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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

His "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was not published until 1750, although it had been written and handed about in manuscript several years before.

From Six Centuries of English Poetry Tennyson to Chaucer by Baldwin, James

The Brann who wrote "Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

From Brann the Iconoclast — Volume 01 by Brann, William Cowper