Elegy : (An) Elegy (Written) in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray.
... far deeper & wider tone of thought & feeling & a far greater sincerity; tho' the style is so different, the tone is almost the same as that of Gray's Elegy; in fact in tone & subject matter it belongs to the same type of elegiac moralizing as the Elegy & the Night Thoughts. Goldsmith carried this departure in tone from Pope yet farther; he wrote what were professedly didactic poems, but instead of teaching... Collins was a republican, Akenside had republican sympathies and Gray was a pronounced Whig. Over the personal emotions Collins & Akenside had no mastery, & Gray only shows it occasionally as in the Elegy & then only over the most general of all of them, the love of life and the melancholy feelings attending death. (4) In spirit, the school departed from the critical, didactic and satiric tendency... language or interested himself in Welsh literature or was a competent & appreciative critic of Gothic architecture. The Thomsonian school had a little but only a little influence on that of Gray. The Elegy carries to its highest point of perfection the vein of elegiac moralising started by Young & Dyer, Collins' Ode to Evening is a study of Nature as faithful but more sympathetic and imaginative than ...
... forgiveness from the little thing which is hurt as well as from the great thing which has given birth to it. Unless you feel thus, you will never be a true poet, never give tongue to an elegy, an idyll, a prothalamium. An elegy is a composition which expresses a sad experience, it may not be a lament but there is a sense of the Virgilian "tears of things", a mortality-moved melancholy. An idyll is a poem... You shall tread deftly Lest beauty be bereaved By bruising of a flower. Your spirit shall be grieved When a bough is broken, Else from your lips shall come No elegy, no idyll, Or prothalamium. When you hear the world's laughter And feel the world's grief In the wash of a wave, In the stir of a leaf; When there shall fall upon you ...
... finished style and proves attractive to the average reader by an artistic coating of the commonplace. We may take an instance from Gray which has some connection with Milton. In his extremely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gray has a stanza recalling our minds to a passage in the speech of Belial from which we have quoted in extenso. Gray tries to convey the pathos of a soul about to... .Bk. V, 28-9. 2 . Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), pp. 118-9. 3 . The Future Poetry, p. 117. 4 .Bk. I, 17-26. 5 . The Future Poetry, p. 116. 6 . Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 85-8. 7 .Bk. II, 146-51. 8 .Bk. IX, 167. 9 . Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality, 1-5. 10 . Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series) ...
... it: should it be in Latin or in English? In his youth he had been proficient in Latin verse. He had actually performed the feat of writing in Latin an elegy on the death of his friend Charles Diodati which nearly equals in poetic excellence the elegy over his friend Edward King's death, the marvellous Lycidas. So if in his steel-tempered old age he were to write Paradise Lost in Latin he was certain ...
... finished style and proves attractive to the average reader by an artistic coating of the commonplace. We may take an instance from Gray which has some connection with Milton. In his extremely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gray has a stanza recalling our minds to a passage in the speech of Belial from which we have quoted in extenso. Gray tries to convey the pathos of a soul about... who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through Eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost _____________________ 1 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 85-8. Page 233 In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion? 1 No doubt, the line about "those thoughts" is extraordinary ...
... have been bold and high, not because of her parish work and municipalities. He was no fool or Utopian who wished to be the maker of songs for his country rather than its law giver. Wolfe had Gray's "Elegy" recited to him on his death Page 880 bed, and said he would rather be the author of these lines than the captor of Quebec. These are the utterances of great workers and heroes, they have ...
... own husband Menelaus! And the Rose held in Helen's lily-slender fingers and watched by her violet-soft eyes must be the same as the Rose that suggested to the French poet Malherbe, when he wrote an elegy on the death of a friend's daughter, the two loveliest lines in French verse: Rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, L'espace d'un matin — lines exquisitely rendered into English by ...
... holds together, thanks to the sugar syrup that is wet). The 'bondey' by itself is useless, dry. But because we mix with sugar we are at least sweet. He would humorously parody lines from Gray's Elegy. One day he exclaimed: Paths of glory lead but to the grave. Either to Kajnov or to Muthialpet. Rani-di remarked: 'With the Mother, Motakaka's behaviour was totally frank ...
... vital together, or vital and physical together, or all three together. But it is the same sadhana always. 28 Poetic composition, whether one is engaged in writing a haiku, a sonnet, an elegy, an Aeschylean tragedy, a play like Hamlet or Faust, or a stupendous epic like the Mahabharata, poses the same basic problem of paradigmatic expression and effective communication, yet the poetic ...
... composite hues and tones. Of the temperament of that civilisation the Seasons is an immature poetic self-expression, the House of Raghu the representative epic, the Cloud Messenger the descriptive elegy, Shakuntala with its two sister loveplays intimate dramatic pictures and the Birth of the War-God the grand religious fable. Kalidasa, who expressed so many sides and facets of it in his writings, stands ...
... personages lose none of their godhead by living on the plane of humanity. Perhaps the most exquisite masterpiece in this kind is the Cloud Messenger. The Page 214 actors in that beautiful love-elegy might have been chosen by Shelley himself; they are two lovers of Faeryland, a cloud, rivers, mountains, the gods & demigods of air & hill & sky; the goal of the cloud's journey is the ethereal city ...
... opportunity of coming back to the surface, and in their place there is the movement of a more thoughtful and often complex sentiment and feeling, not freshets of song, but the larger wave of the chant and elegy and ode: the flowers Page 278 of the field and mountain self-sown on the banks or near the sources are replaced by the blossoms of a careful culture. Still however reined in or penetrated ...
... translators or admirers. Thus Edna St.Vincent Millay elaborates his "de gigantesque naiades" into Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees and Swinburne, in his famous prematurely composed elegy on Baudelaire's death, Ave atque vale, has the lines: Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover...? Perhaps you are over-finicky with Chadwick's ...
... enough — at the same time with love for The Light whose smile kindles the universe and pain at the scorching abuse thrown on it by bigots. The remains of the author of Adonais, that superb elegy on Keats, were buried in the same cemetery at Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos- Page 177 sible: Cor cordium — "Heart of ...
... result of Jeffrey's "This will never do". A belief, however, continued that Keats's early death by tuberculosis was caused by the psycho-logical wounds inflicted by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley's elegy on him, the celebrated Adonais, is written under the impres-sion that he fell a victim to the malevolence of critics. Shelley, himself one of the pioneer Romanticists in England, had been attacked ...
... affluent, but suddenly something went amiss: they found themselves in great penury. All the three brothers were almost stranded; the father for some mysterious reason stopped their allowances. Gray's Elegy says about some poor people: "Chill penury... froze the genial current of their soul." That was not the case with Sri Aurobindo. He took it calmly, quietly, in spite of 2 or 3 hard years, missing a ...
... sequel will speak of "muffled throbs of laughter's undertones" and paint the portrait of "a heart of bliss within a world of pain". There will be no chapters detailing life's little ironies, no inset elegies, no tragedies, no farces; with the greater Self informing the self within, All shall be captured by delight, transformed: In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll ...
... they are cherished for one or another reason. Even so the doubt is often expressed that the world has now gone past the age of providing the right stimulus to the epic poet. Lyrics and satires and elegies, perhaps; perhaps, even, tragedies, though only occasionally; but epics—No! Yet, as J. K. Stephen jocularly remarked, genius finds out what it cannot do and then it goes and does it. ...
... essential oneness with all that Keats stood for and strove after. It was in the fitness of things that one out of the two most purely poetic minds in English literature should write the greatest of all elegies on the other, affirming with him his unity in death when the unity in life remained unrealised and seeing in a final vision his own death soon following that of Adonais as if in answer to a call and ...
... 1935, printed and published by Haren Ghosh. 52. The Mother, Chapter 2. 53. Donne, John (1572 - 1631). Dean of St. Paul's; preacher and metaphysical poet; author of satires, epistles and elegies. Vaughan, Henry (1622 - 1695). A Welsh metaphysical poet and mystic. Crashaw, Richard (1613 -1649). English poet of metaphysical inspiration. Francis Thompson (1859 - 1907): English poet ...
... cite? All I fear have paid the price of suffering, or others have. The two worlds obey different laws. But I've just been rereading Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge (I'm giving four seminars on the Duino Elegies) and he sees woman as the custodian of the soul's love, and of the beauty of la dame au Licorne. Something the modern world so greatly lacks, the receptive not the active genius - he would have deplored ...
... ry and friend of Laurence Binyon, Stephen Phillips and others who became famous in English letters. So completely did he catch the note of his place and time that a reader of his Love Songs and Elegies and Songs of Love and Death would readily take them as the work of an English poet trained in the classical tradition." Sarojini, the only sister, was much younger than Sri Aurobindo, and extremely ...
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