We’ve had poets before who wrote little poetry. The short-lived Chidiock Tichborne, for example, and other minor poets who managed a single memorable poem. Or T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin, who kept a tight watch on their publications and whose collected poems did not form a large volume. And then there’s Thomas Gray (1716–1771) — a poet who occupies a serious place in any standard list of English poets, while publishing only 13 poems in his lifetime.

Even Gray’s collected poems, gathering everything he wrote, runs only to 75 poems, including his Latin poems, fragments, and translations. He once worried that his collected poems would be “mistaken for the works of a flea,” but he could not overcome his perfectionism and unwillingness to continue anything he thought inferior.

Of course, those poems include “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742), which ends “where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise.” And “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (1747). And the inescapable “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). 

Among Gray’s published poems, there’s also today’s Poem of the Day: his sonnet on the death of Richard West, from 1742. While at Eton, he formed close friendships with Horace Walpole, Thomas Ashton, and Richard West, and West’s death as a young man devastated him. The resulting poem is an example of the Petrarchan form of the sonnet. Gray emphasizing the Italianate distinction between the first eight lines, the octave, and the last six lines, the sestet, by using only two periods in the poem: one at the end of the octave and the other at the end of the sestet.

Those two sentences express the unbearable contradiction of grief. In the octave, he speaks of the inability of the sun (Phoebus Apollo) and the birds, the greening fields — all the panoply of spring — to brighten the world when “A different object do these eyes require.” In the sestet, Gray admits that all the world is alive, unnoticing his grief. “In vain,” the poem opens, and with those same words, “in vain,” it concludes.

On the Death of Richard West
By Thomas Gray

In vain to me the smiling Mornings shine, 
And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire; 
The birds in vain their amorous descant join; 
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire; 
These ears, alas! for other notes repine, 
A different object do these eyes require; 
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; 
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire. 
Yet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men; 
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; 
To warm their little loves the birds complain; 
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
And weep the more because I weep in vain.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.