Afoot in England Part 12

After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow in that delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by the discovery of yet another poem of rural England--the Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to like it, for although I did not know anything about the author's early life, the few pa.s.sages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's and other old natural history compilations had given me a strong desire to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it--this quiet description in verse of a green spot in England, my spiritual country which so far as I knew I was never destined to see; and that I continue to like it is, as I have said, the reason of my being in this place.

While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am at the same time convinced that this is not the sole reason for my regard.

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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sably 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 repet.i.tions, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sages 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. 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 n.o.ble 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 st.u.r.dy 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 att.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.semblage 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:

There thousands in a flock, for ever gay, Loud chirping sparrows welcome on the day, And from the mazes of the leafy thorn Drop one by one upon the bending corn.

Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life that swarms about him:

The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a s.p.a.cious plain!

Then higher still by countless steps conveyed, He gains the summit of a shivering blade, And flirts his filmy wings and looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground.

It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his vision is called to the springing lark:

Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings, And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings; Still louder breathes, and in the face of day Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.

Close to his eye his hat he instant bends And forms a friendly telescope that lends Just aid enough to dull the glaring light And place the wandering bird before his sight, That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along; Lost for a while yet pours a varied song; The eye still follows and the cloud moves by, Again he stretches up the clear blue sky, His form, his motions, undistinguished quite, Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.

In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his poles and starts again brushing round.

Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit

Confess the presence of a pretty face.

She is very rustic herself in her appearance:--

Her hat awry, divested of her gown, Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown: Invidious barrier! why art thou so high, When the slight covering of her neck slips by, Then half revealing to the eager sight Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?

The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land; not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails, against which he protests in this place when describing the summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but welcomed them, receiving the a.s.saults as caresses, and stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

"Autumn" opens bravely:

Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods, The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods Invite my song.

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a delightful picture which must be given in full:--

No more the fields with scattered grain supply The restless tenants of the sty; From oak to oak they run with eager haste, And wrangling share the first delicious taste Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground.

It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave: Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave; The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young, Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among, Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round, Where last year's mould'ring leaves bestrew the ground, And o'er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls, Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls; Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool, The wild duck's lonely haunt, whose jealous eye Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly, On the calm bosom of her little lake, Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake; And as the bold intruders press around, At once she starts and rises with a bound; With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear, And ludicrously wild and winged with fear, The herd decamp with more than swinish speed, And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed; Through tangled thickets headlong on they go, Then stop and listen for their fancied foe; The hindmost still the growing panic spreads, Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds, Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap; Yet glorying in their fortunate escape, Their groundless terrors by degrees soon cease, And Night's dark reign restores their peace.

For now the gale subsides, and from each bough The roosting pheasant's short but frequent crow Invites to rest, and huddling side by side The herd in closest ambush seek to hide; Seek some warm slope with s.h.a.gged moss o'erspread, Dried leaves their copious covering and their bed.

In vain may Giles, through gathering glooms that fall, And solemn silence, urge his piercing call; Whole days and nights they tarry 'midst their store, Nor quit the woods till oaks can yield no more.

It is a delightful pa.s.sage to one that knows a pig--the animal we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for example its liability to lose its head. Thousands of years of comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran. Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be thrown off his balance.

Pa.s.sing over other scenes, about one hundred and fifty lines, we come to the second notable pa.s.sage, when after the sowing of the winter wheat, poor Giles once more takes up his old occupation of rook-scaring. It is now as in spring and summer--

Keen blows the blast and ceaseless rain descends; The half-stripped hedge a sorry shelter lends,

and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its construction.

In some sequestered nook, embanked around, Sods for its walls and straw in burdens bound; Dried fuel h.o.a.rded is his richest store, And circling smoke obscures his little door; Whence creeping forth to duty's call he yields, And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields.

On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose, A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows; Where cl.u.s.t'ring sloes in glossy order rise, He crops the loaded branch, a c.u.mbrous prize; And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests, Placing green sods to seat the coming guests; His guests by promise; playmates young and gay; But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away!

He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain, Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain His fairy revels are exchanged for rage, His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage, The field becomes his prison, till on high Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trivial restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an infinitely greater one. Look, he says--