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Commentary on Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Although neo-classicism played a leading role in the literary scene in the 18th Century, there were many poets whose poetry more or less deviated from the rules that set down by neo-classicist poets. These poets showed great desire for something more natural in thought and language. In their poetry, emotions and sentiments had been more expressed. Among these poets, one of the representatives was Thomas Gray. Gray was an important poet of neo-classicism and he spent most of his life in Cambridge on study and work. He was so self critical and fearful of failure that he only published 13 poems during his lifetime. His masterpiece was The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,which cost him eight years to finish and has been ranked among the best of the 18th century English poetry. Gray’s Elegy, a model of sentimentalist poetry, is regarded as a “best known poem in the English language”, a poem full of the gentle melancholy which marks all early Romantic poetry. With a classical precision and polish, the poem shows a keen interest in the English countryside and a sincere feeling of the life of common people.In this poem,the poet wandered in the churchyard and thought a lot when he saw the Grave stones of the ordinary people. These people are unknown to public and they worked for all their lives but they were buried in so simple and crude churchyard after their death .They were ambitious as well as some great people when they were Alive. The poet expressed his great sympathy to the ordinary people and criticize the extravagant and dissipated big shots. Besides, he showed the fact that death was inevitable and that even “the paths of glory led but to the grave”. The poem contains 32 quatrains of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of abab for each stanza. Each line has five pairs of syllables for a total of te