Speaker Point of View

Who is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

The speaker of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a thoughtful, pensive guy. He likes to be alone. At night. In graveyards. So that he can think about death. Good times. But you know the type, right? You might find someone like this speaker in your local coffee shop, wearing all black and maybe just a tad too much eye makeup, reading Camus or Sartre and thinking deep, deep thoughts.
But there's more to this speaker than his arguably morbid tendency to hang out in graveyards. He wants to make sure that we all remember the lives of people who lived before us, even the lives of simple, country folks like the ones buried in the churchyard where the poem takes place. He wants to be conscious of the way that he himself will be remembered after he's dead and gone, and that means thinking carefully about how other people see him now.
Sure, this might seem morbid, but the speaker seems to want to set himself apart from the kind of rich, snobby people who just care about erecting huge monuments and mausoleums in their own honor after they die. Instead, he wants to leave something less concrete behind him in the memories of the people that he cares about.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Setting

Where It All Goes Down

Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" takes place—you guessed it—in a country churchyard. And that means that it was written among all the gravestones of the dead members of that church. It's shaded by elm and yew trees, and there's an owl hooting in the background. Spooky, right?
But it's not supposed to be a spooky poem—this isn't about dead people coming back to haunt the living, it's about how the living remember the dead. And as the speaker imagines what these dead people's lives were like, the setting of the poem shifts—the speaker imagines their everyday lives in their country cottages. Most of these people were farmers, so he imagines them plowing their fields, and coming home to their wives and children at night.
But then the speaker imagines what people will say about him, when he dies, and the setting of the poem shifts again. Now we're in the shoes of some passerby who happens to see the name of the poet on a gravestone, and happens to ask someone what he was like. The speaker imagines that he'll be remembered mostly as a thoughtful guy who loved nature, who was often seen lost in thought under a tree or by the creek.
So, in spite of the poem's title, the setting really isn't creepytown. The emphasis is on the average, everyday, simple "country" part of the setting. There are lots of trees, and creeks, and farms, and no ghosts in the graveyard at all—unless you count the memories of the past that we all carry with us.