Thousands of eulogies and elegies have been uttered to honor the dead. Most are blown away by the wind. Some remain, like headstones, to mark our universal feeling of loss. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address comes to mind. "The Spoon River Anthology" by Edgar Lee Masters is full of memorial thoughts, uttered by the dead themselves.
But a little gem — once required reading but now relegated to the back of textbooks — is Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard."
As if from the grave itself, the poem speaks to people today from 250 years in the past. And the insights and sentiments remain as crisp and clear in 2009 as they were in 1750.
The poem is too long to quote, but we offer some lines that may enhance your Memorial Day. Gray doesn't concern himself with the famous and powerful. He speaks about those who lived good lives out of the limelight. He imagines the simple joys such departed souls must be missing:
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
He says being unknown is not to be unimportant. Greatness can be a quiet thing. He writes:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Finally, he attempts to give these simple souls their due. He praises their steadiness, humility and their gift for living simply:
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their day.
Memorial Day began as a day to honor the soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice for their country. Those sentiments should never be put aside. But over the years, Americans have also quietly added the names of their own friends and relatives who have lived "far from the madding crowd" and lived like a "purest ray serene" and "blush unseen."
Our soldiers and the simple folk our soldiers defend deserve to be remembered.
We urge all Utahns to give a thought to both this Memorial Day.