We Have It From The Inside By
One Who Had Part In It, Born And Bred To The Humble Life
He
described; and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day
record - photographed as we may say
- With all the minute
unessential details and repetitions, but as it appeared when
looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in memory, the
sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's
mind standing vividly out. Of this lowly poem it may be truly
said that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use
the phrase invented by Wordsworth when he attempted a
definition of poetry generally and signally failed, as
Coleridge demonstrated.
It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life - that he
was a farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows,
feed the pigs, and forty things besides, and that later, when
learning the shoemaker's trade in a London garret, he put
these memories together and made them into a poem - are wholly
beside the question when we come to judge the work as
literature. A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his
own day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in
the end his work must be tried by the same standards applied
in other and in all cases.
There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to
endeavour to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is
not altogether bad, but contains many lines that glow with
beautiful poetic feeling, and many descriptive passages which
are admirable. Furthermore, I will venture to say that
despite the feebleness of a large part of the work (as poetry)
it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its
unique character. It may be that I am the only person in
England able to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in
which it first came to my notice, and the critical reader can,
if he thinks proper, discount what I am now saying as mere
personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in a distant
region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I
could find relating to country scenes and life in England
- the land of my desire - I was never able to get an extended
and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in
human and animal life in its relation to nature. It was all
broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes,
vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but
unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural
subjects hanging on the walls of a room. Even the Seasons
failed to supply this want, since Thomson in his great work is
of no place and abides nowhere, but ranges on eagle's wings
over the entire land, and, for the matter of that, over the
whole globe. But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy.
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