Thomas Gray Manuscripts : Thomas Gray, ‘In D: 29am Maii’

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray Manuscripts

On the 29th May 1660, King Charles II entered London. By Act of Parliament, the anniversary of this day – known as Restoration Day – was a public holiday. At the University of Cambridge, throughout Thomas Gray’s life and beyond, a doctor in divinity would preach a sermon at the Senate House. In Peterhouse – Gray’s college for more than twenty years, before he moved to Pembroke College – commemorations took on a less sober cast. The historian of Peterhouse, T. A. Walker, explains that on 29th May, as on 5th November (the day in 1605 that the Gunpowder Plot was foiled) and on the current monarch’s Accession Day, ‘bonfires were lighted[, with] the Porter provid[ing] tar barrels at the College expense.’Restoration Day was also commemorated by Cambridge students through the composition of occasional poetry. The present item – a Latin poem titled ‘In D: [i.e. ‘Diem’] 29am Maii’ (‘On the 29th day of May’) – is an example of this. Although there is a possibility that the poem stems from Gray’s schooldays at Eton – where, in the fifth form, Gray would have been composing ‘three Latin exercises every week, viz., an original theme of not less than twenty lines, a copy of verses of not less than ten elegiac couplets, and five or six stanzas of lyrics on the same subject as the other verses’ (as Henry Maxwell-Lyte writes in his history of Eton) – his editors agree in assigning it to his time at Peterhouse.When Horace Walpole complained to his and Gray’s mutual friend Richard West, who was studying at the University of Oxford, that ‘[w]e have not the least poetry stirring here [in Cambridge]; for I can’t call verses on the 5th of November and 30th of January by that name’ (9th November 1735), he was referring to anniversaries like 29th May (Charles II’s father, King Charles I, was executed on 30th January 1649). Estelle Haan has recently and compellingly argued that Gray’s ‘In D: 29am Maii’ and ‘In 5tam Novembris’ (‘On the 5th of November’), which is also presented in this collection, show that Gray did not share Walpole’s derisive attitude, illuminating the careful artistry in each work. The poem was, however, probably either a college exercise written for his tutor, George Birkett, or a fulfilment of his scholarship duties: as a Cosin scholar in his first year and (from his second year until 1738) as a Hale scholar, ‘on each Sunday and feast day he would produce to the Master and to the President or Senior Dean at dinner hour fair copies of Greek and Latin verses on a subject taken from the Gospel for the day’. These were forms of composition which Gray does not seem to have held in high regard; he may have been thinking of such things when he wrote to West in December 1736, celebrating that he had ‘nothing more of college impertinencies to undergo’, and perhaps it is telling that he transcribed one of his poetic exercises from Eton into his Commonplace Book, but not this. Unlike several other Gray manuscripts in the Pembroke archives (including Gray’s Commonplace Book, pocket books, other poems, and letters), ‘In D: 29am Maii’ is never mentioned by William Mason in his Memoirs of Gray (1775). Therefore, it may not have been kept by Gray himself (and then passed on to his executor, Mason).Whether this poem was prepared specifically for Peterhouse’s 29th May celebrations is not known, although the metaphor at lines 3-4 concerning the signs of fire being erased (‘vestigia flammae / Delentur’) might have been particularly apposite in the context of the college bonfires, and Britain’s address to Charles slips from first person singular (lines 9-14) to first person plural (‘nostrae’ (‘our’) at line 15) to third person (‘Britanno’ (‘[in] Britain’) at line 19), in a way which seems more suited to spoken performance than to a character’s speech. Naturally, in more general ways the poem engages with the anniversary implied by its title. It begins by adapting the first line of Lucan’s Civil War – ‘Bella per Angliacos [Lucan: ‘Emathios’] plusquam civilia campos’ (‘war worse than civil on the English [Lucan: ‘Emathian’] plains’). However, whereas Lucan is announcing the subject of his epic, Gray shifts focus to peace and restoration (and Restoration). ‘Patria’ (Charles’s ‘fatherland’, i.e. Britain, line 8) then speaks to the king, Britain’s opening three lines (9-11) closely following part of Anchises’s first speech to his son Aeneas (Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, lines 692-694). The speech refers to events during the civil war and subsequent Protectorate, including Cromwell’s victory at the Battle of Worcester (‘Vigornia’) in September 1651 (lines 13-14) and Charles’s exile in Europe (lines 11-12). The final eight lines (15-22) apostrophise the Boscobel Oak, the tree in which Charles famously hid to evade Parliamentarian soldiers after the Battle of Worcester.‘In D: 29am Maii’ is typical – of both Gray’s neo-Latin corpus, and neo-Latin poetry more broadly – in its classical borrowings. This was encouraged. In his Advice to a Young Student (1730), Daniel Waterland, a well-regarded tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge, instructed: ‘Endeavour in your Exercises, Prose or Verse, not to copy out, but to imitate and vary the most shining Thoughts, Sentences, or Figures which you meet with in your reading.’ While one might very plausibly interpret the adaptations from Lucan and Virgil as allusions, in which Gray sets up a meaningful tension or harmony between the original lines and his use of them, it is also worth remembering that those lines could act, more simply, as compositional models.As mentioned above, this poem was not published by Mason; instead, it had to wait until 1884 (150 years after Gray matriculated at Peterhouse) to be printed, by Edmund Gosse in his edition of Gray’s Works. Besides two poems published while he was at Cambridge – a hymeneal on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha and ‘Luna est habitabilis’ (the first printing of which is digitised in this collection as ‘Tripos verses (D.28.21.1-2)’ – none of his Latin poetry was printed during his lifetime; rather his poems survived under the headings ‘Carmina’ and ‘Epistolae’ in his Commonplace Book (digitised in this collection), and on loose leaves like this and ‘In 5tam Novembris’. More of Gray’s Latin poetic compositions have recently come to light, namely a draft of ‘De Principiis Cogitandi’ (Eton MS 918, Eton College Library) and a new poem written on the Grand Tour (held in MS-GAR-0046, John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University). This digitisation of ‘In D: 29am Maii’ allows us to see its relationship to the other Latin exercises from Gray’s school and undergraduate years in this collection (as ‘Latin exercises (GBR/1058/GRA/4/1)’), which are also fair copies and similarly signed ‘Gray’, though they were written on different paper. ‘In D: 29am Maii’ was published in this digital edition in November 2024, with editorial and bibliographical metadata by Ephraim Levinson, and images courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge.Ephraim Levinson University of Cambridge <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a> How to cite: Thomas Gray, ‘‘In D: 29am Maii’ (GBR/1058/GRA/4/2)’, ed. Ephraim Levinson, in Thomas Gray Manuscripts, ed. Ruth Abbott, assoc. ed. Ephraim Levinson, <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a>