ne. Blake's "Nurse's Song" is, in
contrast, subtly tinged with modernistic disillusion:

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp'rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.

Here, too, are no tremblings of hope, no sound confidence in the
"average" man, such as Gray surprisingly glimpses. One begins to
suspect that it is more necessary to be subtle in evocations of
despair than in those of hope, even if the hope is tremulous. The mood
Gray sought required no obvious subtlety. The nearest approach to Gray
(found in Catullus) may likewise be said to be deficient in overtones;
but it also comes home to the heart of everyman:

o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto!

These simple lines convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one
evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity.
From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges
to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished
merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an
epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The
epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something
like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one villager--perhaps
for himself--Gray seems to murmur through the gathering darkness: "et
lux perpetua luceat ei." Although in this epitaph we may seem to be
concerned with an individual, we do well to note that the youth to
fortune and fame unknown, whose great "bounty" was only a tear, is as
completely anonymous as the ploughman or the rude forefathers.

The somber aspects of evening are perhaps more steadily preserved by
Gray than by his contemporaries. From Milton to Joseph Warton all
poets had made their ploughman unwearied as (to quote Warton):

He jocund whistles thro' the twilight groves.

With Gray all this blithe whistling stopped together. Evening poems by
Dyer, Warton, and Collins had tended to be "pretty," but here again
Gray resisted temptation and regretfully omitted a stanza designed to
precede immediately the epitaph: