Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish novelist, historian, journalist, dramatist, poet and playwright.
The Deserted Village, a poem published in 1770 was his most popular writing.
The background to “The Deserted Village” is the radical changes to rural life that were occurring during the 18th century, notably as a result of the “enclosures” that were transforming the old pattern of subsistence farming into a system that would support a growing population, and especially one that was becoming increasingly concentrated in the towns and cities as the Industrial Revolution took hold.
The “Sweet Auburn” of Goldsmith’s poem seems to have been a combination of his own childhood village in Ireland (Lissoy in County Westmeath) and an English village of which Goldsmith had witnessed the destruction to make room for a landed estate.
It has been suggested that this was Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, which was re-located in the 1760s by Simon Harcourt, the 1st Earl Harcourt. However, the name “Auburn” was a genuine one, as there is a farmstead and lough of that name very close to Lissoy.
The poem is a long one, consisting of more than 400 lines of iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets.
(source - Goldsmith literary blog )
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed,
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!
How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made!
It idealises a rural way of life that was being destroyed by the displacement of agrarian villagers, changing of the old order to the new, the greed of landlords, and economic and political change.
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