Mary O'Malley is an award-winning poet, born and living in Ireland.
Ill Fares the Land
Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ was among the most quoted poems of my parents’ generation, when primary school children still learned poetry by rote and it seemed to do them no harm. My uncles or father would, usually with some irony, launch into the passage about the village schoolmaster, in particular the lines:
There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule / The village master taught his little school … putting particular relish into the lines about tracing the days disaster in his morning face and words of learned length and thundering sound; and ending with the refrain, usually joined in as at the rosary by anyone else around, And still they gazed and still the wonder grew / That one small head could carry all he knew.
I didn’t think much of the poem when I read it, having a particular dislike for its pastoral idyll, Auburn. I didn’t believe in happy peasants and I didn’t trust trees. Auburn was, I felt, bound to have trees. It also wasn’t an Irish village. In that, at least, I was correct. ‘Sweet Auburn’ was at worst a pastoral idyll, at best a composite of Lissoy, where Goldsmith was reared, and an English village of the Romantic type to be found, or imagined, in parts of England where the notion of ‘the countryside’ was taking root in the collective consciousness. A village in one country is not the same as in another, as any translator will testify.
The Village which exists in the poem with such compelling detail, which is one of its great strengths, an Irish child could imagine only imperfectly, much as when she imagined the accent in which Miss Stackpole spoke to the girls in her English Boarding School, when there was bound to be trouble with vowels. Ironically, with the Deserted Village, the child had no problem at all, since in the West of Ireland countryside she was never far from a ‘famine village’ and in this child’s mind that was how Auburn looked when the poet re-visited its ruins.
Yet even then I loved the music of those masterly couplets, the easy sway of the language that had so much in common with certain ballads in English popular in my mother’s time and which she sang at home, ostensibly to put a child to sleep.
I was recently drawn to re-read ‘The Deserted Village’ for the first time in about thirty years and was surprised at its timeliness. Drawn back to it by the lines:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
I had been looking at the numbers sleeping rough in Galway, City of Culture 2020, and Dublin, City of Everything Else, and trying to work out the formula whereby the State bodies responsible could divide those shelterless souls into the number of patients on trolleys - it seems multiply misery never multiplies - in every hospital in Ireland and come up with variations on the theme that ‘We are a great little country to do business in.’ Talk about alternative universes. Seemingly, we are on the up again, and
… trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose;
And every want to oppulence allied,
And every pang that folly pays to pride.
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| Oliver Goldsmith (studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds) © National Portrait Gallery, London |
Oliver Goldsmith attended Trinity College Dublin as a ‘sizar’. He had to wear the red cap that distinguished such students as having servant status. He did not get on with his tutor but got a BA and arrived in London at a time when the ‘Inclosure Acts’ were at their peak, privatising land and fencing commonage. These were still being enforced when John Clare wrote of the devastation that resulted for the poor, but with more accuracy and less nostalgia, half a century after Goldsmith. Enclosures had an ever greater effect in Ireland than in England, where it also led to impoverishment of the poor.
Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide
And ev’n the bare-worn common is denied.
Those lines are almost shockingly apt in an Ireland where the last of the commonage is being fenced in, often by stealth and without the consent of all those who hold rights to it in the latest state approved land grab.
They came to mind unbidden as I read of a plan to employ statutory powers to open the planning floodgates for the building of even more giant windmills in the name of green energy. This is the latest grantcatcher promoted by the State and the Minister for Green Grants and Several Other Things, who did not think to employ such an instrument to build social housing, nor did his colleague the Minister for Homelessness.
Areas of open ground that managed to escape the enclosure frenzy of the 1770’s and subsequent encroachments by the various classes of land hungry profiteers, usually because they were upland soil of poor quality, With blossomed furze unprofitably gay, are being surrounded by barbed wire fences studded with peculiar gateways.
The enclosing of common land stretches back to the Tudors and earlier but the ‘inclosure acts’ were at their peak when Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’, was published in 1770. Part poem, part political broadside, that is it is so fresh today is surprising, when we consider its elegaic tone, its undeniable flaws and its bucolic setting.
And the flaws are there, the dreadful spectacle of happy peasants, the virtues of poverty, the stylised evocation of poetry as a ‘charming nymph neglected and decried’ but reading the poem now I am struck by its detail, and the clear truth of best lines. Oliver Goldsmith, friend of Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson, member of The Club, hack writer and ‘the ugliest man in London’ according to a socialite of the time, stands to the right inside the gate of Trinity College Dublin. On the left of the gates is his friend Edmund Burke.
Last week I went to see him, and paused in front of the bronze statue, and recited in my mind the lines:
Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed:
In nature's simplest charms at first arrayed;
But verging to decline, its splendours rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprize;
While, scourged by famine from the smiling land,
The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms—a garden, and a grave.
Mary O’Malley
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Mary's eighth collection of poems, Playing the Octopus, was published by Carcanet Press in August 2016 and can be found here.
