-
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.
'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about
the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded
than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their
hands. It was for him to shift the dead from place to place,
to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings.
Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be
guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round
to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach
of hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning,
he would take his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks
to "fields remote from home" to redistribute his dead birds,
then to fetch the cows, and here we have an example of his
close naturalist-like observation in his account of the
leading cow, the one who coming and going on all occasions is
allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by many a
broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its
work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and
luxury of the over-populous capital which drains the whole
country-side of all produce, which makes the Suffolk
dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving nothing but the
"three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local
consumption. What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a
post, which turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in
despair into the hog-trough, where
It rests in perfect spite,
Too big to swallow and too hard to bite!
We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and
here there is more evidence of his observant eye when he
describes the character of the animals, also in what follows
about the young lambs, which forms the best passage in this
part. I remember that, when first reading it, being then
little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid
beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging
each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a
mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort
of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I
used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand
sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch
the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight! I
cannot but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such
pictures as these does or should count for something in
considering his work. He concludes:-
Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb,
Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme,
Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain;
A bird, a leaf, will set them off again;
Or if a gale with strength unusual blow,
Scattering the wild-briar roses into snow,
Their little limbs increasing efforts try,
Like a torn rose the fair assemblage fly.
This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds
him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives - his
white-fleeced little fellow-mortals. He sees the murdering
butcher coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock;
he cannot suppress a cry of grief and indignation - he can only
strive to shut out the shocking image from his soul!
"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a
prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a
rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view
than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when
he attempts wide prospects and large effects. He is at his
best only when describing scenes and incidents at the farm in
which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when, after
the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the
small birds from the ripening corn:
