You Know this Poem: Elegy.... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Stanzas Wrote in a Country Churchyard

Gray had seen many of his loved ones suffering and dying in agony. An elegy is written in praise of the dead, to honor and remember them and their deeds. Here, the poet refers to the humble folk of the English countryside whose rural life, just before the advent of the Industrial Revolution in England, was quiet and simple.

Answer: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

The curfew was rung every evening in English villages to warn people that it was time to put out the fires and candles for the night before they went to bed to avoid mishaps. The word itself comes from Old English-French : couvre + feu or "cover the fire."

Answer: Stoke Poges churchyard

Churchyards, adjacent to the church, were not only used to bury people, but they were also protected areas where church activities could be carried out. Medieval English churchyards were also ideal for growing the poisonous yew tree, which was used to make the famous English long-bow.

In later years, these yards became more of a decorative space surrounding the church, with landscaped lawns, trees and flower beds.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge was a Romantic poet, essayist and thinker. His themes like the Lake Poets were love and spirituality, the beauty of Nature as a teacher and he was just as famous for his long narrative poems. He certainly went through melancholy phases and depression but was by no means a Graveyard Poet!

Answer: Magazine of Magazines

This short-lived magazine was published in London and later in Limerick, Ireland, and accepted literary, scientific, philosophic, meteorological and religious papers for publication. Dr Samuel Johnson and Voltaire were among its other famous regular contributors.

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poet himself was surprised by the adulation that the poem received. In fact, he was by his own admission, notoriously slothful and refused to accept the honored position of Poet Laureate, preferring instead to take up an unpaid teaching post at Cambridge.

However, what makes the poem one of the most-quoted in English is its sombre, mellow tone and in an age of power and monarchy, its respect for the common people. Shelley visited the original churchyard and composed a poem here in a style that is reminiscent of "Elegy".

Answer: ABAB

The poet chooses the classical iambic pentameter scheme, with every syllable following the rhythmic stress-unstress pattern and the rhyming scheme of alternate rhyme in heroic quatrains. This makes it surprisingly easy to memorize!

Answer: Far from the Madding Crowd

The poet was not all gloom and doom! He wrote a playful, satirical piece on the death of his friend Horace Walpole's cat, entitled "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes" which contains the famous line: "What female heart can gold despise"?

Answer: Hampden, Cromwell, Milton

Hampden was a fiery Parliamentarian who defied Charles I and was killed in the English Civil War. Cromwell and Milton, his contemporaries, also fiercely resisted the tyrannies of the King.

Answer: The bosom of his Father and his God

The epitaph is the inscription on the headstone over the grave. Here, he talks of death, mortality and what is finally important in life.