With one proud soar she burst her chain!”
—Blackwood’s Magazine, Sept. 1823.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD.
We have now to speak of a shoemaker-poet. The name of Robert Bloomfield, the author of the “Farmer’s Boy,” is known and held in honor wherever the English language is spoken. All classes of readers admire his poetry, although it is not of the highest order of merit. It has, however, a genuine quality which no one possessed of poetical taste can fail to recognize. Its chief features are delightful rustic simplicity and naturalness, faithful reflection of the beauties of nature, and the charms which belong to rural occupations. The romantic side of the life of a farmer’s boy is given in the poem bearing that name, as we have it nowhere else in all our poetic or prose literature.
Bloomfield, though surrounded by the most unfavorable conditions, as a writer of poetry seems to have experienced no difficulty in executing his task. His was indeed a case in which the adage is well illustrated—poeta nascitur non fit—a poet is born, not made. He was born with the gift of song. It would have been difficult for him to restrain its exercise. He made poetry, as the song-birds sing, by instinct and irresistible impulse. For him the words are quite as true as they are of the greater poet who wrote them,[30]
“I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing.”
Robert Bloomfield was born and brought up in the lovely neighborhood of Honington, Ixworth and Sapiston, in the northern part of the county of Suffolk. An idea of the quiet beauty of the woodland scenery of Suffolk may be obtained from the paintings of Gainsborough, another notable man whom this county has produced. Gainsborough, as a boy full of yearnings after art, loved to spend his time in the woods and pastures round Sudbury, sketching trees, brooks, meadow-landscapes, cattle, shepherds, or ploughmen at their work in the fields. He was at the height of his fame as a painter when Bloomfield was a farmer’s boy at Sapiston, on the Grafton estate. It is interesting to know that these two Suffolk men were contemporary, “the first truly original English painter,” who took his lessons direct from nature, and the first genuine poet of the English farm and field.
Bloomfield’s father was a tailor at Honington, near Bury St. Edmund’s. Robert was born in 1766. His father died at the end of the following year, leaving Robert and five other children to the care of their mother. She was a worthy, estimable woman, who managed by her own unaided efforts not only to maintain her little family, but to give each of her children the rudiments of an education. This she accomplished by opening a school, and teaching her own children along with the rest. With the exception of a few months’ instruction in writing from a schoolmaster at Ixworth, the future poet learned from his mother all he knew when he left his home to earn his own living. This he did at the age of eleven, his mother, who had married again, being no longer able to keep him at home, or put him to a good school. His maternal uncle, a Mr. Austin of Sapiston, agreed to take him as a boy about the farm, and allow him to live in the house with the rest of the family. He appears to have received no wages, his “board” being the only allowance made for the work he did as a farmer’s boy; and this could hardly be much at such an age. He remained in this situation four years, until he was fifteen. It was during these four years of boyhood he picked up the knowledge of farm-life, and made the observations on the varied phases of nature and the seasons which are delightfully interwoven in the four books of his well-known poem, “The Farmer’s Boy.” How observant he must have been, how eagerly he must have entered into the pleasures of rural life, how keen must have been his boyish sense of the beautiful and romantic, may be imagined by those who consider the circumstances in the midst of which, in after-years, he composed that charming poem.