With a thatched roof where the
daws nested in the belfry, and the children played and shouted
among the gravestones in the churchyard; in woods and green
and ploughed fields and the deep lanes - with him and his
fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding
their life and actions from day to day through all the
vicissitudes of the year.
The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic
literature, or to fill a gap; at all events from the point of
view of those who, born and living in distant parts of the
earth, still dream of the Old Home. This perhaps accounts for
the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of the
pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.
Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem
into the four seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an
invitation to the Muse: -
O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art,
Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.
But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction
of the Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I
imagine, Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble
mind and knew his limitations, and though he adopted the
artificial form of verse which prevailed down to his time he
was still able to be simple and natural.
"Spring" does not contain much of the best of his work, but
the opening is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos
in his apologetic description of himself, as Giles, the
farmer's boy.
Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes
Nor Science led me . . .
From meaner objects far my raptures flow . . .
Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew,
Delight from trifles, trifles ever new.
'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor,
Labour his portion . . .
His life was cheerful, constant servitude . . .
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, Nature was his book.
The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable
master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small
flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are
described, and the result left to the powers above:
Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
His tufted barley yellow with the sun.
While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to
do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows;
one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that
have been shot, for although -
Their danger well the wary plunderers know
And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
Will scatter death among them as they rise.
