Thomas Gray’s poem ''Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,'' is written in the romantic style. He describes the beauty of the English countryside and its people. He portrays English subjects such as farmers, housewives, and cowherds, and the natural world. He writes of death and its effect on all beings.
Because he explores the certainty and finality of death, mentioning religion, with its ideal of the afterlife, would take away from the point of the poem. Instead, Gray wants to emphasize that death comes to all in the natural world, and only the names and deeds of people live on. For this reason, he uses the image of the dead lying in their graves ("each in his narrow cell for ever laid," "Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?") to show that death is not only unavoidable but also final. In the poem, the speaker states that the lives and "toil" of humble villagers who are dead and forgotten is equal to that of famous people such as John Milton and Thomas Cromwell. The poet mourns the lost potential of the village folk, who died with their talents hidden and unpraised due to a lack of education and poverty.
God is mentioned in the epitaph at the end of the poem. But Gray does not mention God in his poem because his themes of lost potential, and the inevitable but natural cycle of life and death, go against the religious ideal of eternal life after death.
