Epitaphic Cash Flow in Gray and Wordsworth 73a-systemic and an-economic.7 In a ystem�like that, the money you can spend is always money to be earned later on, therefore any payment is an expenditure for the account of the future. As the epitaph tells us, the visitor indeed has no capital to invest, except his tribute. His ounty�consists solely in his abundant attentiveness, but even that is something that he hopes to be attributed to him in death. Since all his payments (of attention) go to the debit of what is to come, he is spending in fact what he does not have.8 In order to conceal the absurdity of its own operation and preserve at least the illusion of being a system, this conomy�has to appeal to an external authority that may guarantee the continuity of payments, the flow or iquidity�of the currency of attention. As the poem makes it clear, the credibility of the debtors, and thus the repayment of all debts, is sustained by eav� a divine power whose function is that of the modern state, namely to serve as an external insurance for the operation of the system. This heavenly economy creates the illusion of permanence, whereby the tripartite process of transactions (between the dead, the living and the unborn) may appear to occur between two parties (between man and God), and thus may seem to form a closed system. This illusion may make us believe in the future repayment of all payments, and lay trust in what Schor has aptly termed oral liquidity�(1993: 39). But since the illusion of this permanence is produced by the figurative manoeuvres analysed above, there is little hope that it can ever attain the status of an autonomous and absolute guarantee. In order to pursue this line of investigation, and further examine the relations between British epitaphic and economic thought, let us now turn to one of Gray most enthusiastic readers, William Wordsworth, and see what his poetry and prose may add to this topic. I will examine three texts: his poem Tintern Abbey, his Essays upon Epitaphs, and Book VII of The Prelude.Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth)As for Wordsworth lyrical poetry, the most obvious parallel to all that has been said of Gray Elegy would probably be Tintern Abbey (1798), where one may find similar speculative displacements, this time not in the ghostly scenery of a cemetery but in the equally ghostly setting of a natural landscape. Geoffrey Hartman remark about general convergence of elegiac and nature poetry in the eighteenth century�(Hartman, 1987: 33), might be a good starting point in this transition from Gray to Wordsworth. Hartman gives an accurate description of the latter
