I could never stand it when I’d visit Blackheath and, my mother having gone to Bath for her sciatica, her servant Nelly cheerfully assailed me with complex menu choices when all I wanted to think about was what had gone wrong at Rochefort—why had I not convinced my superiors that my military strategy would bear fruit? And as I thought about these important events, events with historic implications, Nelly wanted to go on at length about haddock.

I suppose I knew I could not expect people like Nelly, or the rugby coach on the train, or the Bonaventure ticket seller—or even Sophie, who claims to understand me—to sympathize with Gray’s “Elegy.” Gray’s rugged elms, the yew-tree’s shade where the moping owl to the moon complains…these are not what modern people of any age want to talk about. Gray loves a nodding beech tree that wreathes its old, fantastic roots high beside a holy brook where an ordinary man—the man I once was, the man a general can never be—stops at noon from his labour in the fields, and slumbers in the grass.

The drizzle worsens. Montrealers rush past me to shops and offices. Brick buildings hulk like sodden fruit cake. People scurrying under umbrellas can’t stop to smell Gray’s incense-breathing morn. No beetle wheels his droning flight, no swallow titters from a straw-built shed. Outside Bonaventure Station, still without my ticket to see Madame Blanchard, I watch everyone in the New World rush away from Gray’s natural joys as if they, like me, can’t face the day.

“There’s another man behind the soldier!” I shout at the street. “And I am trying to restore him…”

Mix rain with tears and no one can tell. So what if I’ve no ticket. Even if I had it, I couldn’t sit with Madame Blanchard the way I used to at her plain table with a box of cream crackers, luxuriating my toes in Missy’s fur, rhubarb out the window bulging and snaking under its mealy seed. Madame Blanchard keeps my letters in an old biscuit tin. She watches Coronation Street and hangs my socks to dry on the banister: she can no longer operate the rusty little wheel on her clothesline and asks me to…But no, that was when she still lived in the house…

How much time Gray’s “Elegy” holds suspended in it! Time hangs like a banner of gold dust arcing between Gray’s every word over fields of space.