Essay on THE PROGRESS OF POESY

By Asmodeus, Student

An essay on how Gray poem The Progress of Poesy uses generic conventions to help readers understand it

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

The poem THE PROGRESS OF POESY by Thomas Gray is quite a complex poem, in that it uses many words that are not commonly used in the English language, let alone the actual content. It also makes reference to Greek history and culture, two things you should know a little about if you want the poem to make more sense to you. Gray used and broke many generic conventions when he wrote this poem, and this can help readers to understand the poem better.

As THE PROGRESS OF POESY is an Ode, it follows a few basic rules. An ode is a 'song' of praise, and in the case of Gray's poem, it is a poem/song in praise of the writing of poetry. Odes also usually reveal something about the poets' personality, feelings, and own life experiences. The poem however, does not obey one of the conventions of an ode, in that it doesn't look solid, long, or dignified. It is spread about the page all over the place and looks very messy, and disorganised, for an ode. Each different Stanza has a different form of shape with no pattern in the placing and Quantity of indentations. It is my opinion that Gray originally wrote it like this for a reason, the reason being the fact that the history of writing poetry, let alone poetry itself has never been predictable or ordered, just a random set of events that have aided the development of a form of writing. The poem also uses formal, dignified language, sometimes somewhat difficult to understand.

Because an ode is a type of Lyric poem, it plays on, and relies on the imagination of the reader to make the poem come alive. An example is in the first stanza of the poem, when it talks about a lovely scene, where a brook flows down a mountain. There are some words in this stanza you may not have heard of, but you do not need to know exactly what they mean to be able to understand the stanza, though it helps. The picture painted in your head is enough, and without your mind creating these images for you, you may have found the poem very difficult to understand, and a lot less enjoyable.

The actual content of the poem deals with the changes and the history of poetry since it’s beginning in ancient Greece so many thousands of years ago. It tells of how the first poetry was about nature and the natural world, often in praise of it. Following on, it tells of how the first poetry was music in nature, and became part of the emerging theatre. War was one of the next important steps in the content of poetry. Brave heroes and great battles made for great topics of conversation, therefore they made good poems. Poems were becoming more thrilling for the people that heard and read them. Love has, and I think, always will be, one of or the most written about topic, as most people are able to experience it to some degree.

There is a rhyming pattern in this poem, in that every now and then, two words Rhyme, usually at the end of a line. There is another rhyming pattern, when significance is placed on both the last word of the first line, and the last word of the fourth line. The significance of this is that it keeps the pace of the poem, but allows it to still retain its rather quirky feel.
When the poem says, ‘In thy green lap was Nature’s darling laid’, I think that it is referring to the coming of Shakespeare into the poetic spot light. Shakespeare deserves a mention in this record of poetic history, because of the huge impact he had on poetry, many effects we still see today.

The generic conventions used in the writing of this poem in the end did actually help me to understand the poem a little better. However, not by how Gray followed them meticulously, but by his altering, and breaking of quite a number of them, though with a purpose that was revealed to me with careful thought. By breaking certain conventions, it helps to give an idea of the era of time and actual lyrical content to help you understand the underlying meaning in the poem. Each separate stanza generally deals with a different part of the history of poetry, from ancient Greece to Italy, and Shakespeare to Thomas Gray himself.

He used a great number of long sounding vowel sounds in this poem, which gave it a more ‘oady’ type of feel, and to suggest that you would be able to sing it, though this would actually be quite a challenge, considering the many irregularities in the poem. The poem places a lot of emphasis on the topics of Nature, Love, God, and War. It is these topics that were the earliest to emerge from the minds of past poets. Religion may have placed some very strong boundaries on how abstract and contemplative a poet could write. To question doctrine, let alone contradict it may have had very serious consequences in the times of some of the earlier poets. Nowadays, people are allowed to write what they think, and possibly more open-minded, which is why I believe there is increasing interest in the bizarre, unknown, and abstract. I think that this is one of the points that Gray was trying to make. Not only was he praising poetry, but he was also saying that the greatest things in life will live on. Although opinions change, they will never be totally dismissed.

We write poems for ourselves, and other people that may live in a time hundreds of years in the future. Poetry is interesting in that it is, in a way, immortal. A poem may be short, but can have many invaluable messages there for you to discover if you look for them. In the end, the generic conventions used in the poem, or broken in the poem, did help me to understand it in quite a big way, though not as much as I had first expected.