Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard - Genre

Genre

The poem is not a conventional part of Theocritus's elegiac tradition, because it does not mourn an individual. The use of "elegy" is related to the poem relying on the concept of lacrimae rerum, or despair regarding the human condition. The poem lacks many standard features of the elegy: an invocation, mourners, flowers, and shepherds. The theme does not emphasise loss as do other elegies, and its natural setting is not a primary component of its theme. It can be included in the tradition as a memorial poem, although not necessarily for one person, and the poem contains thematic elements of the elegiac genre, especially mourning. The model for Gray's choice of genre and style is likely Milton's Lycidas but it lacks many of the ornamental aspects found in Milton's poem. Gray's poem is natural, whereas Milton's is more artificially designed.

In evoking the English countryside, the poem is connected to the picturesque tradition found in John Dyer's Grongar Hill (1726), and later in James Beattie's The Minstrel (1771) and William Crowe's Lewesdon Hill (1788). "However, it diverges from this tradition in focusing on the death of a poet. Much of the poem deals with questions that were linked to Gray's own life; during the poem's composition, he was confronted with the death of others and questioned his own mortality. Although universal in its statements on life and death, the poem was grounded in Gray's feelings about his own life, and served as an epitaph for himself. As such, it falls within an old poetic tradition of poets contemplating their legacy. The poem, as an elegy, also serves to lament the death of others, including West. This is not to say that Gray's poem was like others of the graveyard school of poetry; instead, Gray tries to avoid a description that would evoke the horror common to other poems in the elegiac tradition. This is compounded further by the narrator trying to avoid an emotional response to death, by relying on rhetorical questions and discussing what his surroundings lack.

The poem is connected to the ode tradition found within Gray's other works and in those of Joseph Warton and William Collins and to a lesser extent in English ballads. The poem, as it developed from its original form, incorporated various traditional poetic techniques and partly relied on the poetic metre of those like Petrarch. Between the first and final versions, the poem becomes more like Milton and less like Horace in its form. The poem actively relied on "English" techniques and language. The stanza form, quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, was common to English poetry and used throughout the 16th century. Any foreign diction that Gray relied on was merged with English words and phrases to give them an "English" feel. Many of the foreign words Gray adapted were previously used by William Shakespeare or John Milton, securing an "English" tone, and he emphasised monosyllabic words throughout his elegy to add a rustic English tone.