''Their lot forbad''. Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard

The leading theme of the Elegy is the defence of the way of life of the humble, poor and unknown, and this meditation is originated by the poet’s sight of their tombs, (“many a mould’ring heap”, l. 14), presented in stanza 4. Seeing them makes the poet imagine the life of the “rude Forefathers of the hamlet” (l. 16) who rest in those graves. The poet thus fantasizes about their lives, their families, the actions they used to do when working in the fields (stanzas 6-7). Hence, the poet meditates also upon their values and expresses his own ideas: he believes that among those unknown and unhonoured people there might well have been “Some village-Hampden” (l. 57), “Some mute inglorious Milton” (l. 59) or “Some Cromwell” (l. 60), that is to say someone who might have become important or might have done something useful and great for his country or for other people, but in the poet’s opinion, even if there had been such a person, he could not have shown his potentialities, because of “Chill Penury” (l. 51) and of “Knowledge”, that “to their eyes her ample page / … did ne’er unroll” (ll. 49-50).

However, even if Gray feels sympathetic towards them because they could not reveal their potentialities to the world, he also considers them morally better people than those who did know fame and glory. In fact, the peasants, being prevented from becoming rich and important and, therefore, from experiencing a well-off life and doing glorious actions, (“Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, / The threats of pain and ruin to despise, / To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, / And read their hist’ry in a nation eyes”, ll. 61-64), were also kept from doing negative things, because not being important persons, they were not asked to do the negative actions powerful people do, such as wading “through slaughter to a throne” (l. 67).

After this meditation, Gray proceeds to condemn the attitude and behaviour of the great towards life and the poor. They did, in fact, feel superior because they were touched by fame and wealth, and they looked at humble people “with a disdainful smile” (l. 31), despising “their useful toil” (l. 29). In particular, Gray ironically lists all things important to powerful people (such as “the boast of heraldry” and “the pomp of pow’r”, l. 33; “beauty” and “wealth”, l. 34; “glory”, l. 36), only to state that all these things cannot avoid, nor sweeten death, just as “storied urn or animated bust” (l. 41) cannot awake the dead. All those things powerful people considered important did not save them from death; they died just as humble people did: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” (l. 36). The force of this statement is underlined by its extreme directness, after a quite complex sentence which occupies the three previous lines and which is easily misread, because of the word order, borrowed from Latin: the subject does, indeed, follow the verb, which follows the direct object.