![]() Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly. What makes Gray's turn of phrase so clever is the reversal of King David's conclusion: Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind nothing was gained under the sun. Remember that Ecclesiastes begins with "Vanity, vanity, vanity-all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2) and goes on to explicate this in exhaustive detail. Shelley referenced this in his Ozymandias, although TS Eliot's allusion in The Waste Land may be the most compact: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." The reference to dust goes back to the beginning, Genesis 3:19, and provides a basis for Ecclesiastes: "For dust you are and to dust you will return." The more knowledge one has, the greater one's grief, because this knowledge includes the inevitability of death, and that all we are and do and achieve eventually turns to dust. Grey's poem is quite famous, as is the phrase "ignorance is bliss" and much has been written on it, but the the core meaning is quite simple. ![]() Gray was referencing Ecclesiastes and playfully inverting the conclusion of an important verse.įor with much wisdom comes much sorrow the more knowledge, the more grief. ![]()
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