In the Epitaph,
Thomas Gray shows his discontent toward the way that life and death are
categorized on this planet. He speaks of
earth as a place which holds people for the time being that they are going
through this grand cycle of what is called life.
When somebody only "rests his head upon
the lap of Earth" it is not a way of approving the way that people are
laid down for their final resting. The
Epitaph shows , properly titled, the lot about how people are being brought up
and brought down in a dark sort of way.
Someone's personal epitaph is just a place where their head rests and
Even "Fair Science frowned" on the aspects of the person's life and
now the incapacity that they have toward this world. Their one and only sole purpose in this world
is to waste space in the earth and rot away for eternity.
Gray's style is very intriguing. He speaks of god and how there are certain
things around that are only now known as "frailties" of what used to
be life. Gray speaks out against the way
this person was treated in society which is symbolic of how people are being
treated as a whole and the hollowness and shallowness of people in the
world. Now the person is dead, there is
no other help that you could give him.
"Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere" was how the man
lived, and although his soul was a true one, he was still a marked man, and now
he is only marked with a stone that protrudes from the ground known as The
Epitaph.
God is a part of life which gray dispises. He goes against the idea of a belief in one
immortal being who rules over people and casts judgments and leaves some people
for broke. "The bosom of his father
and his god" were those that were unhelpful in the dead man's life,
because he ended up just as everyone else will, dead, it is just that he was
not blessed with as much life. Gray
probably knew someone who died at a young age and it had a traumatizing effect
on him, then he turned to writing of dark and dreary times and those of the
epitaphs and of graveyards and the beliefs of gods and how they relate to life
and death.
Thomas Gray's The Epitaph shows the way that we
treat moral and social problems and help to alert us of another and how faulty
our beliefs towards the juxtaposition between life and death are in our
society.
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