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The Ambivalence of Gray's Elegy

A. E. DYSON

THE prevailing impression we have on considering Gray'sElegy in retrospect is of its distinctive 'atmosphere', contem-plative and Horatian. There is the stoic reflection on the tran-science of earthly glory that we associate with this tradition,the same apparent preference for a Sabine Farm, 'far from themadding crowd's ignoble strife'. The gentle melancholy ofthe mood, as well as the syntax of stanzas 24 and 25, points toGray himself as the subject of the Epitaph. It expresses a wishwhich, in this particular mood, he has for his whole future:to be 'marked out' by melancholy for her own, to live and diein peaceful rustic security.

But this is by no means all that the Elegy says, and it ignoressome powerful emotional undercurrents. For Gray is seeingthe 'rude Forefathers' of the hamlet in two rdles simultaneously,both as the happiest of men, and as victims. The plowman instanza 1 is 'weary', the slumbering dead are rude and un-lettered. The tombs 'with uncouth rnimes and shapeless sculp-tures deck'd' implore the passing tribute of a sigh as much fortheir uncouthness as for the death of their inmates. The ob-scurity of country life has restrained and killed the innatepotentialities of the rustics, for good as well as for evil. Notonly is die possible Cromwell comparatively guildess, but thepossible Milton is mute and inglorious, both forbidden by then-lot any spectacular fulfilment. The obscurity, therefore, inwhich dieir happiness is supposed to consist is felt in terms ofwaste. The words 'mute' and 'inglorious' acquire an ambi-guity from their context. They are words of deprivation anddefeat, but they are here levelled up by juxtaposition witii the'guildess' Cromwells almost to the status of happiness.

This basic ambivalence reveals conflicting emotionalresponses to the situation of the rustics, and these responsesdevelop side by side as the poem progresses. From the Horatianviewpoint, the rude forefathers are more to be envied than

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pitied. Pomfret in his Choice asked little more from life (except,perhaps, the ' philosophic mind5), and Lady Chudworth in herResolve wanted only

A soul, which cannot be depressed by grief,Nor too much rais'd by the sublimest joy.

The Augustan quest for the golden mean excluded extremesof either emotion or achievement, and looked for happiness indetachment from the busy world of men. Pomfret and LadyChudworth express an attitude to life which is typical of theirage, and which survived sufficiently far into the eighteenthcentury to influence Gray. From this point of view, the lot ofthe 'forefathers' in the Elegy is little short of ideal.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray:Along the cool sequester'd vale of lifeThey kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

In this and other stanzas Gray expresses a rational approvalof the rustic life, and in the Epitaph he identifies himself, inwish-fulfilment, with it. The youth 'to fortune and to fameunknown' is not unlike Tennyson's Lady of Shalott before herchoice—a legend to all men, but known to none. He represents,like Arnold's Scholar Gipsy after him, the ideal of a sereneand untroubled existence—but an existence which is essentiallyan escape from life as we know it into a state less vulnerableto the 'thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to'. The peacewhich he enjoys is nearer to death than to life, more like defeatthan victory.

The contradiction inherent in this becomes clear as we noticethat the rude forefathers, even while they are being offered tous as an ideal, are also being represented as victims, both ofsociety and of the nature of things. The primary meanings of'mute' and 'inglorious' suggest this, and there is a sense in whichthe extremism of the Miltons and Cromwells, whether good orbad ethically, is seen as good in so far as it is fulfilment, expres-sion, achievement, 'hie abundant'. The 'applause of listeningSenates', the despising of dangers, the 'scattering of plenty

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o'er a smiling land' are positive and vital touchstones, besidewhich the rustic life is felt as a tragic waste. The rude fore-fathers were victims of a political system which forbade themtheir proper fulfilment. The 'genial current of their soul' wasfrozen by 'Chill Penury'. The hearts once 'pregnant withcelestial lire' are now laid, unhonoured and unremembered, 'insome neglected spot'. The creative spirit was there, but itfound no opportunity for expression. There is, in this reflec-tion, a profound awareness of waste. Death is so cold andirrevocable (stanza n ) , beauty so fleeting and futile (stanza 14).The rustic moralist may have been taught by his simple rehgionhow to die, but ought he not rather to have been given a chanceto live?

For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

• Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind ?

It is to be noted that the enemy to man's fulfilment is notonly society, but Nature herself. The adjectives and verbs ofthe opening stanzas are narcotic and hostile: 'tolls', 'parting','lowing', 'plods', 'weary', 'fades', 'glimmering', 'droning','drowsy', 'lull', 'moping', 'complain', 'secret', 'molest','ancient','solitary', 'heaves', 'mouldering', 'narrow cell', 'rude'. Instanza 7, the harvesters are at war with Nature. In stanza 14,beauty is the victim of a vast and mysterious universe; the gemlost in ocean's 'dark unfathomed caves', the flower wasted uponthe 'desert air' which will destroy it. Finally, as the 'hoary-headed swain' indicates the grave of Gray (if it is Gray—thesyntax is not clear, but the thought indicates that it is), thenearby wood smiles 'as in scorn'. (The phrase 'as in scorn'applies, in the first version of the poem, to the dead man, butin the final version it applies equally, by ambiguity, to thewood.) Nature, therefore, is a more primitive and dubiousgoddess here than in orthodox Augustan circles, and we mighteven discern that sense of the ruthless profusion and wasteful-ness of her works which has become a preoccupation with somepost-Darwinian thinkers.

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How far Gray was conscious of ambivalence in his Elegy wecan probably not hope to decide. The 'graveyard mood' wouldhave seemed to him, perhaps, as unified as the style in whichhe expresses i t He is unlikely to have shared our present-dayawareness of complexity or a tension of opposites in such amood. Even so, the two attitudes we have been consideringexist quite explicitly, side by side, in the poem, and we canlegitimately speculate on the subconscious responses to lifewhich they reveal. These would seem to have included ashrinking from life, with its menaces and responsibilities (some-thing very like the Freudian death-wish, in fact), and also adesire for life (the almost inevitable complementary pull). Ina very personal way, the 'slumbering dead' must have seemed areproach to Gray. He is aware, in the poem, of his socialsuperiority to them. They were unlettered, he is a scholar;they had no opportunity of notable achievement, he, in his ownacademic sphere at least, has had it. But he has failed to takehis own considerable opportunities; his vast learning wasnotoriously unproductive. He is very far from having thespirit of a Milton or a Cromwell. His letters often show him ina Hamlet-like strain of frustration and melancholia. He is likethe Hamlet of Act V, assured of the impossibility of what hemost desired, stoically resigned to life on these terms ('There'sprovidence in the fall of a sparrow), yet haunted by the futilityof it all ('Alas, poor Yorrick'), and still balancing in his mindthe great alternative propositions ('To be or not to be'). All ofthese attitudes are present in the Elegy, though with lessimaginative intensity, of course, than in Hamlet: and so thestanzas which approve the lot of the forefathers spring not onlyfrom a reasoned Augustan belief in the rural life ('Let notambition mock their useful toil' . . . ), but also from a vicariousrealisation of the death-wish. And Gray's frustration is apparentnot only when he is pitying the rustics, but also when he isenvying them; for it is their death, not their life, that he envies.

Gray often seems to be seeing his relationship to the 'great'as analogous to the rustics' relationship to himself. In the finalstanzas he identifies himself with the rustics and dies to ambi-tion and self-fulfilment with them, but here the ambivalence ofemotional response is especially to be felt. 'A youth to fortune

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and to fame unknown' invites our pity; his simple contentment,

He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friendcalls for acquiescence.

So the emotional charge of the Elegy is far from simple, andthat which is ostensibly offered as a good is felt in terms ofwaste. The reflections on the rustics' death in stanzas 4-7become, by implication, a reflection on their life. The 'lowlybed' from which they will not again be roused is the bed onwhich their life has been passed. The long silence and obscurityof the tomb is the same in kind as the condition in which life hasdrifted away. Their obscurity in death and their obscurity inlife are equally symbolised by the buried gem and the wastedflower. And death, in its dual aspect as a longed-for rest and adreaded waste, is present in a single image.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep . . .

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

Gray chooses sleep before action, like the lotus-eaters, andlike Keats he is half in love with easeful death. But he alsofeels, with Milton's Belial, that any form of consciousness is tobe preferred to oblivion, and, like Keats again, responds insome degree to a pull back to life—the 'incense-breathing morn'and the clarion cock-crow.

This complexity is by no means as rich as that in the Ode To aNightingale, and the desire for life receives no expression com-parable in power to Keats's nightingale-symbol of ideal andeternal beauty. But it is a complexity similar in kind, if not inpoetic intensity, to that realised by Keats in the Ode, and thismay well be one of the reasons why the Elegy has always founda 'mirror in every mind'.

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