ENGLISH 3EC3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Public Execution, The World Academy Of Sciences, Pillory
21 Nov 2017
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These metaphors for the villagers is a condemnation of this inequality yet also a naturalization. He shows his privilege by getting an epitaph. Everyone when they are dead needs someone to mourn for them (cid:498)unlettered(cid:499) people do not have a written footprint and thusly do not exist. His sense of what inequality is-> it is an inequality of being unseen. He himself is lettered as he went to cambridge. We are privileged as we can read his poem. The (cid:498)you(cid:499) at the end is deliberately unclear. Gray wants to be remembered, but says he doesn(cid:495)t. Yet who gets recorded in history depends on their caste. We are privileged that we can read this and he is privileged to have an epitaph. It is through language that he is memorialized. It is about the fortune of class and identity. Here rests his head upon the lap of earth.
