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1. "An elegy for the poet himself" from The English Elegy(1985) by Peter Sacks Gray's poem is, of course a poem of mourning. Even if we unwisely discount the specificity of his residual grief for Richard West(who had died in 1742), the "Elegy" mourns a particular death over and above those of the obscure villagers. This individual death, albeit imaginary, is that of the poet himself. The preliminary description and meditation in the graveyard is, in part, a presentation of the sensibility of that poet and a definition of the terms by which he should be mourned. It is carefully modulated so as to climax with a plea on behalf of any dying persons; desire for remembrance(133). "a form of posthumous ventriloquism(136)
2. "The idea of satisfactory unfulfillment" from DLB biography
One of the abiding paradoxes of the poem resides in the idea of satisfactory unfulfillment: village-Hampdens, mute, inglorious Miltons; guiltless Cromwells of the rural life. The paradox is spawned by Gray's vision of human life as dominated by the only inevitability it contains, that of death...The "Elegy" is not in this respect a conventional pastoral elegy: it does not provide the consolation of, say, Milton's Lycidas(1637). Gray's poem suggests that the elegist is himself powerless in the face of death, unable to refer it to a religious belief by which it can be mad comprehensible....The poem is an exercise in sensibility. The darkness in which the narrator stands is the night of mortality illuminated only by varieties of feeling. This common denominator of sympathy, as everything in the poem evidences, is all that binds man to man, and, along with the fact of death that occasions this sympathy, is the single principle of unity within life perceived by the poet(176) 3. "paternalistic epitaphs" from The English Poetic Epitaph by Joshua Scodel(1991)
Though they celebrate a realm of supposedly uncontested social values, such epitaphs are in fact nostalgic responses to, and participants in, vast and unsettling social change. In the face of the mounting tension between classes that accompanied the onset of capitalist relations, epitaphs upon exemplary members of the lower orders, attempt to demonstrate in a radically new way the enduring mutual affection of high and low(10).
4. An elegy of "common language" from "Elegies in Country Churchyards" by Helen Deutsch(Oxford Handbook of The Elegy)
Gray's Elegy thus takes the pastoral one step further by creating a common language that makes the poem's storehouse of classical learning accessible to all. ...the Elegy in its pastoral melancholy, as suspended between two modes of social advancement at a transitional moment when vernacular literacy was on the rise: on the one hand, a competitive social emulation of one's betters through the acquisition of knowledge, on the other, identification with the aristocrat for whom learning is not acquired art but rather second self. Gray's readers, identifying with the poet...thereby acquire Gray's hard-earned learning as if they had always possessed it. Thus in reading the Elegy every common reader is given the pleasure of the commonplace and the common language, and at the same time, the pleasure of withdrawal from the (urban) place(195).
5. "The Elegy for the Poet himself" originally from "The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of the Self" by Roger Lonsdale in Proceedings of the British Academy 59 (1973), a chapter from Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, edited by Harold Bloom(1987).
Eton version: the classical tradition of praise of retirement from the corrupt city and the Christian consolation of eternal peace hereafter(21).
Two selves in the poem: a judicious, normative self, resting confidently on traditional wisdom and values, and a deeper unofficial self of confused and subversive passions(22).
A split in the poem between an aspiration to express timeless truths about human experience and an impulse to render a particular subjective predicament existing and uttered in a troubled present(22)
The result is the swain's depiction of the lonely, distraught, and doomed, perhaps self-doomed, poet....it is a significant version of the self which emerges here: an anticipation of the sorrows and alienation which a generation later would drive Young Werther in similar circumstances to suicide, and a prefigurement, however tentative, of the isolation, mysterious suffering and special sensibility, which were later to become familiar attributes of the image of the artist in an unsympathetic or hostile society(25).
He(the poet in the epitaph) was neglected like the gem and the flower but, unlike them, knew that he was neglected. And yet the epitaph goes on to claim tentatively for the poet a value lacked by both the arrogant great and...the humble villagers. Melancholy leads to sensibility and true sensibility to pity and compassion for others: away finally from the self towards sympathy with the lot of the humble villagers(26).
The self-consuming passions are at last refined into the benevolent sensibility which renders the poet superior to the inhabitants of the "thoughtless World," yet also grants him a compensatory value in the natural rustic world. ...the poet has found an acceptable escape route from the self in the growing contemporary doctrine of the ethical centrality of sympathy(26).
In the second version of the Elegy the poet is excluded from the innocent lives of the villagers, as earlier from nature or childhood. Yet he contrives, as we have seen, finally to escape the living death of the present by an imaginative enactment of his own death into a timeless state of unfulfilled but uncorrupted potential, which he can share with the dead villagers. And the self commemorated thus is no longer simply sterile nor its wisdom merely futile: the whole poem has been an act of that sympathetic sensibility which claims at the end a special value of its own and its own right to comparable sympathy(32).
 
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