The Elegy at Stoke Poges

Some poems are written at the speed of inspiration. Others are written at the speed of grief, which is slower, and which permits the hand only one true line a season. The poem that fixes a churchyard in the English imagination for two centuries is not struck off in a fever; it is filed and refiled across eight summers, in an upstairs room above a south-facing graveyard, by a man who knows he is the last of his Eton circle still living, and who will not let the lines go until they can carry what he means them to carry.

THE FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE

Thomas Gray was born at 41 Cornhill in the City of London on the twenty-sixth of December 1716, the son of Philip Gray, scrivener, and Dorothy Antrobus, sister of the Eton usher who paid the boy's school fees out of his own pocket. At Eton he found the only three friends of his life, the Quadruple Alliance: Horace Walpole, Richard West, Thomas Ashton, and himself. Cambridge made him a Fellow of Peterhouse. The Grand Tour with Walpole ended in a quarrel at Reggio in 1741. The next summer, in June 1742, Richard West died at five-and-twenty of consumption, and Gray, retreating to his mother's house at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, three miles north of Slough, began in the autumn the first eight stanzas of a country-churchyard elegy. He was twenty-five. He would be thirty-three before he let the page out of his hand.

THE LONG MIDSUMMER LIGHT

It is a Thursday evening in late June 1750, twenty minutes past eight by the casement clock. West End Cottage stands at the edge of the parish of Stoke Poges, its upstairs back-parlour looking south over the low wall of the churchyard of St Giles. The yew is in full leaf. The light is the long northern midsummer light that does not properly fail until past nine. From the desk one can see the headstones of the village dead, the ploughman's stone and the rude forefathers' stones, the small mounds of grass, the swallows working low over the chancel roof. Inside the room: a deal table, an inkstand, a candle not yet lit, and the eight-year-old manuscript in his fine clerk's hand on octavo leaves, the margins close-pencilled with the eighteen successive revisions of eight successive summers. Thirty-two stanzas. Quatrains in alternate rhyme, iambic pentameter, plain diction. He has been re-reading the closing four stanzas for an hour.

THE EPITAPH AT THE END

The redrafting is finished, and he knows it as a clerk knows when a column has balanced. The epitaph that closes the poem, four stanzas of an unnamed youth laid in the earth, is the version he cannot now improve, and a poet who cannot improve a line further must either burn it or send it. Horace has been pressing him for the manuscript since Christmas; Horace will, on receiving it, do what Horace does, which is to circulate fair copies through every drawing-room in St James's within the fortnight, and from a drawing-room in St James's it is a short walk to the bookseller-pirates of Paternoster Row. The pastoral-elegiac form is not the fashion. Pope has been dead six years, Swift five; the town wants satire, not yews. The poem will be taken at first for a country-curiosity, an exercise in the antique manner. He looks at the page and notices that he does not, in fact, mind. The paths of glory lead but to the grave: the line he set down years ago and has not had cause to change. The redrafting is finished. The shore must be left. He will write to Walpole tomorrow morning and enclose the fair copy with a month's grace before any wider showing. After that, Dodsley at Tully's Head. He folds the leaves, ties them with thread, sets them on the corner of the desk, and goes down to his mother for supper.

THE SHEETS GO OUT

He sent the manuscript to Horace Walpole on the twelfth of June 1750. Walpole did precisely what was foreseen. By August the fair copies were circulating through literary London; by January the Magazine of Magazines was preparing to print without leave. Gray wrote at once to Robert Dodsley of Tully's Head, Pall Mall. The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard appeared as a sixteen-page sixpenny pamphlet on the fifteenth of February 1751, in a print-run of about a thousand. The first edition sold out in two months. Eleven further editions followed in two years. Samuel Johnson, no friend to Gray's odes, allowed in the Lives of the Poets of 1781 that the Churchyard abounded with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo; by his account it had become the most often quoted piece of English verse since the Restoration.

THE BOATS ON THE ST LAWRENCE

Night of the twelfth of September 1759. The flat-bottomed boats of the British force are drifting on the tide down the St Lawrence below Quebec, oars muffled, lanterns hooded, the cliff of the Anse au Foulon a black rise against a black sky. In one of the boats sits General James Wolfe, thirty-two years old, ill with stone and consumption, half certain he will be dead inside a day. He is reciting, low, to the junior officers nearest him in the boat, the penultimate stanza of a poem he carries with him, given him in London by Miss Katherine Lowther: the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, and all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, awaits alike th'inevitable hour, the paths of glory lead but to the grave. He finishes, by the recollection of John Robison the Edinburgh professor (then a young midshipman in the boats, who set the scene down in 1804), and says quietly to the officers near him: gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow. At first light he takes Quebec, and is shot through the breast on the Plains of Abraham, and dies in the field. The lines he envied a stranger for writing are spoken at his funeral and at every Wolfe-anniversary thereafter. He had been gone nine years from Stoke Poges by then. He had never met the poet whose stanza he carried to his death.

THE SOUTH WALL

Thomas Gray moved from Peterhouse to Pembroke College in March 1756, after Peterhouse undergraduates raised a false fire-alarm at three in the morning and he descended from his window by the rope-ladder he had kept against just such mischief. He took no pupils, gave no lectures, was named Professor of Modern History in 1768 and never delivered a lecture in the chair. He died at Pembroke on the thirtieth of July 1771, in his fifty-fifth year, of what the physicians called gout in the stomach. By his own written instruction he was carried down to Stoke Poges and laid in the brick vault of his mother on the south side of St Giles, immediately beneath the window of the upstairs back-parlour where the Elegy had been written. The vault is marked only by a small stone of local Buckinghamshire limestone, in keeping with his instructions. The first printed guide to the Elegy-country was issued in 1799. The pilgrimage has not since stopped.

Some poems are written at the speed of grief, and arrive at a slowness that the fashionable hour cannot overtake. The yew at St Giles is still in leaf each midsummer; the swallows still work the chancel; the casement of the upstairs back-parlour at West End Cottage still looks south over the low wall of the burial ground. Below the window, on the south side of the church, lies the single small stone of Buckinghamshire limestone under which Thomas Gray and his mother are buried, unnamed, as he wished.