and the total effect is more
pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape,
from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual
grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given
the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be
acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No more" (lines
20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades through the imaginations of
gloom-fed poets. But Gray, although an undoubted "graveyard" poet, is
no mere graveyard poet: he stands above and apart from the lot of
them, and he was not content to end despondently in a descending
gloom. His, as he told West, in a celebrated letter, was a "white
melancholy, or rather leucocholy"; and he wrote of "lachrymae rerum"
rather than of private mordant sorrows.

The poem is couched in universals: Gray writes in "a" country
churchyard, and the actual Stoke Poges, dear and lovely as it
doubtless was to Gray, clings to the fame of the poem almost by
accident. And yet, by a sort of paradox, this "universal" poem in its
setting and mood is completely English. One could go too far from home
for examples of distinction--for the polar stars of the rude
forefathers--just as one could err by excess of "commonplace"
reflections. Some such idea encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth
quatrain, which in the Eton MS reads (the first line has partly
perished from folding of the paper):

Some [Village] Cato [who] with dauntless Breast
The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest;
Some Caesar, guiltless of his Country's Blood.

The substitution of English names is an obvious attempt to bring truth
closer to the souls of his readers by use of "domestica facta" and the
avoidance of school-boy learning.

All these changes illustrate the quality of Gray's curious felicity.
His assault on the reader's sensibilities was organized and careful:
here is no sign of that contradiction in terms, "unpremeditated art."
He probably did not work on the poem so long as historians have said
he did, but he scanted neither time nor attention. Mason thought the
poem begun and perhaps finished in 1742, and he connected its
somberness with Gray's great sorrow over the death of his close friend
Richard West. All this seems more than doubtful: to Dr. Thomas
Wharton in September 1746 Gray mentioned recently composing "a few
autumnal verses," and there is no