I Take It That The Farmer's Boy Is Poetry, Not Merely
Slightly Poetized Prose In The Form Of Verse, Although It Is
Undoubtedly Poetry Of A Very Humble Order.
Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher
qualities of the poet - imagination and passion.
The lower
kind of inspiration is, in fact, often better suited to such
themes and shows nature by the common light of day, as it
were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of lightning
flashes. Even among those who confine themselves to this
lower plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is
constantly sinking and flickering out. But at intervals it
burns up again and redeems the work from being wholly
commonplace and trivial. He is, in fact, no better than many
another small poet who has been devoured by Time since his
day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back.
It is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose
fame was brief would in their day have deeply resented being
placed on a level with the Suffolk peasant-poet. In spite of
all this, and of the impossibility of saving most of the verse
which is only passably good from oblivion, I still think the
Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one, but
chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.
There is no lack of rural poetry - the Seasons to begin with
and much Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a
general way; then we have innumerable detached descriptions of
actual scenes, such as we find scattered throughout Cowper's
Task, and numberless other works. 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. 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. I
visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was
with him from morn till eve always in that same green country
with the same sky, cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic
village, at the small church 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.
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