SOURCE: "The Ambivalence of Gray's Elegy," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. VII, No. 3, July, 1957, pp. 257-61.

In the following essay, Dyson discusses Gray's conflicting attitudes toward rustic life as reflected in the "Elegy. "

The prevailing impression we have on considering Gray's 'Elegy' in retrospect is of its distinctive 'atmosphere', contemplative and Horatian. There is the stoic reflection on the transcience of earthly glory that we associate with this tradition, the same apparent preference for a Sabine Farm, 'far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife'. The gentle melancholy of the mood, as well as the syntax of stanzas 24 and 25, points to Gray himself as the subject of the Epitaph. It expresses a wish which, in this particular mood, he has for his whole future: to be 'marked out' by melancholy for her own, to live and die in peaceful rustic security.

But this is by no means all that...