“The Philosophy of Tears”: Sense(s) and sensibility in some graveyard poems

Abstract

This essay revisits the involved relationship between the senses, sense and sensibility in four eighteenth-century poems customarily assembled under the term “graveyard poetry” while foregrounding the emotional and material marker, the tear, and its presence (or absence) in the poems. The poems in question are Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” (1721), Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743), Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). How does the poet put into words an experience of loss and bereavement and come to terms with the anticipation of his own inevitable demise? Gray’s Elegy brings the genre to its apogee, if not to its conclusion, in the sense that it is itself a remarkable patchwork made up of allusions to, echoes and references from, earlier poems. It is in its way a cento that can seem, at least in part, to be fashioned from amended quotes. Gray appears to be so steeped in the poetry, be it of the recent or more distant past, that his genius expresses itself here in his capacity to refine this poetry, to transform it, producing in the process something at once perfectly traditional, conventional and recognisable, and enigmatically new and curiously incomplete.