ABSTRACT
Questions about projection, identification, and distance, raised most overtly by Cowper, Duck, and Thomson, present themselves more torturously in Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Apt in his recording of Eton’s topographical features but reluctant to reveal the nature of his relationship to the setting he describes, Gray limns a landscape that from the first stanza of the poem threatens to reveal itself as an internal one, one suffused by a longing that Gray regarded as too personal to portray overtly in verse. The shadow of loss is evident from the earliest stanzas of the poem. Despite the many early readings of the ode’s opening as delineating an idyllic picture of youth, the children that the speaker conjures up in his imagination, as both Bentley and Blake conveyed in their designs to the Eton ode, have unquestionably taken on the shackles of Experience.
