
cated heroic quatrains and has far too many lines for a "frail memorial." For
many readers the chief flaw in the poem is the pretentiousness with which it
closes, the "artificiality" which seems not to harmonize with what Gray is taken
to be saying about his sympathy for the poor. Some critics-notably F.W.
Bateson-have gone so far as to suggest that Gray's original ending of the poem

1/The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London,
1969), provides a comprehensive scholarly apparatus for the study of the Elegy. The chief
modern critical discussions include Cleanth Brooks, "Gray's Storied Urn," in The Well- Wrought
Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 105-23; F. W. Bateson, "Gray's 'Elegy' Reconsidered," in English
Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London, 1966; first pub. 1950), pp. 127-35; Frank H. Ellis,
"Gray's Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism," PMLA 66 (1951): 971-1008;
Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago, 1958), pp. 292-301; F. Doherty, "The Two Voices
of Gray," Essays in Criticism 13 (1963): 220-30; three essays in From Sensibility to Romanticism,
ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965): Ian Jack, "Gray's Elegy
Reconsidered," pp. 139-69, Bertrand H. Bronson, "On a Special Decorum in Gray's Elegy,"
pp. 171-76, and Frank Brady, "Structure and Meaning in Gray's Elegy," pp. 177-89; Patricia
Meyer Spacks, "Gray : Action and Image," in The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 115-18; Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gray's "Elegy": A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Herbert W. Starr (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968); Peter
Watson-Smith, "The Origins of the Elegy," Ariel 1, no.4 (1970): 39-47; James M. Kuist, "The
Conclusion of Gray's Elegy," South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 203-14; and Ralph Rader,
"The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies," in New Approaches to Eighteenth-
Century Literature (New York, 1974), esp. pp. 93-99. All these studies are illuminating in one
way or another, and some, notably those of Lonsdale and Jack, are full of perceptive observa-
tions. Hardly any of them, however, really work out a systematic analysis of the poem.
Lonsdale seems to me to have the soundest view of the poem's argument; Jack, while helpful
on many points, surmises that Gray rejected the earlier ending of the Elegy because "it preached
a Stoic attitude to life that he could not accept, at the deepest level of his mind and heart"
(p. 146). This implies that the original ending was not inconsistent with the first seventy-two
lines. I argue below that it was inconsistent and that this is why Gray rejected it.
381

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382 Modern Philology (May 1977)

was superior to the revised one, that he should have kept the four stanzas that
originally followed line 72 instead of replacing them with the fourteen we now
have.2 Those four stanzas, later discarded by Gray, read as follows:

The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow

Exalt the brave, & idolize Success
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Power & Genius e'er conspired to bless
And thou, who mindful of the unhonour'd Dead
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate
By Night & lonely Contemplation led
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate
Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease
In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace
No more with Reason & thyself at strife;
Give anxious Cares & endless Wishes room
But thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.3

This ending does, indeed, stress the contrast between the poor and the gre
and shows the speaker's preference for the simple life. Readers who see this as
the poem's central theme understandably regard this ending as natural and
appropriate. Gray, however, did not, and we must ask why. He brooded over it,
apparently for years, and eventually produced the longer and admittedly imperfect
version. His genius had cooled, no doubt, and in the long labor of revision was
unable to find, at least for the last nine stanzas, the powerful and majestic
phrasing that marks the rest of the poem, including even the discarded ending.
We do not know whether Gray recognized the textural inferiority of the new
version, but we do know that he took great pains to get rid of the first one and
to compose a conclusion that would, in his eyes, do.
The reason for his intense concern, as this essay will try to show, is that the
first ending so diverges from the argument of Gray's poem that he could not let
it stand. It is consistent with the poem that some critics think Gray wrote or
should have written but not with the one he did write'and was on his way to
writing when he finished line 72. The central subject of the Elegy is not the con-
trast between the poor and the great, but the nature and meaning of epitaphs,4

2/Bateson, pp. 129-35. Bateson finds social significance in the Elegy, seeing it as, "in addition
to all the other things that it is, . . . a tract for the times. It was a plea for decentralization,
recalling the over-urbanized ruling class to its roots in a rural society based upon the benevolent
despotism of the manor house" (p. 135).
3/Lonsdale, pp. 130-31.
4/It may be suggested that in originally calling the poem "Stanzas..." rather than "Elegy..."
when he sent the first version to his friend Mason, Gray was choosing a title not only more
modest but also more in accord with that version, which, as I argue above, lets go of what
seems the poem's central argument up to line 72. Mason recalls that he himself suggested the
title "Elegy," whether for the first or later version is not clear, but we do know that when Gray
learned that a pirated version of the poem was on the verge of appearing, with the title
"Reflections...," he had Dodsley publish the poem first and specifically insisted that "the
Title must be, Elegy.. ." (Lonsdale, p. 110).

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 Wright/Stillness in Gray's Elegy 383

a subject to which the division of mankind into contrasting groups is a useful

argumentative device: if one can show that the same psychological feature is
characteristic of radically different groups of human beings, one has virtually
proven that the feature is universally human. In investigating the subject of
epitaphs, from the very first line in which "The curfew tolls the knell of parting
day," Gray develops with great care and precision an argument that is not, as
critics have often charged, loose, disjointed, and sentimental but logical, con-
tinuous, and compelling. If we have misunderstood it, it is because of Gray's
tough, Latinate English, with which not many critics have tried to grapple.
Consider, for example, lines 77-80:

Yet even these bones from insult to protect

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

For all its inversions, the general meaning of the passage is easy enough to follow,
but the word "still" in line 78 invites some puzzlement. It has here not the tem-
poral meaning of "yet" (i.e., still standing, or still being erected, or still frail); it
does not signify that the memorial is "silent," or built to be silent, or silent and
motionless, or built in silence; nor does it mean "nevertheless" (i.e., erected in
spite of its frailness, or although these bones hardly warrant one). None of these
readings is quite plausible, nor is the waggish suggestion that "still" is the only
noun in the line. But even when we understand that Gray is using "still" here in
its now obsolete sense of "continually, ever, always" (as in Florizel's praise of
Perdita: "What you do/Still betters what is done" [The Winter's Tale, 4. 4. 135-
36]), the old meaning spreads uneasily through the sentence. It is partly that
contemporary English must add "being" (some frail memorial continually being
put up) and so construct a passive past participle that to an eighteenth-century
English ear was barbarous; but it is partly also the strange time relationship that
results from combining an action that seems to occur once ("implores") with an
agent that is constantly changing (one "frail memorial" after another).
If "still" thus renders the passage syntactically problematical, the effect, as
we shall see at length, is entirely appropriate. Feeling uneasy about the con-
struction, we are likely to lean back gently on the other meanings of "still,"
especially as we may already have felt their presence in this poem. For "still" is
central in the Elegy in both its adverbial senses ("always" and "even now")
and in both its main adjectival meanings ("silent" and "motionless"). That the
adverbial meanings hover over the poem hardly needs argument: Gray is clearly
concerned with the relation between this life and eternity, between the casual and
the permanent. The slow and stately movement of the poem has often been noted,
most eloquently by lan Jack, who speaks of "the great suspended chords that
sound through the poem and give it its characteristic inevitability."5 The musical
metaphor and the dignified procession of elegiac stanzas remind us that the poem,
like all others, moves through time, although, as Jean Hagstrum has suggested,

5/Jack, p. 156.

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384 Modern Philology (May 1977)

the Elegy is "not basically dramatic or narrative" but "a succession of visually
rendered scenes, each leading to a relevant verbalized reflection."6 As with many
eighteenth-century poems, its philosophical reflectiveness, its generic tableaux,
and even its elevated grammar locate it in a kind of eternal present.7 But the poem
itself, by virtue of being spoken, breaks the silence of the eternal moment, and
throughout the poem the sense of temporal stillness is constantly being countered
by our sense that time is slowly passing, that day is giving way to night, the past
growing ever more definitively dead, and the poet's own life (like ours) moving
steadily to its inescapable conclusion.
This opposition between the relentless movement of time and the timelessness
of its inevitable destination is largely developed through the adjectival meanings of
"still." The poem vibrates between the parallel oppositions of motion-stillness
and silence-sound. In the very first lines the doubleness of this movement is
stressed:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Time sounds in line 1; there is motion and sound in line 2; motion alone measures
time in line 3; and in line 4 the scene fades and the spatial world descends to
darkness. Nothing more is seen to move or heard to sound, and from a scene so
stilled we withdraw "to me," to the still point of this slowly turning world. In
such gentle terms, visual and auditory, the poem proceeds, continually empha-
sizing the harmony between the two kinds of movement and stillness. The land-
scape is fading "on the sight"; and "a solemn stillness holds"-that is, grips and
keeps both from moving and from breaking the silence-"all the air," as if life
had come down to a timeless and spaceless moment of suspended breath-"that
serene and blessed mood," so Wordsworth describes it,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul,
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Gray, too-not Wordsworth's favorite poet-is looking into the life of things in
just such a moment of suspended motion.
But of course the suspension is incomplete, the stillness illusory, and Gray
goes on to offer exceptions to the general picture: "Save where the beetle ...."8

6/Hagstrum, p. 301.
7/On this last point, see my article, "The Lyric Present:Simple Present Verbs in English Poems,"
PMLA 89 (1974): 563-79, for an extended discussion.
8/Every student of the Elegy knows that it is filled with echoes from other poets, classical or
modern, and that the imagery of stillness and the breaking of stillness is thoroughly conven-
tional, so much so as to have given rise to certain standardized formulas. For example, Lonsdale,

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 Wright/Stillness in Gray's Elegy 385

The beetle drones, the sheep-folds tinkle, the owl complains of those who, like
Gray, disturb the usual almost perfect twilight peace. But Gray is alone, the only
intruder on a scene sparsely inhabited by other single creatures-one "solitary"
owl, one beetle, one ploughman. Even the air, the herd, and the folds seem to act
as units; the knell is single. And all the sounds to which the twilight has come
down compose a "world" which is now perceived in any human way only by Gray.
Enough that it is perceived by someone. The speaker, even in the darkness,
can still make out elms, a yew, and country graves, can still hear those faint
evening sounds. But the men in the graves have experienced real stillness. "Each
in his narrow cell forever laid," they do not move; and they are deaf to the sounds
of life: "The breezy call . . . The swallow twittering. . . The cock's shrill clarion
or the echoing horn." The dead are beyond time and motion (not even "Rolled
round in earth's diurnal course"), and for Gray this means that they are beyond
sensation and perception: they have no "ideas" in Locke's sense, either of
primary or of secondary qualities. In Berkeley's terms, they neither perceive nor
are perceived, they have ceased to exist: they are, as Gray repeats, "no more."
This, then, is the true stillness, which the quiet dark evening in the churchyard
only foreshadows. So, for the moment, it appears. But "the great," who come
from another milieu altogether, need not be scornful of these obscure dead: after
all, says Gray in the famous stanzas that follow, such a silence is in store for them
too. "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." True, the high-born can seem to
counteract the silence with spatial and vocal constructs (trophies, anthems, urns,
and busts), but we know how little these avail. Nothing will happen to the "storied
urn" or because of it; the "animated bust" has no soul, no breath: life is beyond
recall. The "dust" remains "silent," and "Death" has a "dull cold ear" that no
sound reaches.
Hence no reason to pity the honest poor: the honors they lack have no power
over the stillness of death. Does anything have such power ? This is the implied
question beneath the stanzas that follow (lines 45-60), and the hypothesis they
propose for consideration (and, ultimately, reject) is that greatness of achievement
is the only true memorial, the only counter to stillness. If it were so, it would
follow that the lack of opportunity for such achievement is something for which
we might justly pity the poor. Again the question is considered in terms both of
motion ("Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed," and Hampden's
heroic stance) and of sound ("Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre," and Milton's
song).
In exploring these questions of "might have been" (reminiscent, incidentally,
of Eliot's Burnt Norton, which, along with the rest of Four Quartets, has numerous

in his edition of Gray's poems, tells us (p. 119 n.): "The 'silence... save where' formula... had
become relatively common in descriptions of evening by the 1740s" and gives several instances.
This study, however, takes the view that Gray shrewdly chose, from among the images and
formulas available to him, those that suited his purposes. If the patterns of sound and silence,
of stillness and motion, that occur in his verse can be found as well in the graveyard or other
poetry of his contemporaries, it is nevertheless only in the Elegy that they contribute to a
logical argument, or even constitute a kind of mythic pattern, that stands as a model for its age.

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386 Modern Philology (May 1977)

and profound echoes of the Elegy),9 Gray is raising still other issues which are
important to a full reading of the poem. The "gem of purest ray" and the
"flower... born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air"
resemble the talented villager whose gifts go either unnoticed or undeveloped:
the village Hampden evidently uses his ability, though in a diminished form; the
"mute inglorious Milton" is prevented from using his. Such greatness as they may
or might have had is unascertainable ("unfathomed... unseen.., mute"). It is
like Berkeley's tree falling in the forest when no one is there to see or hear: it
makes no sound, does not even happen. Nothing happens that is not perceived by
someone-or, in the world of Gray's philosophically up-to-date audience, by
Someone.

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Noiseless as Berkeley's tree. Those actions that might have been-the village
Cromwell's for example-have been reduced to stillness by not having been
performed; those actions that may have been-the village Hampden's-have been
reduced to invisibility and inaudibility by having escaped the notice of the great;
and the Miltonic voice that might have broken the silence has been rendered mute.
The good side of the condition, however, is that their vices and crimes have
similarly not been given ground for development or exhibition and have thus
also, thank God, been visited with a Berkeleyan stillness.
And now after this long digression on the unlived possibilities of the poor,
Gray returns to the question of memorials which was last directly mentioned in
lines 41-44. The digression has, in effect, told us that even if greatness of achieve-
ment is the handsomest of all memorials, that the poor lack the opportunity for
it is, after all, half a blessing (lines 61-72). Now, quite logically, Gray goes on to
suggest that anyway they do have their memorials, not grand ones perhaps-on
the contrary, the rhymes are uncouth and the sculpture shapeless-but simple
stones marked by the minimum name, years, and Biblical phrase (lines 77-84).
They must have them, he tells us, because everyone needs some kind of epitaph
(lines 85-92).
This is the crucial point in the whole poem's argument, the point that struck
Dr. Johnson as utterly original,'0 the point that in the first version of the poem
was never made, though it is clearly the natural next step in Gray's meditation.
It is only human to want to be remembered by someone, to yearn for some
memorial however humble: "Ev'n from the tomb the voice of nature cries," cries
out against the silence of death, "Implores the passing tribute of a sigh," even so
faint a disturbance of the stillness as a sigh. And what more natural, then, than
for the speaker, after having so fully and gradually established how universally
human is the need for a memorial, to turn at last to his own ?
Altogether natural, but, as we have seen, it was not part of Gray's original

9/See my article, "Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard: The Elegy and Four Quartets," ELH
43 (1976): 227-43.
10/So he says in the last paragraph of his otherwise unfriendly Life of Gray.

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 Wright/Stillness in Gray's Elegy 387

plan. Instead of getting to the crucial points of the poem-that the poor do have,
and that we all need, memorials-the four rejected stanzas continued the praise
of innocence and showed the speaker choosing not an epitaph but a life of "sacred
Calm," with its divine overtones, in preference to the "anxious Cares" of urban
life. Bateson and others have thought that ending proper and pleasing, but we
can see why Gray was dissatisfied with it. If stillness and resistance to it compose
his argument, then the unmodulated choice of stillness is a choice of death.
Furthermore, the original ending appears to have lost the train of thought, to
have abandoned the idea of how the record of a vanished life is marked in the
world, and this abandonment is peculiar, indeed extraordinary, because the
speaker, there in the graveyard, has still said not a word about the gravestones
that are presumably there before his eyes. Instead, in the concluding stanzas of
the first version, he has given up completely the illusion of a scene in favor of
pious sententiae. The drama dissolves, and with it our sense of the speaker as a
perceiver. The central framework of the poem is dismantled, notably the pro-
gression from one kind of stillness to another through three stages: from quietness
(as of evening) through death (as of villagers) to that stillest of all conditions, the
condition of not being at all remembered by anyone, oblivion."
For in the first five of the new stanzas (19-23) Gray makes at last that point
toward which the poem has steered from the beginning, that we all need epitaphs.
Through these stanzas, too, the double image of sound and motion persists: the
bones of the poor are protected from "insult" (vocal denunciation or physical
outrage ?) by rhymes (which must be heard) and sculpture (which must be seen).
We see the "frail memorial," but it evokes from us a "sigh." If stanza 22 ("For
who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey...") develops a spatial description of longing,
stanza 23 ("On some fond breast...") is dominated by the more audible sorrow
signaled by tears and the crying of "the voice of Nature."
Even in stanzas 24-29, where Gray fancifully conjures up the figure of the
"hoary-headed swain" retrospectively describing the poet's last days and funeral,12

11/Not that the poem finds anyone so unfortunate, but the idea (the special horror of the un-
epitaphed man) is powerfully suggested and must have been if not the origin at least an impor-
tant source of that familiar Romantic image, the man who leaves no trace: Scott's "wretch"
who "doubly dying, shall go down/To the vile dust from whence he sprung, /Unwept,
unhonoured, and unsung" ("The Lay of the Last Minstrel," canto 6, lines 12-16); or Byron's
castaway who "sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, I Without a grave, unknelled,
uncoffined, and unknown" (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 179). The theme of
oblivion is ancient, of course, but the note of pathos is new. For the Romantics the man who
leaves no trace, like his counterparts the man of mysterious origins or the exile, is of particular
interest in being free of time and place, though in an unenviable and even terrifying way.
12/That "thee" in line 93 refers to a village stonecutter, as Ellis argues at length, or to anyone
other than Gray himself, I find impossible to accept. It seems unbelievable that Gray, in
altering the end of the poem, should divert our attention from the memorials (which are rele-
vant) to their anonymous village maker (who is only marginally so) and should end the poem
by discussing that craftsman's personal relation to God. The only possible craftsman whose
personal relation to God can legitimately be introduced here as bearing specifically on the issues
already being debated is Gray himself, the speaker whose perceptions include the great and the
poor, stillness and motion, stillness and sound, the life of sensation and perception, and the
higher existence made possible by God. Note also that the "thou" in the corresponding lines
of the first version cannot refer to a stonecutter since in that version the stones are never
mentioned. That "thee" in the final version refers to someone different from the "thou" of the
first seems highly dubious.

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388 Modern Philology (May 1977)

the narrative is conducted largely by the same balance between visual and
auditory images:

"His listless length at noontide would he stretch,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by."

The poet's silent but visible expression, "smiling as in scorn," is paralleled by the
vocal movement, "'Muttering his wayward fancies'..."
These later stanzas, too, continue to be marked by the negative imagery
prominent from the beginning: "noiseless... uncouth..,. shapeless.., un-
lettered.., dumb. . . unhonoured... artless... lonely." Death is a matter of
resignation, forgetfulness, absence, against which the human soul cries out for
active remembrance. The Elegy is notably reticent about the manner in which
the villagers have died, about the causes of death (or, indeed, about the causes of
anything). The dead are not those whom disease, old age, or accident has assaulted,
but those who are "no more" engaged in the activities of life. Indeed, the whole
poem is constructed of negative definitions and passivities; from the very
beginning everything alive is withdrawing, the dead are no longer active, the
proud should not be arrogant, the villagers have had opportunities to develop
neither their virtues nor their vices. It is not surprising, then, that the poet's death
at the end of the poem should be described entirely in terms of absence:
"One morn I missed him on the customed hill,
Along the heath and near his favourite tree;
Another came, nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he."

Against this utter absence, the poem, as always, pits faint sound and motion:

"The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne."

Funeral dirge and funeral procession, however, soon end. The epitaph endures,
and like good verse it endures in space and time. Although it is not in motion, the
eye that reads it (if it can read) must move, and when it is read it is heard, it
breaks the silence. No matter how modest, then, an epitaph works against the
stillness to which all human action and achievement are in time reduced.
But the Epitaph itself, far from being bland and sentimental, gives the
argument an almost ironic turn. Up to this point Gray's perspective has been
entirely human, and it is from a human point of view that life appears to be as he
has described it, a process of gradual diminution and loss of energy, withdrawal,
forgetfulness, absence, countered only by hushed cries of pious protest: a per-
ceptual world constantly under threat of becoming Nothing. If epitaphs, if poetry,
can do a little to preserve the reality of a vanishing experience, God, whose
presence in this universe of perception has not previously even been hinted at,
can do everything. Given his existence, epitaphs are merely bland and pale. In
his "bosom" is our peace, a peace in which merits and frailties "alike ... repose."
As the natural framework becomes a cosmic order, the moral opposition replaces
the perceptual one of stillness and motion, but both are evidently resolved in God,

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 Wright/Stillness in Gray's Elegy 389

who comprehends all oppositions and, as in Berkeley, serves as the only and
Absolute guarantee against absolute stillness.
The Epitaph thus makes the point that epitaphs are superfluous. In effect, it
utterly overturns the earlier perspective of the poem so that instead of a time-space
stillness, it is suddenly, miraculously, time and space that have dissolved to
reveal a more permanent imageless ground of being. The funereal but still self-
pitying "no more" that set the tone of the early stanzas now echoes in the more
austere "No farther": we need brood no more, we have found what we want, we
need worry the frame of this world no longer. The abstraction of the imagery here
at the end of the poem casts back over the earlier vivid though passive scenes a
doubting shadow. The poem's argument, winding through the turns of its logical
design and its imagistic patterning, has come to rest at last in a certainty that
dispels all the anxieties that beset creatures who act, as the poem has, as if they
were merely mortal. Since God is there, epitaphs and elegies, as well as articles on
them, are finally futile--though, our nature being what it is, we need them still.
If this is a well-constructed argument, as I think it is, the poetry in which the
miraculous turn occurs is altogether disappointing. Gray did not have available
to him the techniques of distortion, derangement, and decreation that might have
made such a shift of perspective convincing. The divine point of view is always
hard to present in literature, and when one's talent is for the picturesque landscape
or the human group, one may not be prepared to meet God face to face. In the
poem Gray, while acknowledging a divine standard which renders all human
action vain, hardly dares lift his eyes to the God who redeems all his losses, and
the final, the eternal, stillness that suffices for him seems to the modern reader, in
the absence of a dynamic imagery, merely inert. It remained for Wordsworth to
develop a vision grand enough, at least on occasion, to see the divine as powerfully
involved in the mortal, and for Eliot in Four Quartets to explore with a wider
command of thought and symbol the paradoxes of stillness.'3

University of Minnesota

13/See J. Hillis Miller, "The Still Heart and Poetic Form in Wordsworth," New Literary History 2
(1971): 297-310; and my "Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard" (n. 7 above).

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