"Th' applause of list'ning senates to command, . . ." (Diagramming Thomas Gray)

[Holmes]

Greetings,

I realize that not many people here do Reed-Kellogg diagramming, so please forgive me for posting this complicated diagram. The diagram is for the sentence spanning stanzas 16 through 18 of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":

"Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame."

This is the hardest Reed-Kellogg diagram I have ever attempted, and I'd like to make sure that I have gotten it right. Even if you don't know how to read the diagram in detail, there are probably certain aspects of parallelism, etc., which will pop out at you. I am nervously aware that certain aspects of the diagram are debatable.

I understand there to be four coordinated predicates for the main-clause subject, "their lot": "forbade . . . nor circumscribed . . . but confined . . . forbade . . ." Also, I believe that the ending of the sentence ("the struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide . . .") is an infinitival absolute construction (cf. "They will fly out this morning, the rest of the family to follow shortly").

I am not expecting a reply here, but would be delighted to get one. This is a very convoluted sentence, in which there are frontings galore. Let those who scoff at Reed-Kellogg diagrams consider this diagram as an example of how such diagrams can deal with parsing a complicated grammatical macrocosm, for which doing a syntax tree would be borderline insane.

 

[Holmes]

UPDATE: I presented this diagram at a Facebook group devoted to sentence diagramming and received an interesting proposal for the third stanza of the quotation, that its phrases should perhaps be parsed as being coordinated with the first infinitival object clause of the second "forbade," the direct objects inside the infinitival clause being fronted "as usual" (well, in Thomas Gray ).

I like the proposal and have revised my diagram accordingly, doing away with the "infinitival absolute construction," which felt forced to me. Instead of replacing my diagram in my opening post, I am presenting the following diagram as an alternative, one which I like better and find prettier (the diagram seems to me to resemble a flower or a torch). It's amusing to note that, grammatically, this is a "simple sentence"!