Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
1. “Let not ambition mock…lead but to the grave.” (ll. 29—36) Ans. In these lines from the poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the poet Thomas Gray, standing in a country churchyard, reflects upon the generalised past lives of the villagers and admonishes ambitious rich persons not to laugh at the poor persons underground and persons living in grandeur not to listen to their stories. Then he sardonically adds, as a note of caution, that whatever human beings possess or achieve in this world, their ultimate destination is the grave. As the poet watches the ordinary graves of ordinary villagers, he recalls some snapshots of their generalised lives. He finds that they led their lives, of course, in poverty, but they lived in happiness. They did their day-to-day activities and enjoyed their domestic joys in their own ways. They remained outside the great political or military fields and remained quite unknown to the world. In fact, the circle of their existence was very limited, a...