Children

Abstract

Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (ca. 1742) depicts youth as a uniquely carefree stage of human life. The poem invokes as a doubly “Distant Prospect” (removed in time as well as space) the landscape of his schoolboy days, a “pleasing shade” (as he terms it) “Where once my careless childhood strayed, / A stranger yet to pain.”¹ Now as young as Gray had once been, the boys at Eton “have,” correspondingly, “No sense…of ills to come, / Nor care beyond today” (53–54). Though they cannot know it, they nonetheless represent “little victims” (52) because of the fate that lies in store for any adults:

These shall the fury Passions tear,

The vultures of the mind,

Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,

And Shame that skulks behind;

Or pining Love shall waste their youth,

Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,

That inly gnaws the secret heart,

And Envy wan, and faded Care,

Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,

And Sorrow’s piercing dart. (61–70)

These lines make growing up equivalent to dying, as emerges from Goldsmith’s Threnodia Augustalis (ca. 1772): “Death with its formidable band, / Fever and pain and pale consumptive care, / Determined took their stand.”