The Yew-Tree’s Shade – Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard’ (1751)

Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard’ is one of the major poems of the so called ‘Graveyard School‘, often credited as a precursor to Gothic literature. It is also arguably one of the best remembered English poems of the eighteenth century. Traces of its influence can be seen in such figures as Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot. It was the only one of Gray’s poems praised by Samuel Johnson, perhaps the most important literary figure of the era.

The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.

Samuel Johnson, ‘Lives of the English Poets‘ (1779), ed. George Birkbeck Hill, III, p. 441.

The above excerpt can be considered representative of the poem’s wider purpose – to identify with the forgotten poor. ‘Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air,’ Gray famously proclaims. He exhorts the reader not to ‘impute to these the fault/ If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise’, pointing out that those whose do leave behind legacies ultimately come to the same pass anyway. This line of reasoning paves the way for the routine meditation on death that can be expected from any graveyard poem, a meditation which plays out, somewhat predictably, under the ‘yew-tree’s shade’. That Gray should focus not on the tree itself, but on the shadow it casts, is characteristic not only of the seventeenth-century propensity to paint the yew with only the murkiest of artistic palettes, but of the Graveyard School’s general affinity for shadow.

Shadows, indeed, were among the foremost characteristics of Gothic works. They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitations of neoclassical perceptions. Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know. […] Night gave free reign to imagination’s unnatural and marvellous creatures, while ruins testified to a temporality that exceeded rational understanding and human finitude. These were the thoughts conjured up by Graveyard poets.

Fred Botting, ‘Gothic’ (1996), Routlege: Abingdon, p. 32

It was very rarely the loftier regions of the yew, the leaves or branches for instance, that seventeenth-century poets chose to emphasise. It was the subjacent space of the tree, the corpse-laden under-yew, which generally claimed the spotlight. Gray vividly imagines that subterranean space with the striking line ‘Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap’, ranking side by side a stressed triplet of stout, Saxonic monosyllables (‘heaves’, ‘turf’, ‘heap’) that coalesce into the sort of stark, blunt, unsettlingly visceral imagery we might expect from a poetic tableau so deliberately estranged from beauty.

- Spandan Bandyopadhyay