The Poems of Thomas Gray

This collection gathers the verse of Thomas Gray, written mainly in the mid-eighteenth century. The central piece is the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in which a speaker at dusk considers unmarked graves, rural labor, and the leveling of ambition by death. Other poems include the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, The Bard, The Progress of Poesy, and the mock-heroic Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat. The odes use Pindaric form and historical or allegorical figures; the shorter pieces are more intimate. There is no narrative through-line. The book is a small body of English lyric and ode, not a novel and not a life of the poet.

Bound in leather with cloth sides blocked with a gilded design and inset leather label, 116 watercolours. Commentary volume by Irene Tayler, bound in grey cloth. Both in a brown buckram solander box with a gold printed leather label.