Shades of Thomas Gray & Contemporary Criticism

In a verse chronicle in the June New Criterion, William Logan excoriates James Tate ("a wisecracker. . . [who] giggled at his own jokes"), so what else is new; he pleads with the late C. K. Williams "to shut the hell up," and makes the astounding claim that "scarcely anyone reads James Schuyler or Kenenth Koch" these days.

He loses no time in making a false assertion with the confidence of a lobbyist. "One poem like Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems."  Dull? Has Logan read Gray's "Ode on a Distant Propsect of Eton College," or the sonnet on Richard West's death or his 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes'." I ask readers to judge for themselves. Here is a link to Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," with my gloss on it, written for the "classic poems" section of Slate along with the other two poems I've named. -- DL

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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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Click here for the full post. 

https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44305/on-the-death-of-richard-west

from "Hymn to Adversity":

Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic Train be there
To soften, not to wound my heart.
The gen'rous spark extinct revive,
Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are, to feel, and know myself a Man.

Comments

[ALAN WEARNE]

John Forbes was a great great fan of Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. I recall him reciting it at a party . We did those kinds of things at Australian parties in the 1980s/90s.
And after the recitation concluded with '...where ignorance is bliss,/ 'Tis folly to be wise.'
'Christ!' proclaimed John, 'it's enough to make you go out and shoot yourself!'