"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

1 February 2018: (Three poetry posts in a row, but such is life...)

Discussed this poem today in my ENGL 311 class so it's been on my mind for a few days (leading up the discussion). The concerns of Gray's meditation on death and memory struck my class as timeless, as we talked about how, even as technological and cultural shifts affect what it means to mourn or remember someone, anxieties about being remembered or remembering in the "right" way linger, as do larger questions about forgotten lives or thwarted/frustrated/arrested greatness.

Before class, I advised students to read along to a good clip of someone reading the poem aloud. Many of them did just that. I myself used the clip below.



(We covered this one, too--always a favorite of mine.)