Here’s a poem I wrote about 15 years ago when we were living just west of London in Buckinghamshire. Only a short drive from our house in Gerrard’s Cross was a little village called Stoke Poges, whose claim to fame is a beautiful little country churchyard in which the English poet Thomas Gray reportedly wrote his most well-known poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which begins with these lines:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I visited the churchyard occasionally to experience the peace, beauty and quiet of both the churchyard and St. Giles Church, part of which dates to the Saxon era. On one visit, this poem emerged, a reflection on the death of my father just a few years before.
[Read more…] about Memorial Day: Elegy Written in Thomas Gray’s Country Churchyard
