The Epitaph by Thomas Grey

Essay by Anonymous UserHigh School, 10th gradeA-, April 1996

download word file, 2 pages 4.3

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...