" This poem asks, "Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust?" and praises the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" whose "sober wishes never learned to stray" as they dwelt "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife."
In Cultural Capital, John Guillory related this poem's "refunctioning of the commonplace book" to its subsequent linguistic capital as a means of inculcating literacy in schools. William Empson objected to the "complacence" of this poem's "bourgeois ideology," arguing that the "universality and impersonality" of its truisms "claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society." Assessing this poem, Samuel Johnson famously wrote, "Had [he] written o7ten thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him," concluding his "Life" of its author. In this poem, the speaker imagines himself being described as "drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love." This poem asks, "Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust?" and praises the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" whose "sober wishes never learned to stray" as they dwelt "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." For 10 points, name this influential elegy, the magnum opus of Thomas Gray.
In Cultural Capital, John Guillory related this poem's "refunctioning of the commonplace book" to its subsequent linguistic capital as a means of inculcating literacy in schools.
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"