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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