Our poetry editor Ira Maine continues his series on Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” with the third part.
One of the important things to understand about this poem is the pace. The poet is remembering his home village, not only as it was in his youth, but how it will be when he comes to retire there. Villages in the 17th and 18th century, tucked well away in spectacularly beautiful parts of the countryside, hardly changed from one century to the next. The poem is written deliberately to match this unchanging pace and demonstrate the unhurried nature of village life.
I have chosen random lines and phrases here to show how the poet remembers his boyhood village. To get the full flavour of this account, a proper reading is essential.
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain…
Seats of my youth, where every sport could please…
How oft have I paused on every charm…
The cultivated farm…the brook…the busy mill…the decent church…
The seats beneath the shading hawthorn bush…the bashful virgin…the reproving matron…
The sport…the singing…the dancing…
Then quite suddenly,the poet introduces a darker, less Elysian, much more forbidding tone.
But now the sound of population fail,
No chearful murmurs fluctuate in the gale,
No busy steps the grass-grown foot-way tread,
But all the bloomy flush of life is fled.
All but yon widowed, solitary thing,
That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;
She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,
To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,
To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn,
To seek her nightly shed, and weep til morn;
What on earth has happened here? Who is this ‘matron’, this ‘..widowed, solitary thing…’ forced to sustain herself by her wits, by scavenging, in the ruins of what had been a thriving village?
In the wake of whatever calamity consumed the village, she appears to be, on the surface just another penniless casualty of that calamity. On the other hand, I suspect the poet intended much more for her. The matron is surely intended to represent the spirit, the very essence of the village itself, and her paupered condition, her ruined circumstances, reflects exactly the present state of that village.
The village of Auburn has ceased to exist. The animals, the barking dogs, the blacksmith, the wood-men, the farmers, the geese, the women and children, the barber, everyone, all gone.
There was no famine to kill them, no plague, and no war. At least not in England. There was however, the American War of Independence, which was followed closely enough by the Napoleonic Wars. Soldiers needed bread and the demand for flour was insatiable.
Land in England, as little as 200 years ago, did not belong to anyone. The idea of ‘owning land’ simply didn’t exist. You couldn’t buy it and you couldn’t sell it. However, industrial cities were growing and their workforces needed food. Enterprising industrialists, like the famous Coke of Norfolk, seeing an opportunity, took wire and fence posts and enclosed thousands of acres of land to grow wheat. These ‘Enclosures’, when they enclosed villages, gave the encloser the right to consider the inhabitants of these villages as his property! He could then demand a percentage of every scrap they produced!
The government of the time consisted of the King and a few of his aristocratic cronies. The King essentially didn’t care what industrialists got up to as long as he got a cut. Landowning, not industry, was the mark of a man, and peasants didn’t matter. So when the same Coke of Norfolk in the 18th century, infected as he was with the fashionable notion of a Great House, needed not just a stately home, but hundreds of acres of well manicured ‘grounds’ to boot, he enlisted one Joseph Paxton who promptly littered the place with hunting lodges, fountains, parterres,and lakes, not to mention statuary, waterfalls and spectacular ‘vistas’.
If you allow for the fact that these vast land enclosures were like small countries then you will understand why the great ‘landscapers’ of the period, Joseph Paxton and ‘Capability’ Brown amongst others, much more than occasionally found villages, hamlets and whole towns inconveniently situated amidst their grand plans. Now and then, a little compensation was offered. Sometimes a whole new village was built and the people moved en masse. Much more often the peasantry were simply driven both out of their homes and off the land then left to fend for themselves. Their houses were pulled down to stop them coming back. This is why to this day we have people on the roads in Europe called “tinkers’ or the ‘travelling people’, as distinct from gypsies or Romany, who took up this peripatetic existence as a result of the notorious ‘Enclosure Acts’ or later, in the 19th century, because of famine. Enclosure drove people off the land and into the industrial cities, where so many of them died of disease it became a national scandal. Thousands more died en route to Canada, America and Australia on what were referred to as “coffin ships’. The usual ever present exploiters dispatched their desperate passengers on overcrowded, unseaworthy vessels. Some of the vessels simply sank, drowning everybody, while others made it to their destinations, overloaded and weeks behind schedule, with no food left, disease conditions rife, and many passengers already consigned to the sea.
I feel we might stop here. Nothing I’ve said is untrue. Every example of callous exploitation I’ve used here may be verified.
Oliver Goldsmith was appalled that the wholesale destruction of an entire, wholly self-sufficient country way of life was allowed, indeed encouraged, in order that a handful of men could become fabulously rich. This was at the expense of almost the entire rural population of the British Isles.
Is it any wonder that the workers who remained fought for over a hundred years thereafter to be allowed form unions? To form societies to protect themselves against this band of murderous curs?
I shall continue next week when my equanimityis restored. In the meantime,beware; these same murderous curs are with us still.
Ira Maine, Poetry Editor.