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):

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:

With similar critical tact Gray realized that one might have too much of stately moral reflections unmixed with drama. Possibly such an idea determined him in discarding four noble quatrains with which he first designed to end his poem. After line 72 in the manuscript now in Eton College appeared these stanzas:

"And here," comments Mason, "the Poem was originally intended to conclude, before the happy idea of the hoary-headed Swain, &c. suggested itself to him." To reconstitute the poem with this original ending gives an interesting structure. The first three quatrains evoke the fall of darkness; four stanzas follow presenting the rude forefathers in their narrow graves; eleven quatrains follow in reproach of Ambition, Grandeur, Pride, et al., for failure to realize the high merit of humility. Then after line 72 of the final version would come these four rejected stanzas, continuing the reproach of "the thoughtless world," and turning all too briefly to one who could "their artless tale relate," and to the calm that then breathes around tumultuous passion and speaks of eternal peace—and "the silent tenor of thy doom."

That would give a