"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

-In classic literature (Greek and Latin), the elegy was a poem of couplets.  Each couplet was made up of a longer line followed by a shorter line.

• Dactylic hexameter
• Dactylic pentameter
• Dactylic hexameter
• Dactylic pentameter


-There were not a fixed number of lines in an elegy.

-earliest elegies were about many subjects.  Later the term was narrowed to apply to poems about funerals.

this meter was also used in epigrams, which were brief - 2 or 4 lines

• written in the churchyard
• What is in the churchyard?  Graves
• time of the day is dusk
• the owl is complaining to the moon because someone has awaken her, she wants to be left alone.  It's just barely sunset, too soon to get up.
• He is looking at tombstones
• rich and poor still die and get buried together
• the overall focus of the poem is the folly of ambition-everybody shares the same fate
• Penury- poverty
• Enclosure- the nobles taking the little people’s land

# 29  Ambition shouldn't despise such simple folk.

# 41  Can the splendid graves of the famous bring them back?  There is equality in death if not in life.  This is an ancient theme, voiced by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius among others.

"Alexander the Macedonian [Alexander the Great] and his groom are reduced to  the same state in death; for either they were received among the same creative Reason of the universe, or they were alike dispersed among the atoms." (Marcus Aurelius 6. 24)

# 57-68  If their poverty kept them from great accomplishments (like Milton), it also kept them from great crimes (like Cromwell).  They had the same potential, just not the same opportunities.

# 77-84  Even in this humble graveyard, you can see the markers on the graves with their simple messages.

# 99ff He imagines himself dead & someone asking about him.

# 117  The epitaph he wants on his own grave.  Have you written yours yet?