Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Evening empties a country churchyard of everyone but the speaker, who reads the unlettered graves of plowmen and asks what the village might have produced had any of them been given the chance — a mute inglorious Milton, a Cromwell with no blood on him. The turn comes when the meditation on the buried poor slides into the speaker's own likely obscurity and the epitaph some stranger might one day read. Immediately and permanently popular, it fixed the note of eighteenth-century English melancholy for every graveyard poet who followed.
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