SOURCE: "Gray's Churchyard Space," in Preromanticism, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 42-8.

In the following excerpt, Brown illustrates how Gray generalizes from the particular in the "Elegy" to create a sense of universal experience.

… Space has always been recognized as a problem in Gray's "Elegy." The speculation concerning the location of Gray's churchyard is as idle as that concerning Goldsmith's Aurora, yet also as natural. For it reflects the tension that runs through the poem between particular place and universal space. In the early stanzas the repeated possessives drive toward local dominions, and so indeed do the definite articles.⁶ At twilight the private consciousness faces dormancy unless it is rescued by positioned singularities ("Save where," "Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r"). Dominion is ubiquitous: in the owl's "solitary reign," the children's envied sire, the war to subdue nature to cultivation. It is not by chance that the three model...