GEORGE WATSON 51

The voice of Gray ‘They’ve a temper, some of them,’ Lewis Carroll’s Hmpty-Dumpty remarked of words, ‘particularly verbs.’ The temper of verbs is an enticing study, especially when, as in Gray’s Ehgy, their status can be temperamental to the point of puzzlement. The poem, to put it simply, is hard to parse. The extreme instance of such puzzlement, which has a point beyond the farcical, survives in the anecdote about the inattentive schoolboy who, waking suddenly during a lesson, e n d what kind of an animal an ocean bear was. His mistake st i l l carries some weight, if only as a warning. Gray was a passionate pedant with language, as his notes and letters show, and he would not have been disappointed to know that the grammar of his poem could momentarily startle and confuse.

I propose here to consider uncertainties in Gray’s use of the active and passive voice in the Elegy. Accustomed as any critic is to be bullfed into agreeing that an indifference to modern linguistics is the blackest of intellectual sins, I shall find the most familiar of grammatiad terms enough for my purpose, and expect to reach a conclusion without employing anything that looks like a terminology. It is natural to assume that Gray, a highly deliberate artist, is using devices here deliberately. In line 94 of the poem he refers to the ‘artless tale’ of the unhonoured dead who lie buried in his country churchyard, in a phrase of affectionate con&scension; but the Elegv itself is not that tale, and has little in it of the artless. Gray’s most characteristic device is to use grammatical uncertainty to make the reader think twice: the readerispushedintoconsideringhowthepoemmightbeotherthanit is, and less than it is, by pgressively rejecting merely plausible interpretations in favour of better ones. Of course anoceanbear is not an animal: not here in the poem, or anywhere else.

This is not the first time a critic has suggested the poem could be other than it is, though earlier proposals have been metrical rather than syntactical. Goldsmith once enraged a friend by proposing to ‘mend’ the Elegy, as he jocularly put it, in omitting ‘an idle word’, or superfluous adjective, from each ofthefirstthreelines:

Ihecui6ewtullstheknellofby, The lowing herd kinds o’er& lea, The ploughmm hmrcwprd pbds his way. . .

and a more recent critic’ has suggested that the quatrain, which at the start of the poem, at least, could readily be turned into the more familiar heroic couplet, enforces upon the reader leisure for essential rumination:

52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4

’Ihe curfcw tolls the knell of pprting h y , The ploughman homeward plods his wepry way, ’ h e lowing herd winds slowly o’er the h, Aad leaves the world to darkness and to me.

One wants to shout Stop to all this, like Goldsmith’s friend, though it is embarrassing to have to admit that it does little damage to the logic of the stanza. The damage is all to its pace, which it accelerates disastrously. It converts a refldve ondonte into glib patter, and the observations suddenly look commonplace. Gray is justly anxious that his corxmonpkes should not look that : he lived beyond the age when the saw or proverb still kept its literary dignity, so that the poem, though humanistic in its concerns, cannot afford to be merely that in its manner. The wise saw needs something done to it by 1750: to be redecorated, or itonised, or converted freshly into an aphorism. And above all, to be ruminated.

The opening lines of the poem are cast in an entirely elusive syntactical simplicity. Each is self-contained, or nearly so, until at the end of the second stanza Gray at last allows a complication heralded by the first subordinate clause to be admitted: ‘Save where the beetle . . . ’. The device of subtly advancing complication serves to steady the movement of the poem, to hold ghbness at bay. The movement is steadied again at the beginnins of the third stanza, with ‘Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower . . .*, where a new sentence begins with a clause, and a clause with a parenthetical phrase inset. The repetition of ‘save’ strikes one here as merely artless - a defect hard to explain or defend in so deliberated a performance as this.

But is the simplicity of the opening lines real? They are so deftly calculated to draw the reader firmly into a grammar of mounting complexity that it is only on reflection one can see them to be puzzling in any sense. Their very familiarity, needless to say, makes that recognition none the easier. Goldsmith’s teasing dislocation at least has that justification. To see that a familiar poem muld be otherwise is, after all, to renew a fading sense of what it was and is. I believe his scepticism should have dug deeper, however; and paradoxically, it would have been more appreciative of the poem if it had done that. Any idiot can stop a clock from working. It does not deflate a good poem to spoil it. Just the reverse. Can one toll a knell? Undoubtedly yes; but it is a question whether a

curfew can do so. To put it like that is to see, with a salutary plt, how rhetorically intricate that familiar eight-word sentence really is. ‘To toll’ can be active or passive in ordinary English, then as now; that it is active here is not the problem. The problem lies in the puuling relation between subject and object. Though metaphor is involved here, metaphor is hot an adequate description of this figure. The whole poem is an elegy for a melancholy youth;

The voice of Gray 53

but here in its opening it is the day that is dying at wening - parting, or departing - and the wening bell of the village church tolls a funeral note for its going. If Gray had merely written a version of that, he would have written metaphorically; but in substituting ‘curfew’ for some word such as ‘bell’ he has drawn attention to the double voice of the verb ‘to toll’. Such verbs, being active or passive according to context, have the odd property of facing both ways. They are fairly numerous in English. A knell could toll a curfew, one may suppose, as easily as a curfew a knell. This is a familiar area of flexibility and uncertainty in the language, and amtext usually rids a case of all or most of its possibilities for confusion. One can rehearse a play, &er all, or rehearse actors for a play, or simply rehearse. Only transitive verbs can be in the passive voioe, one is inclined to think; but then a surprising number of essentially intransitive verbs can on occasion be transitive, as in waiting dinner or walking a dog. ‘The dog has just been walked’ is a possible sentence in English.

And some verbs, such as ‘to toll’, can be transitive or intransitive in about equal measure. A r e c e n t p d , F.R. Palmer, in his A Linguistic Study of the Ettgkb Verb (1965), has reminded us that there is no ‘one-to-one relation between voice and the categorising of verbs as transitive and intransitive’ @. 68). Without so much as hinting at Gray, he cites instances very close to the Elegy:

Theymgthebeu The bell rang The bell WPJ rung,

where the third instance, a passive, functions much like an intransitive. It would be an injjstice as well as an historical misunderstanding to suppose

that Gray and his educated contemporaries were ignorant of grammatical subtleties such as this. The modem cult of linguistics may have had its rewarding aspects, but it can sometimes give rise to the thoughtless assumption that a close analytical concern for syntactical patterns is a phenomenon of this century. But a knowledge of grammar was a stronger characteristic of Gray’s century than of ours, as any teacher of literature will discover who asks a student to parse a sentence from Shakespeare, Milton or Dickens. There are academic students of literature today who need to be told what tense and voice are. Whatever modem linguistics may have achieved, it has not advanced a general awareness of matters such as these, where the advantage lies altogether with our hefathers: with the humanist and Latin-based tradition of learning dominant in English schools from Tudor times down to some point in the mid twentieth century. That tradition now looks ready for revival. In the meantime, one may salute the last poet in English to have acknowledged a debt to that tradition, or almost the last. Gertrude Stein had little else in common with

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Gray, but she had this. ‘When you are at school,’ she recalled in her Lectures in AmeriGa (New York, 1935), ‘and learn grammar, gr- is VerY aath.

sentences.’ Nouns and adjectives, she went on, are not very interesting; but verbs and adverbs ‘have one very nice quality, and that is they can be SO mistaken’, being ‘on the move’. Gray exploits the fluidity of the verb. He loves their endless ‘mistakes’. But in him, of course, they are deliberate mistakes. English, unlike French, is not ‘a settled thing’, Gray once remarked in a

famous letter to West (8 April 1742), and English poetry has ‘a language peculiar to itself‘. His maturest skill lies in exploiting that peculiar and unsettled language to decelerate, in acontextwhere slow reading means refkction. ‘The province of Eloquence’, he remarks to himself in his Pocket Book of 1755, ‘is to &g~ ovet minds Of Slow and bth imaginatiOn. . . - to engage their attention by details and circumstarrces gradually unfolded . . .’ A good poem does not surrender itself all at once.

In the eighteenth century, in any case, p n m a r b s insisted on a knowledge of the function of the verb even in schoolboys. In 1765 William Ward, a Yorkshire headmaster, produoed An Essay on Grammar which requited of his pupils not only that they should distinguish active verbs from passive, but that they should recognise how potentially misleading such terms could be:

Avab in the Sctive &very frequently denotes a state which implies no real action;

in the passive voice frequent)p denotes a ate which implies n o d suf6aine; as ‘to bs

Ward’s point needs to be enlarged on. Modern grammatians are rightly fond of reminding us that hundreds of English verbs are subject to uansitivation, or the process of being made transitive when normaUy otherwise. Visser, for example, in his Histtmkd S’tax of tbe Engiisb Language (leyden, 1963-), remarks on the inadequacy of rigid distinctions here: ‘If intransitive means “does not take a direct object”, and trwrsitiue “requires a direct object”, a verb can never have these contradicmy qualities at the same time’ (I, 97). Gay, as dearly as the Dutch grammarh, can see that some verbs do possess these contradictory qualities. In a discussion that might have interested him Visser lists hundreds of verbs subject to transitivation, and suggests that the process derives from summarising a suppressed ‘thrtt . . .’ clause @. 133). Shakespeare’s ‘He brags his service’, for instance (CymbeZiw V.3.93), might be explained as a summary version of ‘He brags that he has been of service’, Verbs such as ‘to be’ and ‘to seem’ are copulative, and in Visser’s terms Gay’s ‘tolls’ might be classified as quasi-copulative, a class for which he instances such phrases as ‘to blush scarlet’ or ‘to stad my friend’ @. 217).

Ireally do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming

sfor instoace ‘to svffsr - to msmbls - to ezcd’ , pndmpny others. And Jo p w&

got, to & lost, to bsf i~nd’ , and UIZQY othn. (pp. 58-9).

The voice of Gray 55

Gray valued the summary effect in poetry, and once approved a remark of Shenstone’s about Pope’s ‘art of condensing a thought’. That would help to explain his fondnes for the quasi-copulative, which teasingly condenses a

tinguiding the functions of the English verb: the voice of Gray, it is tempting to say, is a grey voice. And the area is grey or indeterminate in more ways than one. It is not just that the reader hesitates to parse ‘tolls’ or ‘plods’ in the h t stanza of the Elegy, but that he senses in such usages that the sentence only barely exists within the language at all. That is in no way true of ‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way’, which is reassuringly run-of-the- mill, even granting that ‘weary’ is a transferred epithet. But ‘And leaves the world to darkness and to me’ is perilously and engagingly close to zeugma: ‘She left in a fit of anger and a hackney coach’. The scholar is taxed to think of a non-comic parallel to that line in Shakespeare, or in any other classic English poet. Gray’s difficulties lie in there being almost no difficulty at all. ‘The more bizarre a thing is,’ SherW Holmes once remarked, ‘the less mysterious it proves to be.’ Gray’s language is in no way bizarre, but it is all the more mysterious for that. Could one answer elementary questions of parsing here, or figures of speech, if challenged to do so? or pronounce firmly on the literary novelty of his usages?

The purpose of Gray’s grammatical indeterminacies is to trick the reader through a deceptively simple opening into imagining that little or no novelty is being attempted at all. That description holds, with some reservations, for the first two stanzas. It is simple, or seemingly so, to write six lines of which each is a discrete syntactical unit - or so nearly so, by the linkage of ‘and’, as to & little diffenmce. The oddity of relating ‘curfew’ to ‘knell’ is perhaps a stumbling-block, as is the near-mqpa of the fourth line. But the reader is in m serious grammatical difficulty until line six, which is a famous crux: ‘And all the air a solemn stillness holds.’ The schwlboy who asked about the ocean bear, had he been awake a little earlier, might have posed a more intelligent question about this. Does the air hold a stillness, or stillness the air? Gray has subtly chosen an instauce where the uncertainty is all the greater because one might reasonably say it all comes to the same thing. Neither interpretation can be excluded on the simple ground that it makes nonsense of the argument. That is not always so in English, or usually so. There is a large difference between walking a dog and bemg walked by one. Several answers are conceivable to this question. One is that s u b m normally precedes object - in which case it is the air that holds the stillness. On the other hand, the noun that precedes the verb most nearly is normally its subject, in which case the stillness holds the air. This is supported by the less ambiguous case of line 90: ‘Some pious drops the closing eye requims’, where there can be no doubt that ‘eye’ is the subject of

longer construction. This, admittedly, is the greyest of grey areas in dis-

56 Ctitical Qwrterly, vol. 19, no. 4

‘requires’. There is a further reason for pteferring the second solution, and that is the sense of the verb ‘to hold’. Can air hold an abstraction like silence? Transitive as it often is, there are s d y limits to its use as that, and it sounds more natural to say that asilence holds all the air than to turn that sentence on itshead.AUthatisconfirmedbythestanzabeginning ‘Fullmanyagem.. .’, where subject immediately precedes the verb. But it is significant that the sixth line takes so long to tease out.

The alert reader, at least, is by now more than a little preIwed for the radical grammatical equivocation of the ninth stanza of the poem:

Thebosst dhetpldry, the pcnnpdpoanr, And dl that beauty, d that wealth e’a gave, Awaits dike th’inevitsble bow. The paths of glory lcsd but to the grave.

‘Awaits’, being in the singular form, seems to guarantee that its subject is ‘hour’ - in which case the sentence is a more-than-Miltonic suspension, since Milton is more inclined to suspend a verb rather than its subject. ‘The hour (of death) awaits the boast of heraldry, etc.’ seems to make necessary sense here, too. But does the sentence not leave a nagging sense of another possibility? If the long opening phrase were atomised, it would make four singular subjects to the verb:

The boast d hapldiy awaits the hour of depth The pomp of power awaits the hout d death Au that beauty ever gave awaits the hour of depth All that wealth ever gave awaits the hour ofdepth

This is to mangle more grievously than Goldsmith, but it is not apparent how the solution is to be refuted. Subject does normally precede verb, after all, and the verb ‘to await’ is oddly noMxnnmittal here, in the sense that one individual or abstraction can await another and be awaited by him at the same tinre. Gray gives us little ground for certainty here. Perhaps that is the idea.

I do not know that any English poet before 1750 had ever played with verbs in this way. The game does not strike me as charactexisticaIly shalrespearean or Miltonic, though instances might still be found there. The essence of the game is to see that the copulative status of such verbs as ‘to be’ can be imitated by verbs that are not annmonly thought of as that. Its ef6ea is to blur what is ordinarily one of the most obvious of all s y n t d c a l dif6erences , that between subject and object. Gray’s verbs tend to look d h m a s q l * yinbothdirections at once. A more delayed e k t has been to enrich and ennoble the verb ‘to be’ itself, which in the past two centuries, in mote poets than one, has taken to itself more power than seems natural to it. Wordsworth was perhaps the first

The voice of Gray 57

master of this usage: consider the unforgettable lines from his ‘Song at the kast of Brougham Castle’, inconceivable as English of the sixteenth of seventeenth century:

The silme that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is amoq the lonely hills.

Wordsworth’s lapidary ‘sleep that is . . .’ has been attempted since, often enough, though the device disabuses by looking easier than it is. Mr James Merrill,in ‘AfterGreece’,hasrecendyapproachedit:

Qht into the olive entered Andwm o i l . . .

And the poem, a little further on, attempts Gray’s trick with voice:

Allthrough The counflyside we= old ideas Found lying open tothe elements.

Is ‘were’ merely an element in the passive voice here, or is it a Words- ‘tobe’? There are moments, in the traffic of a poem from page to mind, when one would prefer a question not to be answered: not soon, often, and sometimes not at all.