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• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

  noun

  a poem (1750) by Thomas Gray.
• “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
  “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

  (1751) An enduringly popular poem by the English poet Thomas Gray. It contains the lines “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air,” “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and “far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray.”

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

American  

noun

1. a poem (1750) by Thomas Gray.

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“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” Cultural  

1. (1751) An enduringly popular poem by the English poet Thomas Gray. It contains the lines “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air,” “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and “far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray.”

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Example Sentences

Such "solemn stillness" is broken, as the poet Thomas Gray wrote in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, "where the beetle wheels his droning flight".

From The Guardian • Jun. 5, 2012

Musical, eloquent, moral, the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is not only a beautiful poem in its own right, but opens a network of cultural pathways.

From The Guardian • Jan. 17, 2011

The great poet of this decade was Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by many held the noblest English lyric, appeared in 1751.

From English Poets of the Eighteenth Century by Bernbaum, Ernest

This is why the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to Spoon River Anthology.

From The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century by Phelps, William Lyon

Among his well-known poems are "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "The Progress of Poetry," "The Bard," "The Fatal Sisters," and "The Descent of Odin."

From It Can Be Done Poems of Inspiration by Morris, Joseph