For the "classics poems" section of Slate David Lehman chose “Ode on a Distant
Prospect of Eton College,” an overlooked poetic masterpiece by Thomas Gray (left). Here is an excerpt from the piece:
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I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and
it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a
description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the
shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing
fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the
battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys
at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a
“momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn
in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth:
“the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in
intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their
doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim,
the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and
looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of
the plate.
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