Besides All This There Are
The Countless Shorter Poems, Each Conveying An Impression Of
Some Particular Scene Or Aspect Of
Nature; the poet of the
open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out
for picturesque "bits"
And atmospheric effects as a subject.
In Bloomfield we get something altogether different - a simple,
consistent, and fairly complete account of the country
people's toilsome life in a remote agricultural district in
England - a small rustic village set amid green and arable
fields, woods and common lands. 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 269 of 298
Words from 73885 to 74154
of 82198
