Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

In choosing an "English" over a Classical setting, Gray provided a model for later poets wishing to describe England and the English countryside during the second half of the 18th century.[31] Once Gray had set the example, any occasion would do to give a sense of the effects of time in a landscape, as for instance in the passage of the seasons as described in John Scott’s Four Elegies, descriptive and moral (1757).[58] Other imitations, though avoiding overt verbal parallels, chose similar backgrounds to signal their parentage. One favourite theme was a meditation among ruins, such as John Langhorne's Written among the ruins of Pontefract Castle (1756),[59] Edward Moore's “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman's seat in Cornwall" (1756)[60] and John Cunningham's "An elegy on a pile of ruins" (1761).[61] Gray's friend William Mason chose an actual churchyard in south Wales for his Elegy VI (1787), adding a reference to the poet in the text. He also provided a final note explaining that the poem was written "to make it appear a day scene, and as such to contrast it with the twilight scene of my excellent Friend's Elegy".[62]

A kinship between Gray's Elegy and Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village has been recognised, although the latter was more openly political in its treatment of the rural poor and used heroic couplets, where the elegist poets kept to cross-rhymed quatrains. At first it was collected in various editions along with Gray's poem and other topographical works, but from 1873 a number of editions appeared which contained just the Elegy and The Deserted Village, though sometimes with the inclusion of Goldsmith's The Traveller or some other single work as well.[63] At that period an anonymous review in The Academy (12 December 1896) claimed that "Gray's 'Elegy' and Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' shine forth as the two human poems in a century of artifice."[64]

18th century tombs "beneath the yew tree's shade" in St Giles' churchyard

The Elegy's continued influence in the 19th century provoked a response from the Romantic poets, who often attempted to define their own beliefs in reaction to Gray's.[65] Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, who as a schoolboy was given the exercise of translating part of the Elegy into Latin, eventually wrote his own meditation among the graves in 1815. His "A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire" is metrically more inventive and written in a six-line stanza that terminates Gray's cross-rhymed quatrain with a couplet. In theme and tendency Shelley's poem closely resembles the setting of the Elegy but concludes that there is something appealing in death that frees it of terror.[66]

In the Victorian period, Alfred, Lord Tennyson adopted many features of the Elegy in his own extended meditation on death, In Memoriam. He established a ceremonial, almost religious, tone by reusing the idea of the "knell" that "tolls" to mark the coming night. This is followed with the poet narrator looking through letters of his deceased friend, echoing Gray's narrator reading the tombstones to connect to the dead.[67] Robert Browning relied on a similar setting to the Elegy in his pastoral poem "Love Among the Ruins" which describes the desire for glory and how everything ends in death.[68] Unlike Gray, Browning adds a female figure and argues that nothing but love matters.[69] Thomas Hardy, who had memorised Gray's poem, took the title of his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, from a line in it. In addition, many in his Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898) contain a graveyard theme and take a similar stance to Gray, and its frontispiece depicts a graveyard.[70]

It is also possible that parts of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets are derived from the Elegy, although Eliot believed that Gray's diction, along with 18th-century poetic diction in general, was restrictive and limited. But the Four Quartets cover many of the same views, and Eliot's village is similar to Gray's hamlet. There are many echoes of Gray's language throughout the Four Quartets; both poems rely on the yew tree as an image and use the word "twittering", which was uncommon at the time. Each of Eliot's four poems has parallels to Gray's poem, but "Little Gidding" is deeply indebted to the Elegy's meditation on a "neglected spot". Of the similarities between the poems, it is Eliot's reuse of Gray's image of "stillness" that forms the strongest parallel, an image that is essential to the poem's arguments on mortality and society.[71]

On the basis of some 2000 examples, one commentator has argued that "Gray's Elegy has probably inspired more adaptations than any other poem in the language".[72] It has also been suggested that parody acts as a kind of translation into the same tongue as the original,[73] something that the printing history of some examples seems to confirm. One of the earliest, John Duncombe’s “An evening contemplation in a college” (1753),[74] frequently reprinted to the end of the 18th century, was included alongside translations of the Elegy into Latin and Italian in the 1768 and 1775 Dublin editions and 1768 Cork edition of Gray's works. In the case of the American The Political Passing Bell: An Elegy. Written in a Country Meeting House, April 1789; Parodized from Gray for the Entertainment of Those Who Laugh at All Parties by George Richards (d.1804) and published from Boston MA,[75] the parody was printed opposite Gray's original page by page, making the translation to the political context more obvious.

A shift in context was the obvious starting point in many of these works and, where sufficiently original, contributed to the author's own literary fortunes. This was the case with Edward Jerningham's The Nunnery: an elegy in imitation of the Elegy in a Churchyard, published in 1762.[76] Profiting by its success, Jerningham followed it up in successive years with other poems on the theme of nuns, in which the connection with Gray's work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: The Magdalens: An Elegy (1763);[77] The Nun: an elegy (1764);[78] and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of the earlier poems on ruins by Moore and Cunningham.[79] At the opposite extreme, Gray's poem provided a format for a surprising number that purport to be personal descriptions of life in gaol, starting with An elegy in imitation of Gray, written in the King's Bench Prison by a minor (London 1790),[80] which is close in title to William Thomas Moncrieff’s later "Prison Thoughts: An elegy, written in the King's Bench Prison", dating from 1816 and printed in 1821.[81] In 1809, H. P. Houghton wrote An evening's contemplation in a French prison, being a humble imitation of Gray's Elegy while he was a prisoner at Arras during the Napoleonic wars (London 1809).[82] It was followed next year by the bitter Elegy in Newgate, published in The Satirist in the character of the recently imprisoned William Cobbett.[83]

An obvious distinction can be made between imitations meant to stand as independent works within the elegiac genre, not all of which followed Gray's wording closely, and those with a humorous or satirical purpose. The latter filled the columns in newspapers and comic magazines for the next century and a half. In 1884 some eighty of them were quoted in full or in part in Walter Hamilton's Parodies of the works of English and American authors (London 1884), more than those of any other work and further evidence of the poem's abiding influence.[84] One example uncollected there was the ingenious double parody of J. C. Squire, "If Gray had had to write his Elegy in the Cemetery of Spoon River instead of in that of Stoke Poges".[85] This was an example of how later parodies shifted their critical aim, in this case "explicitly calling attention to the formal and thematic ties which connected the 18th century work with its 20th century derivation" in Edgar Lee Masters' work.[86] Ambrose Bierce used parody of the poem for the same critical purpose in his definition of Elegy in The Devil's Dictionary, ending with the dismissive lines

The wise man homeward plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.[87]

St Giles' churchyard; Gray's tomb is at the foot of the brick-built extension on the left

While parody sometimes served as a special kind of translation, some translations returned the compliment by providing a parodic version of the Elegy in their endeavour to accord to the current poetic style in the host language. An extreme example was provided by the classicised French imitation by the Latin scholar John Roberts in 1875. In place of the plain English of Gray's “And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave”, he substituted the Parnassian Tous les dons de Plutus, tous les dons de Cythère (All the gifts of Plutus and of Cytherea) and kept this up throughout the poem in a performance that its English reviewer noted as bearing only the thinnest relation to the original.[88]

The latest database of translations of the Elegy, amongst which the above version figures, records over 260 in some forty languages.[89] As well as the principal European languages and some of the minor such as Welsh, Breton and Icelandic, they include several in Asian languages as well. Through the medium of these, Romanticism was brought to the host literatures in Europe. In Asia they provided an alternative to tradition-bound native approaches and were identified as an avenue to modernism.[90] Study of the translations, and especially those produced soon after the poem was written, has highlighted some of the difficulties that the text presents.[91] These include ambiguities of word order and the fact that certain languages do not allow the understated way in which Gray indicates that the poem is a personalised statement in the final line of the first stanza, “And leaves the world to darkness and to me”.

Some of these problems disappeared when that translation was into Classical Latin, only to be replaced by others that Gray himself raised in correspondence with Christopher Anstey, one of the first of his translators into Latin.

“Every language has its idiom, not only of words and phrases, but of customs and manners, which cannot be represented in the tongue of another nation, especially of a nation so distant in time and place, without constraint and difficulty; of this sort, in the present instance, are the curfew bell, the Gothic Church, with its monuments, organs and anthems, the texts of Scripture, etc. There are certain images, which, though drawn from common nature, and everywhere obvious, yet strike us as foreign to the turn and genius of Latin verse; the beetle that flies in the evening, to a Roman, I guess, would have appeared too mean an object for poetry.” [92]

Anstey did not agree that Latin was as unpliable as Gray suggests and had no difficulty in finding ways of including all these references, although other Latin translators found different solutions, especially in regard to inclusion of the beetle.[93] He similarly ignored Gray's suggestion in the same letter, referring back to his own alternative versions in earlier drafts of his poem: “Might not the English characters here be romanized? Virgil is just as good as Milton, and Cæsar as Cromwell, but who shall be Hampden?” Again, however, other Latin translators, especially those from outside Britain, found Gray's suggested alternative more appealing.

One other point, already mentioned, was how to deal with the problem of rendering the poem's fourth line. Gray remarked to Anstey, “’That leaves the world to darkness and to me’ is good English, but has not the turn of a Latin phrase, and therefore, I believe, you were in the right to drop it.” In fact, all that Anstey had dropped was reproducing an example of zeugma with a respectable Classical history, but only in favour of replicating the same understated introduction of the narrator into the scene: et solus sub nocte relinqor (and I alone am left under the night). Some other translators, with other priorities, found elegant means to render the original turn of speech exactly.

In the same year that Anstey (and his friend William Hayward Roberts) were working on their Elegia Scripta in Coemeterio Rustico, Latine reddita (1762), another Latin version was published by Robert Lloyd with the title Carmen Elegiacum. Both were subsequently included in Irish collections of Gray’s poems, accompanied not only by John Duncombe’s “Evening Contemplation”, as noted earlier, but in the 1775 Dublin edition by translations from Italian sources as well. These included another Latin translation by Giovanni Costa and two into Italian by Abbate Crocci and Giuseppe Gennari.[94] The pattern of including translations and imitations together continued into the 19th century with an 1806 bilingual edition in which a translation into French verse, signed simply L.D., appeared facing the English original page by page.[95] However, the bulk of the book was made up of four English parodies. Duncombe's “Evening contemplation” was preceded by a parody of itself, “Nocturnal contemplations in Barham Down’s Camp”, which is filled, like Duncombe's poem, with drunken roisterers disturbing the silence. Also included were Jerningham's “The Nunnery” and J.T.R's “Nightly thoughts in the Temple”, the latter set in the gated lawyer's quarter in London.

Trilingual editions without such imitations were also appearing both in Britain and abroad. Gray’s Elegy in English, French and Latin was published from Croydon in 1788. The French author there was Pierre Guédon de Berchère and the Latin translator (like Gray and Anstey, a Cambridge graduate) was Gilbert Wakefield.[96] In 1793 there was an Italian edition of Giuseppe Torelli's translation in rhymed quatrains which had first appeared in 1776. This was printed facing Gray's original and was succeeded by Melchiorre Cesarotti’s translation in blank verse and Giovanni Costa's Latin version, both of which dated from 1772.[97] A French publication ingeniously followed suit by including the Elegy in an 1816 guide to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, accompanied by Torelli's Italian translation and Pierre-Joseph Charrin’s free Le Cimetière de village.[98]

Such publications were followed by multilingual collections, of which the most ambitious was Alessandro Torri's L'elegia di Tommaso Gray sopra un cimitero di campagna tradotta dall'inglese in più lingue con varie cose finora inedite (Verona 1819).[99] This included four translations into Latin, of which one was Christopher Anstey's and another was Costa's; eight into Italian, where versions in prose and terza rima accompanied those already mentioned by Torelli and Cesarotti; two in French, two in German and one each in Greek and Hebrew. Even more translations were eventually added in the new edition of 1843.[100] By that time, too, John Martin's illustrated edition of 1839 had appeared with translations into Latin, Greek, German, Italian and French, of which only the Torelli version had appeared in previous collections.[101] What we learn from all this activity is that, as the centenary of its first publication approached, interest in Gray's Elegy continued unabated in Europe and new translations of it continued to be made.

A woodcut to John Constable's design for stanza 3 of the Elegy

Many editions of the Elegy have contained illustrations, some of considerable merit, such as those among the Designs by Mr. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray (1753).[102][103] But the work of two leading artists is particularly noteworthy. Between 1777 and 1778 William Blake was commissioned by John Flaxman to produce an illustrated set of Gray's poems as a birthday gift to his wife. These were in watercolour and included twelve for the Elegy, which appeared at the end of the volume.[104] Another individual book was created in 1910 by the illuminator Sidney Farnsworth, hand written in italic script with a mediaeval decorative surround and more modern-looking inset illustrations.[105]

Another notable illuminated edition had been created in 1846 by Owen Jones in a legible blackletter script with one decorative initial per page. Produced by chromolithography, each of its 35 pages was individually designed with two half stanzas in a box surrounded by coloured foliar and floral borders. An additional feature was the cover of deeply embossed brown leather made to imitate carved wood.[106] A little earlier there had been a compositely illustrated work for which the librarian John Martin had been responsible. Having approached John Constable and other major artists for designs to illustrate the Elegy, these were then engraved on wood for the first edition in 1834. Some were reused in later editions, including the multilingual anthology of 1839 mentioned above. Constable's charcoal and wash study of the "ivy-mantled tower" in stanza 3 is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum,[107] as is his watercolour study of Stoke Poges church,[108] while the watercolour for stanza 5, in which the narrator leans on a gravestone to survey the cemetery, is held at the British Museum (see below).

While not an illustration in itself, Christopher Nevinson’s statement against the slaughter of World War I in his painting Paths of Glory (1917) takes its title from another line in the Elegy, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave”. The title had already been used two years before by Irvin S. Cobb in an account of his journalistic experiences at the start of that war.[109] It was then taken up in the unrelated Humphrey Cobb's 1935 anti-war novel, although in this case the name was suggested for the untitled manuscript in a competition held by the publisher. His book also served in its turn as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory, released in 1957. This example is just one more among many illustrating the imaginative currency that certain lines of the poem continue to have, over and above their original significance.

Since the poem is long, there have been few musical settings. Musicians during the 1780s adopted the solution of selecting only a part. W.Tindal's musical setting for voices was of the "Epitaph" (1785),[110] which was perhaps the item performed as a trio after a recitation of the poem at the newly opened Royalty Theatre in London in 1787.[111] At about that time too, Stephen Storace set the first two stanzas in his “The curfew tolls” for voice and keyboard, with a reprise of the first stanza at the end.[112] At the period there were guides for the dramatic performance of such pieces involving expressive hand gestures, and they included directions for this piece.[113] There is also an item described as "Gray's Elegy set to music" in various settings for voice accompanied by harpsichord or harp by Thomas Billington (1754–1832), although this too may have only been an excerpt.[114] A member of the theatrical world, Billington was noted as "fond of setting the more serious and gloomier passages in English verse”[115]

In 1830, a well known composer of glees, George Hargreaves, set "Full many a gem", the Elegy's fourteenth stanza, for four voices.[116] And finally, at the other end of the century, Alfred Cellier did set the whole work in a cantata composed expressly for the Leeds Festival, 1883. The work was “dedicated to Mrs Coleman of Stoke Park, in memory of some pleasant hours at the very spot where the scene of the elegy is supposed to be laid.”[117] A nearly contemporary cantata was also composed by Gertrude E. Quinton as Musa elegeia: being a setting to music of Gray's Elegy (London, 1885).[118]

The only other example yet discovered of a translation of the Elegy set to music was the few lines rendered into German by Ella Backus Behr (1897–1928) in America.[119]

John Constable's study for stanza 5, 1833

Critics at the beginning of the 20th century believed that the poem's use of sound and tone made it great. The French critic Louis Cazamian claimed in 1927 that Gray "discovered rhythms, utilised the power of sounds, and even created evocations. The triumph of this sensibility allied to so much art is to be seen in the famous Elegy, which from a somewhat reasoning and moralizing emotion has educed a grave, full, melodiously monotonous song, in which a century weaned from the music of the soul tasted all the sadness of eventide, of death, and of the tender musing upon self."[131] I. A. Richards, following in 1929, declared that the merits of the poem come from its tone: "poetry, which has no other very remarkable qualities, may sometimes take very high rank simply because the poet's attitude to his listeners – in view of what he has to say – is so perfect. Gray and Dryden are notable examples. Gray's Elegy, indeed, might stand as a supreme instance to show how powerful an exquisitely adjusted tone may be. It would be difficult to maintain that the thought in this poem is either striking or original, or that its feeling is exceptional."[132] He continued: "the Elegy may usefully remind us that boldness and originality are not necessities for great poetry. But these thoughts and feelings, in part because of their significance and their nearness to us, are peculiarly difficult to express without faults ... Gray, however, without overstressing any point composes a long address, perfectly accommodating his familiar feelings towards the subject and his awareness of the inevitable triteness of the only possible reflections, to the discriminating attention of his audience. And this is the source of his triumph."[133]

In the 1930s and 1940s, critics emphasised the content of the poem, and some felt that it fell short of what was necessary to make it truly great. In 1930, William Empson, while praising the form of the poem as universal, argued against its merits because of its potential political message. He claimed that the poem "as the context makes clear", means that "18th-century England had no scholarship system of carriere ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it ... By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved. Furthermore, a gem does not mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that man is like the flower, as short-lived, natural, and valuable, and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without opportunities."[134] He continued: "the truism of the reflection in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death."[135] T. S. Eliot’s 1932 collection of essays contained a comparison of the elegy to the sentiment found in metaphysical poetry: "The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress."[136] Later, in 1947, Cleanth Brooks pointed out that "In Gray's poem, the imagery does seem to be intrinsically poetic; the theme, true; the 'statement', free from ambiguity, and free from irony."[137] After describing various aspects and complexities within the poem, Brooks provided his view on the poem's conclusion: "the reader may not be altogether convinced, as I am not altogether convinced, that the epitaph with which the poem closes is adequate. But surely its intended function is clear, and it is a necessary function if the poem is to have a structure and is not to be considered merely a loose collection of poetic passages."[138]

Critics during the 1950s and 1960s generally regarded the Elegy as powerful, and emphasised its place as one of the great English poems. In 1955, R. W. Ketton-Cremer argued, "At the close of his greatest poem Gray was led to describe, simply and movingly, what sort of man he believed himself to be, how he had fared in his passage through the world, and what he hoped for from eternity."[139] Regarding the status of the poem, Graham Hough in 1953 explained, "no one has ever doubted, but many have been hard put to it to explain in what its greatness consists. It is easy to point out that its thought is commonplace, that its diction and imagery are correct, noble but unoriginal, and to wonder where the immediately recognizable greatness has slipped in."[140] Following in 1963, Martin Day argued that the poem was "perhaps the most frequently quoted short poem in English."[14] Frank Brady, in 1965, declared, "Few English poems have been so universally admired as Gray's Elegy, and few interpreted in such widely divergent ways."[141] Patricia Spacks, in 1967, focused on the psychological questions in the poem and claimed that "For these implicit questions the final epitaph provides no adequate answer; perhaps this is one reason why it seems not entirely a satisfactory conclusion to the poem."[142] She continued by praising the poem: "Gray's power as a poet derives largely from his ability to convey the inevitability and inexorability of conflict, conflict by its nature unresolvable."[143] In 1968, Herbert Starr pointed out that the poem was "frequently referred to, with some truth, as the best known poem in the English language."[144]

During the 1970s, some critics pointed out how the lines of the poems were memorable and popular while others emphasised the poem's place in the greater tradition of English poetry. W. K. Wimsatt, in 1970, suggested, "Perhaps we shall be tempted to say only that Gray transcends and outdoes Hammond and Shenstone simply because he writes a more poetic line, richer, fuller, more resonant and memorable in all the ways in which we are accustomed to analyze the poetic quality."[145] In 1971, Charles Cudworth declared that the elegy was "a work which probably contains more famous quotations per linear inch of text than any other in the English language, not even excepting Hamlet."[146] When describing how Gray's Elegy is not a conventional elegy, Eric Smith added in 1977, "Yet, if the poem at so many points fails to follow the conventions, why are we considering it here? the answer is partly that no study of major English elegies could well omit it. But it is also, and more importantly, that in its essentials Gray's Elegy touches this tradition at many points, and consideration of them is of interest to both to appreciation of the poem and to seeing how [...] they become in the later tradition essential points of reference."[147] Also in 1977, Thomas Carper noted, "While Gray was a schoolboy at Eton, his poetry began to show a concern with parental relationships, and with his position among the great and lowly in the world [...] But in the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard these longstanding and very human concerns have their most affecting expression."[148] In 1978, Howard Weinbrot noted, "With all its long tradition of professional examination the poem remains distant for many readers, as if the criticism could not explain why Johnson thought that "The Church-yard abounds with images that find a mirrour in every mind".[149] He continued by arguing that it is the poem's discussion of morality and death that is the source of its "enduring popularity".[150]

By the 1980s, critics emphasised the power of the poem's message and technique, and it was seen as an important English poem. After analyzing the language of the poem, W. Hutchings declared in 1984, "The epitaph, then, is still making us think, still disturbing us, even as it uses the language of conventional Christianity and conventional epitaphs. Gray does not want to round his poem off neatly, because death is an experience of which we cannot be certain, but also because the logic of his syntax demands continuity rather than completion."[151] Also in 1984, Anne Williams claimed, "ever since publication it has been both popular and universally admired. Few readers then or now would dispute Dr. Johnson's appraisal ... In the twentieth century we have remained eager to praise, yet praise has proved difficult; although tradition and general human experience affirm that the poem is a masterpiece, and although one could hardly wish a single word changed, it seems surprisingly resistant to analysis. It is lucid, and at first appears as seamless and smooth as monumental alabaster."[152] Harold Bloom, in 1987, claimed, "What moves me most about the superb Elegy is the quality that, following Milton, it shares with so many of the major elegies down to Walt Whitman's ... Call this quality the pathos of a poetic death-in-life, the fear that one either has lost one's gift before life has ebbed, or that one may lose life before the poetic gift has expressed itself fully. This strong pathos of Gray's Elegy achieves a central position as the antithetical tradition that truly mourns primarily a loss of the self."[153] In 1988, Morris Golden, after describing Gray as a "poet's poet" and places him "within the pantheon of those poets with whom familiarity is inescapable for anyone educated in the English language" declared that in "the 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard,' mankind has felt itself to be directly addressed by a very sympathetic, human voice."[154] He later pointed out: "Gray's 'Elegy' was universally admired in his lifetime and has remained continuously the most popular of mid-eighteenth-century English poems; it is, as Gosse has called it, the standard English poem. The reason for this extraordinary unanimity of praise are as varied as the ways in which poetry can appeal. The 'Elegy' is a beautiful technical accomplishment, as can be seen even in such details as the variation of the vowel sounds or the poet's rare discretion in the choice of adjectives and adverbs. Its phrasing is both elegant and memorable, as is evident from the incorporation of much of it into the living language."[155]

Modern critics emphasised the poem's use of language as a reason for its importance and popularity. In 1995, Lorna Clymer argued, "The dizzying series of displacements and substitutions of subjects, always considered a crux in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), results from a complex manipulation of epitaphic rhetoric."[156] Later, Robert Mack, in 2000, explained that "Gray's Elegy is numbered high among the very greatest poems in the English tradition precisely because of its simultaneous accessibility and inscrutability."[6] He went on to claim that the poem "was very soon to transform his life – and to transform or at least profoundly affect the development of lyric poetry in English".[157] While analyzing the use of "death" in 18th-century poetry, David Morris, in 2001, declared the poem as "a monument in this ongoing transformation of death" and that "the poem in its quiet portraits of rural life succeeds in drawing the forgotten dead back into the community of the living."[158]