As Thomas Gray writes in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a poem I used to teach my high-school students: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

I especially loved the famous prefaces to classic books and the poetry — Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” rings in my ears still.

I thought of the Bible, but in the end decided poetry might be more soothing, so I brought an anthology from my room and read Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

The phrase subtly alludes to another meditation on unrealized genius, “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,” from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Forget Hamlet's soliloquies about this mortal coil of ours; forget Hieronymus Bosch's comic hellscapes; forget Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.