An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize

An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize is a short comic poem by Oliver Goldsmith, written in the same comic elegy mode as his more famous Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. The poem belongs to Goldsmith’s body of shorter verse and shares the deadpan ironic technique that made the Mad Dog elegy one of the most enduring English comic poems.

The poem mourns the death of Mrs. Mary Blaize, a respectable London woman whose various virtues are catalogued across the stanzas in the standard elegiac mode. Goldsmith builds the mock-eulogy carefully through the conventional formulas. Mrs. Blaize was generous to the poor. She gave loans to her neighbors. She kept her household in good order. She was friendly to all. The stanzas pile up the standard virtues of a respectable English woman of her time and station.

The comic deflation lies in the small qualifying details that Goldsmith inserts into each stanza. Mrs. Blaize gave loans, but on terms that always benefited her. She was friendly to all who paid their debts. She kept her household well, but never lent her wedding ring. The cumulative effect is to leave the reader with a portrait of a thoroughly self-interested woman whose various respectable virtues turn out to have always served her own advantage rather than the broader good they appeared to represent.

The technique is one Goldsmith handled with particular skill. The mock elegy form had been used in earlier English comic verse including various pieces by Swift and Pope, but Goldsmith’s particular contribution was the gentle quality of the deflation. Mrs. Blaize is not denounced as a hypocrite or attacked as a fraud. She is simply observed accurately enough that her actual character emerges through the conventional praise.

The poem appeared in various editions across Goldsmith’s lifetime and has remained in standard English poetry anthologies. It pairs with the Mad Dog elegy as a matched pair of comic poems from the same author working in the same mode. For readers interested in eighteenth-century English comic verse, Goldsmith’s elegies are essential.

The poem is short, eight stanzas, and reads in three minutes. It pairs with Goldsmith’s other work and with the broader eighteenth-century English comic verse tradition.