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 repetitions, 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 circumstances 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 passages which
are admirable.
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