<P> An obvious distinction can be made between imitations meant to stand as independent works within the elegiac genre, not all of which followed Gray's wording closely, and those with a humorous or satirical purpose . The latter filled the columns in newspapers and comic magazines for the next century and a half . In 1884 some eighty of them were quoted in full or in part in Walter Hamilton's Parodies of the works of English and American authors (London 1884), more than those of any other work and further evidence of the poem's abiding influence . One example uncollected there was the ingenious double parody of J.C. Squire, "If Gray had had to write his Elegy in the Cemetery of Spoon River instead of in that of Stoke Poges". This was an example of how later parodies shifted their critical aim, in this case "explicitly calling attention to the formal and thematic ties which connected the 18th century work with its 20th century derivation" in Edgar Lee Masters' work . Ambrose Bierce used parody of the poem for the same critical purpose in his definition of "Elegy" in The Devil's Dictionary, ending with the dismissive lines </P> <P> The wise man homeward plods; I only stay To fiddle - faddle in a minor key . </P> <P> While parody sometimes served as a special kind of translation, some translations returned the compliment by providing a parodic version of the Elegy in their endeavour to accord to the current poetic style in the host language . An extreme example was provided by the classicised French imitation by the Latin scholar John Roberts in 1875 . In place of the plain English of Gray's "And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave", he substituted the Parnassian Tous les dons de Plutus, tous les dons de Cythère (All the gifts of Plutus and of Cytherea) and kept this up throughout the poem in a performance that its English reviewer noted as bearing only the thinnest relation to the original . </P> <P> The latest database of translations of the Elegy, amongst which the above version figures, records over 260 in some forty languages . As well as the principal European languages and some of the minor such as Welsh, Breton and Icelandic, they include several in Asian languages as well . Through the medium of these, Romanticism was brought to the host literatures in Europe . In Asia they provided an alternative to tradition - bound native approaches and were identified as an avenue to modernism . Study of the translations, and especially those produced soon after the poem was written, has highlighted some of the difficulties that the text presents . These include ambiguities of word order and the fact that certain languages do not allow the understated way in which Gray indicates that the poem is a personalised statement in the final line of the first stanza, "And leaves the world to darkness and to me". </P>

Thomas gray's poem elegy written in a country churchyard summary lines