Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, by Thomas

Gray

Thomas Gray (1716-71) is remembered mostly for his celebrated

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, but it would be a mistake to think of
him as a poetic “one hit wonder”. He was the best-known poet of his age.
Stylistically, his poetry forms a bridge between the Augustan neoclassicism of
Alexander Pope and the Romanticism of William Wordsworth, and elements
of both approaches can be seen in his poetry. This is certainly true of his 1742
poem (published in 1747), “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”. Gray
had been a pupil at Eton from 1727 to 1734, so he was therefore writing about
his old school a few years after leaving it. Eton, founded in 1440 by King
Henry VI is regarded as one of the top elite schools in the country, having
turned out nineteen British Prime Ministers and countless leaders in many
areas of civic life. Thomas Gray can therefore be regarded as having been
highly privileged to be a former pupil.

The poem comprises ten stanzas, each of ten lines. The poem takes
the general form of a Horatian ode, but with a typically 18th century adaptation
to a 10-line format, often referred to as the “English ode”. The odes by Horace
tended to be more personal in tone than those by Pindar, and the choice of
the Horatian pattern by Gray seems to reflect that approach. The rhyme
scheme used by Gray is ABABCCDEED, which is a variant in the typical
English ode pattern of ABABCDECDE.

The prospect is distant in both space and time, although, as

mentioned above, the poem was not written all that many years after Gray
had left the school. However, much had happened in the meantime to throw a
gulf between the past and the present. Gray had become good friends with
three other Etonians who went on to make names for themselves, but he had
since fallen out with them. Horace Walpole, a politician and novelist, and the
poet Richard West who had died shortly before the Ode was written.

The tone of the poem therefore suggests that the past is much further
back than it actually was, and that is mainly because Gray is adopting the
Augustan habit of generalising from the particular. Although the prospect
clearly brought back actual memories, Gray does not specify these, preferring
to focus on archetypes of Etonians and speculating on their future lives.

The poem splits into two even parts, with the first fifty lines concentrating on
the past and the present, with the boys at school devoting all their energies to
play and study and paying little heed to the future, and the second half dealing
with that future and the pain and suffering that it is likely to bring.

The poem opens with Gray, standing alone and describing the
campus—its spires and towers, Windsor Castle in the background,
the surrounding groves, lawns, and meadows, and the shade trees
and flowers along the winding Thames River. His references to King
Henry VI, whose “shade” or spirit presides, and to the “shade” of
the old trees affirm the harmony of history and nature at the school
and they hint at the “shade” of death that awaits everyone. Gray
conveys a refreshing wistfulness as he remembers the playing
fields, on which he showed little athletic promise and observes
“careless childhood” now at play. His memories of youth are “gales”
that bring a fleeting joy.

The first three stanzas contain a lot of personification, with “happy hills”,
gales that blow “A momentary bliss bestow” and a direct address to “Father
Thames”, on whose banks the boys chase hoops and play football and on
whose “glassy wave” they row. All of the boys find their playtime more
sweet because school rules and study are the “graver hours” that
limit their fun. Other boys explore the campus and even wander,
against the rules, off school grounds. Aware of their disobedience,
they imagine that the wind reprimands them, tempering their
forbidden joy with fear.

The general impression of these opening stanzas is that hope is driven

only by unrealistic imagination: “Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed.” 
The schooldays are a blissful time in which there is little to worry about “The
spirits pure, the slumbers light” and, even if there are occasional problems,
“The tear forgot as soon as shed”.

However, once Eton is left behind, the world outside will heap
multifarious troubles on its former inmates. This is made clear from the often-
quoted couplet that begins the sixth stanza: “Alas! Regardless of their doom, /
The little victims play”. Gray really goes to town on the horrors that lie in wait
to be delivered by “The ministers of human fate, / And black Misfortune’s
baleful train!”

This includes anger, fear, shame, love, jealousy, despair and sorrow.
Some will rise with their ambitions only to fall in scorn and infamy. The death
of loved ones, poverty, aging and a whole lot more, all of which are due to fall
upon them simply to “tell them they are men”. In other words, mankind is
condemned to suffer, and all must groan.  However, the final point made by
the Ode is that there is no reason why the boys at Eton should be told about
this, and they should be allowed to stay in a state of innocence for as long as
possible; “why should they know their fate”, as Gray puts it.

The poem ends with the couplet that has entered the common stock of
English quotations: “where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise”. This is
often misinterpreted as stating that it is a good thing to be uneducated, but
that is not what Gray means by “ignorance”. Instead, he is summarising
everything that has gone before in this poem to say that misfortunes will come
in their own good time and it would be cruel to inflict them on young people
before they are ready to bear them.

The Ode can be read as a version of Paradise Lost, minus the

angels and much else besides. The first half of the poem is therefore
representative of innocence and Paradise, but the Fall comes when school is
left behind and the boy becomes a man .Gray emphasizes the contrast
between Paradise and Fall, or Innocence and Experience, by making the boys
very young “the little victims” and the prospect distant and open-air. The latter
contrast panders to the 18th century notion that everything in the countryside
was good but everything urban was bad.

The epigraph “I am a man, reason enough for being miserable”, a

quotation from the Greek playwright Menander, crisply states the poem’s
theme: The ultimate trouble and unhappiness of human life. The diction of
the Ode seems to derive from poets of an earlier age, particularly John Milton,
of whom Gray was a great admirer. Gray is a transitional figure in the history
of English poetry, and “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is a poem
that illustrates that transition as neatly as any.