 The poem is an elegy in name but not in form ; it employs a style similar to that of contemporary odes , but it embodies a meditation on death , and remembrance after death . The poem argues that the remembrance can be good and bad , and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard . The two versions of the poem , Stanzas and Elegy , approach death differently ; the first contains a stoic response to death , but the final version contains an epitaph which serves to repress the narrator 's fear of dying . With its discussion of , and focus on , the obscure and the known , the poem has possible political ramifications , but it does not make any definite claims on politics to be more universal in its approach to life and death . 
