grayt.ead.0001-mss.0239Thomas Gray Manuscripts:An Inventory at the Thomas Gray Archive.Alexander HuberThomas Gray Archive2006Catalogued in EAD 2002 by Alexander Huber,
Editor, Thomas Gray Archive, 2005-Englishgrayt.ead.0001-mss.0239#did0001mss.poemsPoems[ca.
1725]-1771poems.elccElegy Written in a Country
ChurchyardThe curfew tolls the knell of parting day,1751Starr/Hendrickson (eds.), Complete Poems (1966), 37-43Lonsdale (ed.), Poems (1969), 103-141
Begun c. 1745 and completed
early in June 1750 at Stoke Poges.
Gray sent the poem
in a letter to
Horace
Walpole dated 12 June 1750.
First published, as An Elegy wrote in a Country Church
Yard and printed by Dodsley, in 1751.
mss.0239poems.elccAn Elegy written in a Country Church Yard[between c. 1760 and 1790]7transcript in an unidentified hand
MS Lt 99, ff. 20r-23rBrotherton Collection Manuscript Verse, Special CollectionsLELINelson (ed.), Union First Line Index. Mar. 2010. Folger Shakespeare
Library. 19 March 2010. <http://firstlines.folger.edu/detail.php?id=4660>
Transcript in an unidentified hand, beginning "The curfeu tolls the knell of parting day", in a commonplace book,
entitled
Old songs & other poems, "in two hands, c.1760-90, containing transcribed verse
and prose of the 17th and 18th centuries".