'To Soften, Not to Wound My Heart'

It may seem unfair to reduce a poet to a single poem but consider the thousands who never wrote even one memorable line. Take Thomas Gray. His reputation, if any, amounts to "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). Generations of school children once recited the poem and millions could quote it: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Dr. Johnson famously praised it as Gray’s sole successful poem, saying, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader.” 

Johnson is largely correct but small pleasures can be found in some of Gray’s other work. Take “Ode to Adversity” (1742). Gray, as always, is a moralist, and can be rather dry and stiff-necked, but also reassuring. He addresses Jove:

 

“Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear,

Thy milder influence impart,

Thy philosophic Train be there

To soften, not to wound my heart.

The gen’rous spark extinct revive,

Teach me to love and to forgive,

Exact my own defects to scan,

What others are, to feel, and know myself a Man.”

 

Johnson said of the poem: “Of the Ode on Adversity the hint was at first taken from ‘O Diva,gratum quae regis Antium’; but Gray has excelled his original by the variety of his sentiments and by their moral application. Of this piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not by slight objections violate the dignity.” The reader's consolation prize is that Gray’s theme echoes that found in a greater work, As You Like It. In Act II, Scene 1, the Duke says:  

 

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

I would not change it.”

 

Gray was born on this date, December 16, in 1716 and died in 1771 at age fifty-four.