Extract

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea.

A curfew bell tolls over a darkening village, a plowman trudges home, and the world empties of light until only the poet remains among the graves. Thomas Gray published this meditation in 1751, and it became one of the most beloved poems in English almost overnight. Its subject is the unrecorded dead, the mute inglorious Miltons who tilled these fields and sleep beneath these stones with no monument but the moss. Gray's genius was to make their silence eloquent without pretending to break it, honouring lives that left no trace by giving them the most exquisite trace possible: verse so cadenced it feels like the language remembering something it always knew. Every churchyard since has been more legible for his having stood in this one.