…lead but to the grave

Apart for the opening lines – ‘the curfew tolls the knell of parting day’ – I feel I am guilty of unfamiliarity with Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. On visiting St Mary’s, Lytchett Matravers, I can only reflect on this omission in my personal literary canon as unforgivable unless it previously meant nothing to me; a feeble excuse. The word ‘elegy’ requires less thought than ‘country’.

A busy morning, occupied with little of significance, demands an afternoon foray into the near-at-hand countryside, just to make sure the sunshine isn’t wasted. On my way down the proverbial long and winding country lane, an animal bounds along the tarmac in front of the car. What is that? Too big for a cat; too small for a deer; wrong shape for a fox. It’s a hare! My second in a week.

‘…that yew tree’s shade, where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap’. Truth be told, I’m here with my trusty little camera because someone said the place is pretty, and is home to several birds. I don’t see them so I wander around for a bit. Obviously, the church is shut. Then I take look around the graveyard and find myself in the extension. Which is when the notion of ‘country’ hits home.

For we are not just talking countryside, we’re talking ‘my’ country. Whether or not I’m a patriot is disputable: I don’t stand up for the national anthem, for example. And I don’t much care for what I perceive as us interfering in other folk’s problems. On the other hand …click the picture to read the inscription.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife … I know their base is to hand, but there are other churches closer. For reasons that are presently unclear, St Mary’s is the resting place of many Royal Marines – SBS, SAS, killed In Iraq, Afghanistan and so-forth. They are decorated with poppy wreaths from their squadrons and crosses signed by their compatriots, but their stones bear the inscription ‘daddy’; which gives meaning to the young age at which they were killed. For their country. These are the men who left England’s green and beautiful for some other foreign field. They are the collateral of war games.

It’s unclear why Gray wrote his elegy. 270 years since, it resonates so succinctly that it might’ve been constructed yesterday. And that says a lot about how far we’ve come. Which is nowhere apart from making me wake up to what is given for country. And what is forgotten, unless you happen to be in an English country churchyard.