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 passages 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 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—