 The Elegy 's continued influence in the 19th century provoked a response from the Romantic poets , who often attempted to define their own beliefs in reaction to Gray 's . Percy Bysshe Shelley , for example , who as a schoolboy was given the exercise of translating part of the Elegy into Latin , eventually wrote his own meditation among the graves in 1815 . His " A Summer Evening Churchyard , Lechlade , Gloucestershire " is metrically more inventive and written in a six @-@ line stanza that terminates Gray ’ s cross @-@ rhymed quatrain with a couplet . In theme and tendency Shelley 's poem closely resembles the setting of the Elegy but concludes that there is something appealing in death that frees it of terror . 
