with questions that were linked to Gray's own life; during the poem's composition, he was confronted with the death of others and questioned his own mortality. Although universal in its statements on life and death, the poem was grounded in Gray's feelings about his own life, and served as an epitaph for himself. As such, it falls within an old poetic tradition of poets contemplating their legacy. The poem, as an elegy, also serves to lament the death of others, including West, though at a remove. This is not to say that Gray's poem was like others of the graveyard school of poetry; instead, Gray tried to avoid a description that would evoke the horror common to other poems in the elegiac tradition. This is compounded further by the narrator trying to avoid an emotional response to death, by relying on rhetorical questions and discussing what his surroundings lack. Nevertheless, the sense of kinship with Robert Blair's "The Grave" was so generally recognised that Gray's Elegy was added to several editions of Blair's poem between 1761 and 1808, after which other works began to be included as well. The performance is connected with the several odes that Gray also wrote and those of Joseph Warton and William Collins. The poem, as it developed from its original form, advanced from the Horatian manner and became more Miltonic. The poem actively relied on "English" techniques and language. The stanza form, quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, was common to English poetry and used throughout the 16th century. Any foreign diction that Gray relied on was merged with English words and phrases to give them an "English" feel. Many of the foreign words Gray adapted were previously used by Shakespeare or Milton, securing an "English" tone, and he emphasised monosyllabic words throughout his elegy to add a rustic English tone. Poem The poem begins in a churchyard with a speaker who is describing his surroundings in vivid detail. The speaker emphasises both aural and visual sensations as he examines the area in relation to himself: As the poem continues, the speaker begins to focus less on the countryside and more on his immediate surroundings. His descriptions move from sensations to his own thoughts as he begins to emphasise what is not present in the scene; he contrasts an obscure country life with a life that is remembered. This contemplation provokes the speaker's thoughts