back from the thoughtless world to praise again the "cool sequester'd
vale of life" and then appending "the happy idea of the hoary-headed
swain, &c." does really improve the poem structurally. Its method is,
however, more acceptable in that now the reflections are imbedded in
"drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total effect is more
pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape,
from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual
grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given
the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be
acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No more" (lines
20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades through the imaginations of
gloom-fed poets. But Gray, although an undoubted "graveyard" poet, is
no mere graveyard poet: he stands above and apart from the lot of
them, and he was not content to end despondently in a descending
gloom. His, as he told West, in a celebrated letter, was a "white
melancholy, or rather leucocholy"; and he wrote of "lachrymae rerum"
rather than of private mordant sorrows.

The poem is couched in universals: Gray writes in "a" country
churchyard, and the actual Stoke Poges, dear and lovely as it
doubtless was to Gray, clings to the fame of the poem almost by
accident. And yet, by a sort of paradox, this "universal" poem in its
setting and mood is completely English. One could go too far from home
for examples of distinction--for the polar stars of the rude
forefathers--just as one could err by excess of "commonplace"
reflections. Some such idea encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth
quatrain, which in the Eton MS reads (the first line has partly
perished from folding of the paper):

Some [Village] Cato [who] with dauntless Breast