That teach the rustic Moralist to dye. There at the Foot of yonder nodding Beech 'That wreathes its old fantastic Roots so high, 'His listless Length at Noontide wou'd he stretch, 'And pore upon the Brook that babbles by. The next with Dirges due in sad Array 'Slow thro' the Church-way Path we saw him born. Melancholy mark'd him for her own. The Bosom of his Father and his God.
Every noun is capitalized.
The capitalization of nouns, still mandatory in modern German, was a printers' custom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but a custom somewhat haphazardly observed. It lent an air of naturalness to the eighteenth-century habit of generalization and unobtrusive personification. In this poem the unusual care with details of printing and punctuation marks Gray as belonging to the first generation to expend pains on the way the poem looks on the printed page. The title draws attention to the fact that we have before us a piece of writing, not a transcription of what somebody is supposed to have said or thought. Return to index of poems .