64. "To see in the contented looks of a whole nation the record of their acts" (Bradshaw). 65. circumscribed, confined, forbad, finite verbs: their lot is the subject. 68. Cp. Shakespeare, Henry V. III. iii. 10, "The gates of mercy shall be all shut up.' 69-72. "Their lot forbade them to be eminent persecutors (1. 69), unscrupulous place-hunters, or ministers to vice in high places (1. 70), or courtly and venal poets (11. 71, 72)” (Tovey). But does not 1. 69 mean rather, To disguise the pangs of truth of which they are conscious and which is trying to assert itself in their own minds? ingenuous shame, Horace's ingenui pudoris, natural modesty-their own. 72. Muse's flame, poetic inspiration. Cp. the references to the degradation of Roman poetry in Collins' Ode to Simplicity, No. 2, 31-42, and Gray's Progress of Poesy, No. 26. 77-82 Here, in Gray's first MS., followed these stanzas: "The thoughtless world to majesty may bow, But more to innocence their safety owe Than power and genius e'er conspired to bless. No more with reason and thyself at strife Give anxious cares and endless wishes room, According to Mason, the Elegy was originally intended to end with these stanzas, but his statement lacks proof. 73. madding, neuter participle from 'to mad' 'to be mad,' 'to rage.' Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost, vI. 210, "the madding wheels Of brazen chariots raged"; and Drummond (Poems, ed. 1856, p. 38), "Far from the madding worldlings' hoarse discords." 66 Since 73-4. The construction is ambiguous: Gray means, they were far.. their wishes never learnt to stray.' 75. sequester'd, secluded : from late Lat. sequestro, separate.' 76. tenour, continuous course: Lat. tenor, from tenere, to hold. 81. "Gray had probably in mind that under the yew-tree [in Stoke churchyard] there is a tombstone with several words wrongly spelt and some letters ill-formed, and that even in the inscription which he composed for his aunt's tomb the word ' resurrection' is spelt incorrectly by the unlettered stonecutter" (Bradshaw). 84. that teach, many a holy text' being treated, somewhat loosely, as a plural. the rustic moralist, the countryman who draws a moral from the tombstones. to die, how to die. Gray probably had in mind Bishop Ken's lines: "Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed; Rise glorious at the awful day." 85-86. "Who ever resigned this pleasing anxious being so as to become a prey to dumb forgetfulness...?" Prey may be in apposition with who or with being. The proleptic use is somewhat obscure in English. Gray was probably influenced by his classical reading, and Mr. Tovey reminds us that Horace uses victima nil miserantis Orci, the victim of pitiless Orcus," in precisely the same anticipatory sense in Odes, II. iii. Cp. with this stanza Milton, Paradise Lost, II. 146: Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Devoid of sense and motion?" But it is not likely that Gray was thinking of annihilation: by the phrase 'dumb forgetfulness' he only meant that the dead cannot speak to the living and are in danger of being forgotten by them. 86. pleasing anxious. Cp. No. 56. 5-6, "Life! we've been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather." 87. precincts, boundaries. Cp. "Not far off Heaven in the precincts of light," Paradise Lost, III. 88. cheerful day. Cp. Virgil's wonderful picture of the dying Dido, Aeneid, IV. 691, oculisque errantibus alto Quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta, and with wandering gaze she sought the light in high heaven, and groaned as she found it." 89-92. "It has been suggested that the first line of Gray's stanza seems to regard the near approach of death; the second its actual advent; the third, the time immediately succeeding its advent; the fourth, a time still later" (Hales). 89. fond, affectionate. Contrast the use in No. 26. 46, "The fond complaint. 90 pious drops, tears of dutiful affection. in the sense of the Lat. pius. Pious is here used 92. "Ch'i veggio nel pensier, dolce mio fuoco, Fredda una lingua, e due begli occhi chiusi Rimaner dopo noi pien di faville.-Petrarch, Sonnet 169" (G.). "For in my thought I see-sweet fire of mine !— A tongue, though chilled, and two fair eyes, though sealed, Fraught with immortal sparks, survive us still.” 93. th' unhonour'd dead. Cp. a very beautiful modern poem, "To the Forgotten Dead," in Lyrics and Ballads, by Margaret L. Woods. 95. chance. See note on No. 15. 15. 97-100. This stanza contains several reminiscences of Milton: (1) "Ere the blabbing Eastern scout, The nice Morn, on the Indian steep From her cabined loophole peep."--Comus, 138-140. (2) . . though from off the boughs each morn 66 We brush mellifluous dews."--Par. Lost, v. 428-9. 100. Here followed in the first draft of the poem : While o'er the heath we hied, our labours done, "I rather wonder that he rejected this stanza, as it not only has the same sort of Doric delicacy, which charms us peculiarly in this part of the poem, but also completes the account of his whole day whereas, this Evening scene being omitted, we have only his Morning walk and his Noon-tide repose (Mason). Other editors have remarked that the hill,' the 'heath,' and 'favourite tree' of 11. 109-110-as also the 'rill,' lawn,' and 'wood' of 11. 111-112-involve a reference to the three scenes which he had haunted in youth. 101. beech. Cp. Gray's description of Burnham Beeches in his letter to Walpole, Sept. 1737. It ends, "At the foot of one of these squats me I (il penseroso) and there grow to a trunk the whole morning." See also the Ode on the Spring, No. 31. 13-15, where again we have a picture of a beech beside a stream. Gray probably had in mind, moreover, Shakespeare's description of the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, II. i. 30-32, "He lay along Under an oak, whose antique root peeped out 105. Hard by yon wood. The first draft gave With gestures quaint. Gray probably made the alteration when he had decided to cut out the stanza given in the note on 1. 100. by. Cp. note on No. 14. 4, "Fast by.' 107. woeful-wan, i.e. woeful and wan. Hard 114. church-way path. The phrase occurs in Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i. 389: "Now is the time of night That, the graves all gaping wide, In the church-way paths to glide.' In Shakespeare, therefore, the paths are paths in the churchyard leading to the church; but the church-way paths' of Stoke Pogis are paths leading from the high road to the churchyard (Bradshaw). 115. (for thou canst read) perhaps implies, as Prof. Hales says, that the hoary-headed swain' himself could not read, reading being a far from universal accomplishment in Gray's time. lay, properly a 'song'-the German lied: here very loosely used for verses. 116. thorn, hawthorn tree. The Pembroke MS. here contains this stanza, which was actually printed in the third edition of the Elegy, 1751, but omitted again in the 1753 edition : "There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; And little footsteps lightly print the ground." Mason says it was omitted because Gray thought it too long a parenthesis in this place. Dr. Bradshaw adds that Gray may have rejected it as too fanciful, or because of its close resemblance to some lines in Collins' Dirge in Cymbeline : "To fair Fidele's grassy tomb Soft maids and village hinds shall bring To deck the ground where thou art laid." 66 119. science, knowledge, as in No. 35. 50 and No. 48. 3, and in 1 Timothy, vi. 20 (A.V.), 'oppositions of science falsely so called." frown'd not on, looked favourably upon. Cp. Horace, Odes IV. iii. Quem tu Melpomene semel Nascentem placido lumine videris, "Whom thou, Melpomene, hast once looked upon with kindly eye at his birth." 120. melancholy. Gray is undoubtedly thinking of himself in these lines. He often refers to his melancholy in his letters, and defines it in a letter to West, May 27, 1742: "Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part, which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of state." It is, in other words, the studious Melancholy of Milton's Il Penseroso. 123-4. The tear is the bounty of 1. 121, and the friend the recompense of 1. 122. In writing a friend' Gray is surely thinking of his dead friend West, though Dr. Bradshaw understands him to mean God Himself. The first interpretation is confirmed if we think with Mitford that the stanza was suggested by the noble lines in Cowley's poem on the death of Mr. William Hervey (G. T., cxxxvII.): Large was his soul; as large a soul as e'er Submitted to inform a body here; High as the place 'twas shortly in heaven to have, But low and humble as his grave; So high that all the virtues there did come As to the chiefest seat Conspicuous, and great; So low that for me too it made a room.' 127. trembling hope. Sonnet 114" (G.). 66 paventosa speme, Petrarch, 37. O Mary at thy window be Nos. 37-40 form a group of love lyrics, charmingly simple and exquisitely musical, by ROBERT BURNS. Mary Morison was described by Burns as "one of my juvenile works"; but it bears no signs of immaturity. Metre. The arrangement of rhymes in each eight-line stanza is a b, a b, bc, b c. This 'octave on three rhymes' is shown in Henley and Henderson's note on The Lament (Burns, ed. 1901, I. 371) to have been a very favourite metre in Scotland. It had been used by Henryson (1430-1506?), who got it from Chaucer, by Gavin Douglas, Dunbar, and others; and Allan Ramsay had printed some twenty examples of it in his ballad book, The Evergreen, with which Burns was familiar. |