ABSTRACT
Gray’s Elegy deviates from its graveyard contemporaries by way of both its poetic method and objective. Perhaps “once pregnant” with the same “celestial fire” (46) that forged both the fervent religious poetry and the salvation of his predecessors, the elegist instead turns to another source of inspiration and an alternative end in the domestic comforts and “wonted fires” (92) of humanity. In arguing that Gray’s elegist willingly seeks death in a bold attempt to seek poetic apotheosis, thereby rejecting the possibility of salvation in God, it is possible to view the Elegy’s attempt to cultivate sympathy for its dead elegist as a social and secular alternative to the obscured consolations of traditional Christian eschatology. From the elegist’s perspective, the living and the dead can find solace in the generous affections of friends and relatives, whereas the Christian telos remains cloaked in doubt and uncertainty. Where the social bonds of sympathy are evident, present and knowable, nothing is certain in a deferred Christian afterlife.
