The Social Denounce in the Poetry of Sensibility

7/31/2019 The Social Denounce in the Poetry of Sensibility

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John Jaime Ossa Bentez.

BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGUEV.

Abraham- Curiel Department of Foreign Literature and Linguistics.

The social denounce in the poetry of sensibility

One of the facts that influenced English life from the late 18th century and from there on was the

burst of both Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) and Agricultural Revolution (coming to its end by the

late 19th century). Ordinary life changed and mostly in rural contexts. The English village was therefore

affected and transformed. This subject was not indifferent to English writers, who were to reflect on the

changes. As natural world was also of their regards, everything that had to do with the village -

understood as the countryside- became a special concern in written expressions. Some poets gave shape

to these changes and transformations by the way of exaltation but also denouncing what they witnessed

as a time of decay and abandon.

Oliver Goldsmiths The deserted village, James Thomsons Winter(from The Seasons), Thomas

Grays Elegy written in a country churchyardand George Crabbes The Village, are the works to be

considered here as sources of this portraying of the English Village. The issue that is going to keep us

busy here is that of the social denounce (the complaint) and the poetic lament on the vertiginous and at

times incomprehensible change of the rural scene.

The major poem of reference will be Goldsmiths The deserted village. It is considered a

pastoral style poem, a literary work that intends to portray rural life or the life of shepherds, especially

in an idealized or romantic form. Right from the beginning Oliver Goldsmith shows us this evocating

resemblance:

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,Where health and plenty cheerd the laboring swain,

Where smiling Spring its earliest visit paid,And parting Summers lingering blooms delayd (1-4).

The initial image of the village -which we want to put in evidence-, is that of the countryside as

a properly rural space. Goldsmith says here that it is healthy, cheerful, framed in the spring season,

creating an environment of joy (smiling in line 3) and of warm permanence by the lingering blooms

delayd (4). This is in fact, an idealized vision that the poet is portraying, but is, at the same time, the

appeal for a contrast between the idyllic view of rural life and the economic changing climate of the late

18th century England: the introduction of machinery in the fields, the monopoly of some landowners, the

profit that a more industrialized countryside might offer and, as an inevitable aftermath, the breaking of

rural traditions, of still life and peasants stability.


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To reinforce this necessary contrast, Goldsmith beings by highlighting the image of other

country or farm laborers and shepherds idolized in some other poems published earlier that century; and

by referencing the others who have immortalized this laboring swain (2), he underlines his perceived

value of the country life. This reference can alsobe seen in James Thomsons Winter: a poem, where healso speaks about the value of the spring season, being personified, and said to be the inspiration of the

farm labor:

Lookd out the joyous spring, lookd out and smild,

Thee too, inspirer of the toling Swain! (14-15).

There it appear again some synonym terms of what Goldsmith has expressed: joyous spring,

smild, recalling this country life as a welfare state of tranquility, reasonable cultivation and

inhabitants satisfaction in labor, despite the hard it could be. This is the situation of the common and

simple people, usually found in the country side, which is also represented in almost the final lines of

Thomas GraysElegy written in a country churchyard:

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,To meet the sun upon the upland lawn (XXV. 97-100).

Gray does also think so highly of the simple country folk, that he chooses an old-grey haired

farmer -who as he works in the fields occasions to see the poet protagonist walking about- to report the

poets death. The vision of the poet tends to a description of this countryside people, almost rescuing

their kindness and simplicity. They, to the poet, are those who witness sunrise, stand up early to meet

the day and set labors in course (see lines 97-98); those who try at most to seize the day (see line 100). It

can also be an idealized image but it is a portrait of rural faces as some kind of socio-cultural

expression.

Even though the life of the village has been portrayed in an idyllic way -and even being

industrialization and the introduction of new techniques, apparently beneficial to the development of the

agrarian scene-, it has to be acknowledged that a state of tension is taking place and the poets are also to

reflect it. Goldsmith shows that this is about the progressive decline of the simple and quiet country way

of life in the homes that have collapsed in ruin, neglected farmlands, and unattended gardens and yards:

Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,

And the long grass oertops the mouldering wall;

And, trembling, shrinking from the spoilers hand,

Far, far away thy children leave the land (47-50).

Gray, his turn, also says something on the matter:Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-trees shade

Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap (IV. 13-14).


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These lines mirror the affect over time of a cycle of decay and idleness. Terms like heaves and

mouldering are to express the picture of a land that is being parched and rendered practically sterile.

Crabbe also says at the beginning of his poem:

Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,

The rustic poet praised his native plains:No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,Their countrys beauty or their nymphs rehearse (II. 7-10).

Times are fled, the times of inspiration, when there was a land to sing or to write about but it

seems not to exist anymore; and also the shepherds are gone (No shepherds now). There is some kind

of Exodus of people, leaving their homeland and rendering it abandoned and solitary. They are

displaced either by some machinery or some whimsical desire of the new landowners. Gray backs up

that vision when he writes:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseenAnd waste its sweetness on the desert air (XIV. 55-56).

There are no witnesses or spectators of nature evolutions and expressions because they are

absent from their lands. When there is a scenario like this, it emerges the paradox between development

and stagnation, between progress and backing down, between industrialization and a rudimentary state

of manual execution. There was a promise of prosperity and modernization on one hand, but also the

fear of losing the value of the rural manifestation on the other. While some were longing to live in the

urban centers, some others were to prefer the shelter that the countryside was used to provide. The

question now was if it could still give those benefits. It seems not anymore. Goldsmith says about:

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,

Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;Amidst thy bowers the tyrants hand is seen,And desolation saddens all thy green (35-38).

The terms sweet smiling and loveliest, picture how the poet cherishes the village and shows

a sentiment of both care and nostalgia. The danger -we have already mentioned- turns now into a fear

that is portrayed in the images of charms withdrawn, the tyrants hand and desolation which give

a frame of solitude and emptiness. Goldsmith is thus presenting a situation of concern about how rural

life was menaced by the imminent intrusion of the already urban industrialized society into the

countryside, making peasantsas Gray has also stated-migrate to other places: thy sports are fled (36).

According to Trevor Rowleys book Villages in the landscape, in the 1760s Goldsmith

witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms, in order to clear land and

render it a wealthy mans garden. His Sweet Auburn -in line 1ofThe Deserted Village- was believed

to have been Nouneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire which Simon Hartcourt had demolished to make the

park for his Nuneham House (87). That visionfrom where Goldsmith has a true background- makes


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him insist on this issue, while expressing that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from

productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay (51-52).

The words used here refer this state of abuse on the land, firstly because of the expropriationeven by commercial and formal means (when buying it to peasants at a low cost: where wealth

accumulates), but secondly, by damaging the life of its workers and inhabitants when substituting

farms with gardens. The land cannot longer then be cultivated and therefore any source of job and food

supplies may also be dismissed, turning the state of ownership and support that peasants used to hold-

in a state of shortage, poverty and even misery:

But a bold peasantry, their countrys pride

When once destroyd, can never be supplied (Goldsmith 55-56).

Gray also pictures a frame of this situation when he writes:Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oftthe stubborn glebe has broke (VII. 25-26).

That was the initial state where the force of labor was to be seen and it could still transform the

agrarian scene into a productive and supplying terrain; but now appears another image with the

inevitable exhaustion of the countryside. He also writes some lines after:

Een from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

Een in our ashes live their wontedfires (XXIII. 91-92).

This concern was also on a still probable early monopoly economic system, at least in rural life,

which Goldsmith also denounces and laments in his poem:

One only master grasps the whole domain,

And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.

No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,

But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way (39-42).

Some portions of land were therefore acquired by just a few landowners who retained the

possibility of expansion and reasonable farming. One only master (39) appears instead of a

community that owns and labors the open and available country, as long as he grasps the whole

domain (39).

Crabbe is also aware of the situation. He writes with deep grief:

I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms

For him that grazes or for him that farms;

But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace

The poor laborious natives of the place,

And see the mid-day sun, with fervid ray,

On their bare heads and dewy temples playWhile some with feebler heads and fainter hearts,

Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts


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Ten shall I dare these real ills to hide

In tinsel trappings of poetic pride? (VI. 39-48).

Hard labor was something for granted in the countryside, but not that imposed by the new

conventions of oppressive and excessive ways of production. Terms as feebler and fainter speak

about this illness of depersonalization and loss of the dignity of human work; this picture cannot be

hidden although the poet thinks is hard to be expressed (see lines 47-48).

There is then a social reflection, as a real background to these poems. The way traveled so far

along these quoted lines, gives us a kind of final portrait composed by these several images of denounce

and complaint, which can be summarized in seven aspects:

Monopolization of the land. Rupture of rural lifestyle and traditions. Revolution on the concept of the countryside. Loss of human dignity and kindness (depersonalization). Decadence and idleness, mostly on the landscape, the farming territories and the resting

places.

Exile, exodus and the assumption of a new condition of inhabitants and workers. Individual possession rather than a sense of community, even keeping private property.

Collecting all of these images and aspects, it is evidenced that the poets denounce is mainly

concentrated on the deterioration of human condition, on the establishment of a way to work that is not

really worth while, on the violent transformation of the countryside and eventually on the hasty irruption

of the new means of production. This whole has generated a feeling of missing the ground of the origins

and the primal source of feeding: that is the rural scene. There is also a social gap that gains terrain,

creating a new social division, among the new landowners and the former ones who have become now

employees or workers in a minor state of possibilities. The poets will finally draw the an image that is

once more as a complaint, in order to reinforce the endeavored social reflection. The image of thefarewell or the image of death gives shape to their final stands.

Crabbe, in a more pronounced pessimistic sense, will remain in a feeling of nostalgia that will

only be solved when time passes by or a new memory as a denouncing voice- will be able to awake

some justice:

These fruitful fields, these numerous flocks I see,

Are others gain, but killing cares to me; ()A lonely, wretched man, in pain I go,

None need my help, and non relieve my woe;


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Then let my bones beneath the turf be laid,

And men forget the wretch they would not aid (XXIV. 216-217; 222-225).

Gray, writing precisely from a churchyard, covers with this same halo of vanishing the final

lines of his poem, in order to point at the human condition, that even in a condition of poverty, realizes

that its major wealth is not in the possession of a land but in the preservation of humanity:

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;

Heaven did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Misry all he had, a tear,

He gaind from Heaven, twas all he wishd, a friend (XXXI or The Epitaph, 121-124.Italics are

Grays).

And if beginning with Goldsmith it is also necessary to end out these considerations with his quote,

which plays the role of the complaint and synthesizes the poetic function of denouncement and the

denouncing force of poetry. Goldsmith, more optimistic in his conclusion, appeals precisely to this force

as a remaining voice that continues to give shape to that social reflection and also might help further

considerations:

And thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid

Still first to fly where sensual joys invade!

Unfit, in these degenerate times of shame,

To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame;()

Still let thy voice, prevailing over time,

Redress the rigours of thinclement clime;

Aid slighted Truth with thy persuasive strain;

Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;Teach him that states of native strength possesst,

Though very poor, may still be very blest;That Trades proud empire hastes to swift decay (407-410; 421-427).

Works cited

Crabbe, Georges. The Village. Abrams, M.H. (ed.). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th

Edition. Volume I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000: 2867-2874.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The deserted village. Abrams, M.H. (ed.). Abrams, M.H. (ed.). The Norton

Anthology of English Literature. 7th Edition. Volume I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

2000: 2858-2866.

Gray, Thomas. Elegy written from a country churchyard. Abrams, M.H. (ed.). The Norton Anthology

of English Literature. 7th

Edition. Volume I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000: 2830-

2833.

Rowley, Trevor. Villages in the landscape. London: J.M. Dent, 1978: 87-88

Thomson, James. Winter: a poem, from: The seasons. Abrams, M.H. (ed.). The Norton Anthology of

English Literature. 7th Edition. Volume I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000: 2822.

The Social Denounce in the Poetry of Sensibility

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