Exploring elegiac and eulogistic tones in Thomas Gray's poem elegy written in a country churchyard (original) (raw)
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Aspects of Linguistic Usage in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
International Journal of Research - GRANTHAALAYAH, 2022
APA Cite: - Quadri, K. M., Yadav, M., Yadav, M. (2022). Aspects of Linguistic Usage in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. International Journal of Research - GRANTHAALAYAH, 10(12), 44–54. doi: 10.29121/granthaalayah.v10.i12.2022.4948 Poetic language includes three key components: sound, shape, and sense. However, every poem has its own context and is an intertext with other poems. Therefore, the substantial use of alliteration, rhyming, lyrical expression, and clichés, as well as other language devices that bring attention to words, sounds, or other device decorations, is a necessary tool and trick in the scientific production of poetry. This article explored to inspect the aspects of linguistic usage in the forms of semantics that are accomplished in the poetic and figurative language of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which aimed to examine the influence of lexical knowledge in language and literature and how it enhances inventiveness. Even though this poem speaks of ordinary people, and an expression of sympathy and support for those who have the misfortune to be without money or social prestige in the literary sense. The involvement of syntactic-semantic factors, viz., presupposition and entailment, make the poem more vivid to the reader. Furthermore, the poem Elegy contains hyponyms and synonyms, accompanied by a semantic echo. This study focuses on lexical relations included in the poem through syntagmatic and paradigmatic word descriptions. Further, this study examines those ambiguous words that generate complexity between the speaker/writer and their listener/reader. It has been discovered that various aspects of semantics form a nexus between the theme and word formation in poetry.
LANGUAGE LITERACY: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching
The research deals with the problems of poverty with the aim of revealing the situation of rural people experiencing various shortages throughout their daily needs. This poem is also a personal picture of the poet seeing by firsthand the situation of the marginalized people. Through critical discourse analysis by means of Van Dijk model consisting of three dimensions, namely text, social cognition and social context, the picture of the poor in the poem can be seen clearly. The data used are lines of Stanza No. 13 as a representation of the whole poem. The method used is descriptive qualitative. The results of the research indicate that knowledge or education is not limited to one group, but for all; but in practice the poor do not always get the opportunity to obtain proper education. The voice of the poor is not heard; therefore, they are bound by circumstances and cannot do much. In connection with critical discourse analysis, at the level of text, the general theme is the death...
Journal of Language and Literature
Apart from being an entertainment medium, literature has also an important role in exposing social problems, as basically literature is born and is intended for the community. Through the disclosure of social problems, the role of literature is increasingly developing, among others, as a medium of teaching, reference, reflection, character building and also criticism. Thus, it is clearly illustrated that literature has multifunctional roles. The message conveyed through literature can be effectively absorbed by the community owing to the entertainment factor. Through the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", Thomas Gray tells the story of the lives of marginal people, always having to face problems. Through descriptive qualitative research method, referring to social phenomena, supported by sociology of literature approach, the results of the study show that there are three social problems that always arise in the community, especially in the lower class one: poverty, right to get proper education and equality to obtain opportunities in the line of life. These three social problems are closely interrelated so that they become a unification undermining the lives of marginalized people.
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: Pre-Romantic Perfection , 2023
The aim of this study is to highlight the Romantic dimension of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), a neo-classical and meditative poem which is perfected to lament and commemorate the dead ordinary men from one hand and moralize the human beings about death from another hand. This paper explores some of the Gray's fundamental Neo-classical and Romantic tenets in the context of Pre-Romanticism. Since Gray (1716-1771) is primarily an eighteenth-century transitional poet, the objective of this study is twofold: a) to depict Gray's Preromantic thematic endeavors as he pursues a high ideal of artistic and aesthetic perfection following the Neo-classical writing conventions regarding style and form, b) to stress his contribution to Romantic thought, by offering him not only as a pre-romantic poet but also as a possible Romantic precursor in the Bloomian sense.
The Lower Class in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Esteem Journal of English Education Study Programme, 2020
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", by Thomas Gray is the main source data of this study. It is a poem of reflections-reflections of death, nature, the lots of marginal people, the poor, or the lower class which becomes the subject matter of the study. The objectives are to find out the concept of lower class in social discrimination. It is qualitative research. The research result show that the examples of discrimination found in Stanza 4,8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17 and 18. In this elegy, the social stratification formed by itself and the system is the closed system. The poor belongs to the lower class and always becones a focus of attention owing to their being wretched, powerless and illiterate. They are actually great in their low quality. All of these traits are beautifully exposed in the poem.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LAMENTATION BETWEEN "ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD" AND "KOBOR
Hello-Teen Society
The present comparative study deals with the major aspects of Thomas Gray and Jasimuddin. Both poets deal with rural people with their pains and gains, emotions and passions, occupations and professions, problems and prospects in their respective poems. Both of them were deeply concerned with the unavoidable ill fate of the commoners who are deprived of modern amenities. Both the poems 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray and 'Kobor' by Jasimuddin are in the forms of elegy where the speakers lament for the death of near and dear ones. Gray laments over the death of common fellows in general whereas Jasimuddin here presents an old grandfather who cries out before his grandson with heartrending tears because of the premature demises of his family members. Gray repines that the dead rural fellows may achieve name and fame if they were given opportunities but Jasimuddin's poem is just saturated with ceaseless pathos for the loss of kin. In the current paper, there is an attempt to make a comparative study between 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' and 'Kobor (Graves)' following the methods of literary research.
Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World. Vol. 1: Macropaedia, ed. by J. Bloemendal, C. Fantazzi and P. Ford (Leiden and Boston), 387-398, 2014
This essay is concerned with all Neo-Latin poetry in the elegiac couplet. It is thus not confined to the modern sense of the (English) word ‘elegy’, which is usually employed only for poetry of mourning. Though this type of elegy is strongly related to the origins of the classical genre and constitutes an important category within Latin elegiac poetry, it is certainly not the only type. Epigrammatic poetry, however, will be excluded from this essay, though much of it is composed in the elegiac couplet. On the basis of a number of characteristics, conciseness and shortness being the most important, it is generally perceived as a genre of its own. This is not to suggest, though, that the distinction between elegiac and epigrammatic poetry would be an easy one, and it is important to note here that there are many influences from epigram in elegy and vice versa, and that many similar subjects were treated by both. This is true for antiquity, but even more so for the early modern period. Neo-Latin elegiac poetry is for a considerable part, based on classical, mostly Latin models. These models include the Latin love elegies by Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid (including his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto), and the elegiac poems of late antique poets such as Ausonius and Claudian. Because of the great variety of themes treated in elegiac poetry in antiquity and later ages, the variety in Neo-Latin elegiacs is likewise enormous. Moreover, the range of Neo-Latin elegiac poetry is much broader than earlier models might suggest. This range results substantially from the basic openness that the genre displayed in antiquity, which inspired many Neo-Latin poets to broaden the scope of the elegiac genre and also to incorporate themes not treated in classical elegiac poetry. In order to arrive at an understanding of this wide-ranging Neo-Latin elegiac practice, this essay will distinguish between various subgenres or ‘types’. It will first discuss a number of categories that display a close and recognizable relationship with specific classical elegiac model(s). Subsequently, it will discuss the ways in which the genre was further broadened to include several new themes and functions. This overview and discussion of examples will obviously be neither exhaustive nor representative of all Neo-Latin elegies that have been written. Nonetheless, it aims to give an impression of the most common Neo-Latin elegiac (sub)genres, explain the ways in which they developed from certain classical models, and present the new forms that were invented while accounting for their foundations.
The Hampden-Milton-Cromwell passage in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
2018
This paper discusses the different conventions of literary didacticism in Gray’s Eleg y from almost medieval allegorical teaching, replete with capitalized moral qualities (“Ambition,” “Grandeur,” etc.), through the humanist model of exemplary history (teaching through the powerful rhetorical presentation of turning points in the lives of great men) to a modern model of teaching that is not directed at action but at sympathy evoked through the understanding of socio-economic and cultural forces. The analysis focuses on the transactions between exemplary history and the “annals of the poor” in the poem. The two probably most familiar critical statements on the poetry of Thomas Gray seem to contradict each other rather sharply. The first is, of course, Samuel Johnson’s famous verdict on the Eleg y from the concluding words in his life of Gray (1781). “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo” ( Joh...
An Encounter with the Dead and a Fantasy of Communication: Intersubjectivity of Elegiac Poetry
Topia, 2011
In his essay, "Autobiography as a De-facement," Paul de Man comments on the elegiac prosopopoeia as follows: "the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death" (1979: 928). In this view, by becoming a mouthpiece for the dead, the living elegist enters the world of death. This idea has formed the basis for our current theorization of elegy as a point of intersection between the dead and the living, a medium of communication between the two.