KILKENNY WEST CHURCH
(R. H. Newell)
[The hawthorn bush.] The Rev. Annesley Strean, Henry Goldsmith’s successor at Kilkenny West, well remembered the hawthorn bush in front of the village ale-house. It had originally three trunks; but when he wrote in 1807 only one remained, ‘the other two having been cut, from time to time, by persons carrying pieces of it away to be made into toys, etc., in honour of the bard, and of the celebrity of his poem.’ (Essay on Light Reading, by the Rev. Edward Mangin, M.A., 1808, 142–3.) Its remains were enclosed by a Captain Hogan previously to 1819; but nevertheless when Prior visited the place in 1830, nothing was apparent but ‘a very tender shoot [which] had again forced its way to the surface.’ (Prior, Life, 1837, ii. 264.) An engraving of the tree by S. Alken, from a sketch made in 1806–9, is to be found at p. 41 of Goldsmith’s Poetical Works, R. H. Newell’s edition, 1811, and is reproduced in the present volume.
HAWTHORN TREE
(R. H. Newell)
[How often have I bless’d the coming day.] Prior, Life, 1837, ii. 261, finds in this an allusion ‘to the Sundays or numerous holidays, usually kept in Roman Catholic countries.’
[Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen.] Strean’s explanation (Mangin, ut supra, pp. 140–1) of this is as follows:—‘The poem of The Deserted Village, took its origin from the circumstance of general Robert Napper [Napier or Naper], (the grandfather of the gentleman who now [1807] lives in the house, within half a mile of Lissoy, and built by the general) having purchased an extensive tract of the country surrounding Lissoy, or Auburn; in consequence of which many families, here called cottiers, were removed, to make room for the intended improvements of what was now to become the wide domain of a rich man, warm with the idea of changing the face of his new acquisition; and were forced, “with fainting steps,” to go in search of “torrid tracts” and “distant climes.”’
Prior (Life, 1837, i. 40–3) points out that Goldsmith was not the first to give poetical expression to the wrongs of the dispossessed Irish peasantry; and he quotes a long extract from the Works (1741) of a Westmeath poet, Lawrence Whyte, which contains such passages as these:—
Their native soil were forced to quit,
So Irish landlords thought it fit;
Who without ceremony or rout,
For their improvements turn’d them out ...
How many villages they razed,
How many parishes laid waste ...
Whole colonies, to shun the fate
Of being oppress’d at such a rate,
By tyrants who still raise their rent,
Sail’d to the Western Continent.
[The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest]. ‘Of all those sounds,’ says Goldsmith, speaking of the cries of waterfowl, ‘there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern.’ . . . ‘I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird’s note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event; and generally found or made one to succeed it.’ (Animated Nature, 1774, vi. 1–2, 4.)