of Dr. Johnson's exquisitely chosen diction is likewise ingeniously
studied and self-conscious. When Gray soared into the somewhat turgid
pindaric tradition of his day, he too was slaking a thirst for
rhetorical complexities. But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor
do we have artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed maiden"
apostrophized in Collins and Joseph Warton. For Gray the hour when the
sky turns from opal to dusk leaves one not "breathless with
adoration," but moved calmly to placid reflection tuned to drowsy
tinklings or to a moping owl. It endures no contortions of image or of
verse. It registers the sensations of the hour and the reflections
appropriate to it--simply.

It is not difficult to be clear--so we are told by some who habitually
fail of that quality--if you have nothing subtle to say. And it has
been urged on high authority in our day that there is nothing really
"fine" in Gray's "Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting
his address to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not
writing to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to
create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and the
approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed by doubt;
it ends on a note of "trembling hope"--but on "hope." There are
perhaps better evocations of similar moods, but not of this precise
mood. Shakespeare's poignant Sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year"),
which suggests no hope, may be one. Blake's "Nurse's Song" is, in
contrast, subtly tinged with modernistic disillusion:

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp'rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.