grayt.ead.0001-mss.0230Thomas Gray Manuscripts:An Inventory at the Thomas Gray Archive.Alexander HuberThomas Gray Archive2006Catalogued in EAD 2002 by Alexander Huber,
Editor, Thomas Gray Archive, 2005-Englishgrayt.ead.0001-mss.0230#did0001mss.poemsPoems[ca.
1725]-1771poems.elccElegy Written in a Country
ChurchyardThe curfew tolls the knell of parting day,1751Starr/Hendrickson (eds.), Complete Poems (1966), 37-43Lonsdale (ed.), Poems (1969), 103-141
Begun c. 1745 and completed
early in June 1750 at Stoke Poges.
Gray sent the poem
in a letter to
Horace
Walpole dated 12 June 1750.
First published, as An Elegy wrote in a Country Church
Yard and printed by Dodsley, in 1751.
mss.0230poems.elccElegy written in a Country Church-Yard1780[?]11transcript in an unidentified neat and legible hand on
Whatman paper180 mm x 110 mm
MS Add. 439, Poems section,
117-127
The ArchivesYMAR
MS catalogued by Alexander
Huber in The Archives, York Minster Library & Archives, on 27/03/2007.
Transcript in an unidentified neat and legible hand, entitled
Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard
(p. 117) (Elegy. [p. 119]). The
poem, which in this version has four unique readings ("winds" for
"wheels" [l. 7], ", the" for "and" [l. 32], "to" for "on" [l. 68], and
"sage" for "swain" [l. 97]), is part of a section called Poems, which is
separately paginated and has its own table of contents (p. 129), in a
volume entitled Gray's Poems. The book
carries the bookplate of Gray's friend and biographer William
Mason.