Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round
Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale
Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale,
and so on for another dozen lines.[79]
Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting appear in “The Deserted Village,” almost the only example of the stereotyped phrase being in the line
These simple blessings of the lowly train
(l. 252).
Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual. In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon.
That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language, wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the “Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience,” which are concerned with natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines,
the starry floor