Have you read the poem? It's not a particularly obtuse work, especially when you remember to pronounce "ye" as it was intended: "the." It's almost certainly got a personal element to it (his mother scrimped and saved to put him through Eton), while simultaneously a more universal comment on the beauty of young people not knowing the troubles that long life brings. I don't think Gray would have bought into the snarkier interpretation that competes with the sentimental in the public consciousness, or at least that's not what he was hoping to evoke in the poem. After all, this is the guy who wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ("Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air."). When my man Tommy settled in to poetize, he wasn't fucking around; he wasn't some cosmic ingrate like Alexander Pope or Samuel Johnson.