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PUBLISHED DATE: - 30-07-2024
DOI: -
https://doi.org/10.37547/tajssei/Volume06Issue07-17
PAGE NO.: - 155-161
THE DESERTED VILLAGE BY OLIVER
GOLDSMITH: NOSTALGIA AND MEMORIES
OF THE PAST
Zaki Mahsen Abeid Ali
Ministry Of Education, Najaf Governorate Education, Iraq
INTRODUCTION
This paper concentrates on the theme of nostalgia
and memories of the past as they are reflected in
Oliver Goldsmith’s blank
-verse poem The Deserted
Village (1770). The work has consequently been
referred to as 'the second most frequently quoted'
in the English language. The importance of
Goldsmith’s setting is justified by critic Frederick
Kipp stating readers 'return to it again and again',
even offering that rapid shifts in historical opinion
and judgment possess the power to make those
revisiting rural Auburn suitable for a more recent
set of critical perspectives, justifying its continued
study at such intervals across the span of time
(Slemon, 2007).
The poem locates for us a village in Ireland and
transposes it from a poverty-stricken, beautiful,
pre-Enclosure location to a violent and ugly one.
The village falls victim to the 'clearing' era
described by Scottish historian Thomas Sowell as
one of depopulation, leading the characters of farm
leaders Mr. Primrose and his son George early and
late in the novel, respectively, to 'prognosticate'
the extinction of such settlements. Thus, the
poem’s rural ideal represents 'the simple life' at
which it glances away from various corruptions
that still make their obscure marks upon its fabric.
Goldsmith’s continued depiction of society as vast
primitivist Arcadia argues for enough of a
corresponding perspective in history as acquired
by perception. Displacement along a mere
temporal sphere scarcely accounts for such
compassion for everyday life. (Zimny, 2013) Such
distance from Auburn and our present day’s
concrete agendas, I argue, can be seen as ranging
through various historical periods. Given that
Goldsmith wrote 'The Deserted Village' in 1840
–
the threshold of the modern age, following Giedion
–
we can see such melancholic mourning as still
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Abstract
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relevant within our accelerated time of computers
and planetary consumer capitalism.
1.1. Background of Oliver Goldsmith and 'The
Deserted Village'
Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish poet,
playwright, essayist, and novelist whose work may
be seen as representative of the classical tradition
in English literature. Influenced by the French
essayists, Goldsmith grants prime importance to
the depiction of life as it is and to the discovery of
underlying meaning behind common practices.
(Sridharan, 1999) His almost exclusive focus on
human life in realistic settings has led to the
publication of many important works, including
the novel "The Vicar of Wakefield," which is a
significant work that has enjoyed lasting success
with readers of English literature. Goldsmith's
works have been praised for their honest
depictions of life and for the rich, vivid, and elegant
prose he employs. Born in County Longford,
Ireland, in 1730, Goldsmith died in London,
England, in 1774. Though he lived most of his life
in England, Goldsmith never became a naturalized
English citizen, and he always remembered his
native Ireland with affection.
"The Deserted Village" was written between 1764
and 1770; the poem was published on May 26,
1770. The poem was inspired by the visit which
Goldsmith made to his young brother, Henry, who
resided in the village of Athlone. Though Goldsmith
was urged to cut down the initial version of the
poem, he eventually published it in the longer 430-
line edition. (Powell, 2018) He added the "Preface"
to the second version, which made it clear that the
treatment of contemporary social issues was not
intended as an allegory, a figure of speech with a
non-apparent meaning, and strongly opposed
those who accused him of the same. Goldsmith also
included the "Dedications" to two important
figures at the end of his poem: Sir Joshua Reynolds
and Dr. Thomas Bernard. Goldsmith was not quite
happy with the last two verses of the second
version of the poem.
1.2. Definition and Significance of Nostalgia in
Literature
Texts where nostalgia is a main theme always
possess a charm that conquers the readers'
interest and allows them to unleash their
creativity. Nonetheless, the concept of nostalgia is
essential, even though the fascination for the
concept has diminished. Some argued that in
recent years, nostalgia regained its former vigor as
a general consensus in various fields emerged.
Nostalgia has a powerful effect on people, as it
often leads to inconsistent emotions. Moreover, it
encourages the active participation of the reader.
(Oliver, 1996) Without his personal idea of the
past, the tale of yore loses its substance. Thus, the
narrative reaches its primary purpose, that of
infusing emotions and changing mentalities.
Therefore, mankind becomes ready to move on,
leaving behind experiences that are no longer
valid. The observers of the past help the world
assess what is relevant and, thus, decide what
cultural remains are to be inherited. In the end, the
power to reach the universal is still solely in the
author's hands.
In literature, nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for
the things of the past. Without the sweet and sour
taste of the past, writing would be fragile and
would not transmit any emotions. The philosophy
of such a sentimental movement's mindset aimed
to bestow their readers the right stimulus in order
to reawaken the memories of a bygone era.
Consequently, different sorts of feelings were
delivered to the broad masses. Oliver Goldsmith's
poem, "The Deserted Village," was one of the most
delightful deliveries of such a portrait. His poem
recalls many of the features that are vividly
presented in some of the best eighteenth-century
nostalgia poems. (Fulmer, 1993) A tour through
Ireland would confirm many of the features of 'The
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Deserted Village' and other such popular English
nostalgia poems. This particular volume of
nostalgic poetry was genre-bending, as unlike the
more traditional forms of self-indulgence used in
such poems, these poems portrayed a setting
rather than poetical inspirations upon which to
sentimentally reflect, and thus, were sometimes
not taken seriously.
2. Literary Analysis of 'The Deserted Village'
‘The Deserted Village’ by Oliver Goldsmith is
known for its theme of nostalgia and memories of
the past. The poem slightly surprises in style, not
only because of its personal, affectionate, and
sympathetic tone, but also because while it lauds
the old, it is neither severely satirical nor openly
critical of the present day times of its composition.
The Deserted Village is really a poetic form of the
scholarly prose essays of Steele, Johnson, Burke,
and Goldsmith, or the chapters on village life in
Richardson’s Clarissa H
arlowe. The poem talks of
two villages: one the poet has seen in his childhood
(a description of it), and the other as the poet saw
it when he grew older. The former type is
symbolized in the village of Nesof, which has been
called by some Derry. In the second village
depicted in the poem, the poet praises the charm of
a village which had been destroyed by the
upgrading of the Heathcote family.
The Deserted Village is representative of the
school of poetry that celebrates the beauty of
yesteryears in simple and unsophisticated
manners. It deliberately invokes simple feelings
and pleasures and the simplicity of our country life
associated with the poet’s joys in the lap of nature.
(Bartner, 2020) It is symbolic of that unique
beauty and charm, which can be felt in memory
and in memories. The poet soothes his dreamy
mind by the remembrance of the idyllic peace and
happiness of old days, of the vision of standing
grain waving in the wind, of the evening time, and
the landmarks of the village.
2.1. Themes of Nostalgia and Memories
Dr. Johnson said in the preface to Lycidas, "He that
has once admired the task of untwisting the
involved sentences and finding the scattered
members heaping together and those that are
disjoined dispersing, may she be reminded how
many mortals he has outlasted, and how many he
shall outlast." Goldsmith addresses such readers -
readers who make of the poem a "silent, wandering
doomsday." Certainly, The Deserted Village has
been received warmly by readers of all ages for
almost two centuries, since it was first published in
1770. Critics, Goldsmith has invited readers to
share in his sadness, as he detours the present and
ponders on the past. In this poem, we find "what
pleasure lives in the detail of reminiscence and
what pain." As F. J. Easteray has noted, nostalgia
and memories of an almost fantastic past
constitute the themes around which the poem is
woven.
Readers that to be pathetic, the present of his
people is far removed from the past; in a sense,
Goldsmith was not so much editorializing on the
reality of the rural scene in Ireland or England, the
two countries of his loyalty, but was corporatizing
on the reality of the human mind in a private way,
no matter how the poet who the readers in the
actual announced his desire to render an accurate
rural history just as he saw that, in so doing it,
would bear some social relevance. (Al-Onizi, 2012)
Emotional. The emotional aspect of such an act is
not surprising; the celebrated description of the
hamlet in decay sits here in a rhetoric of yearning,
one exhorted by the trope of memory: "thus, as told
of yore, the way to life," And such is largely the way
that "The Deserted Village" is read.
3. Historical Context of the Poem
The history of any artwork deeply reflects the time
and space it belongs to. It is shaped and created by
the circumstances of its own age. The rural
landscape that Oliver Goldsmith depicts in 'The
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Deserted Village' is also a product of 18th-century
contemporary Irish society. His view of the history
of Auburn is similar to that of the sources he had
read: the Yankee Farmers and the British
Government's parliamentary reports. In making
his portrait of the lost village, the location is
unspecified. Historical, geographical, and other
evidence is washed out. (Chow, 1993) However, it
is obvious and easily imaginable that Goldsmith's
Auburn is the symbol of the homeland Ireland, the
unspoiled uplands of the poet's imagination.
Auburn of 'The Deserted Village' is a product of
Oliver Goldsmith's despair and his society's guilt.
The last four villagers, he tells us, are bored,
exhausted, apathetic, toiling to no purpose after all
the rest of the villagers have been evicted and
dispersed. As the villagers scatter into other
parishes, the entire social system falls into decay:
the marriage system, the chieftain system, the
village school, the village industries, all fall into
final decline. When Goldsmith dated 'The Deserted
Village' 1770, there were results corresponding to
the parliaments in Ireland to the Land Commission
in 1819, 1825, and 1826. In other words,
Goldsmith's details and anger are indiscriminate.
More importantly, he chose to depict a decaying
economy on the brink of catastrophic change in
order to attack those changes: luxury, charities,
enlightenment, pamphleteering, summits, budgets,
bids, and the rest. Goldsmith, writing in the mid-
18th century, stares a swift and complex
transformation dead in the face, laments my
beautiful ways, and anticipates a ruined very soon.
3.1. 18th-century Ireland: Socioeconomic
Changes
The long 18th-century (1691
–
1800) is of great
importance in the context of Irish history, as this
period was marked by several socioeconomic
changes in the country. Ireland lost its position as
a colony to an extent and became a fully political
and administrative member of the United Kingdom
in 1800. The Penal Laws and the enactment of the
1709 Statutes enacted against the woolen industry
in Ireland saw the emigration of a sizeable chunk
of Irish men and women to continental Europe and
the United States. A lot of Irish people went to
France as British-Irish soldiers on loan, among
whom a few stayed back and married French
women. There were sizeable numbers of Irish
soldiers all across Europe in different
Christian/Jesuit regiments.
The two greatest forces that caused the decline of
the village were, firstly, the enclosure and
consolidation of commons and common land; and
secondly, the slump in agricultural prices. As a
result of the enclosure of Common Lands, several
thousand rural families living in the village of
Lissoy lost their common rights and commons over
the land. Several clans and landlords of bigger
estates initiated the process. Enclosure is one of
the biggest concomitant effects of the Agricultural
Revolution as it leads to the consolidation of the
landed estates as well as the disempowerment of
the tenants or the agricultural smallholders. To
survive the poverty of wages, many tenant farmers
and rural workers emigrated to London, Liverpool,
Manchester or to the Caribbean and the United
States. A number of them worked as weavers in the
South of Ireland as handloom weaving was in great
demand in the early nineteenth century, especially
in Manchester, England.
4. The Role of Memory in 'The Deserted Village'
Memory is one of the principal components of the
narrative of pastoral romantic vision, and the
presence of memory in, or rather as, the poem is
very important. The narrative of the poem shifts
between the present and the past, between the
reader's time and a recalled time. The shift from
description to the villagers in the poem is also a
shift of narrative from present scenes to the
remembered past of the village schoolmaster, the
parish priest, and the village youths gathered in the
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ale house. The journey to this place seems
separated by scores of years, and it is the memory
of the whole social life that characterizes the
village people and portrays our lives. The poem is
a lasting theme on the life of the poet himself.
Human memory, which the poet makes use of, is
the reflector of past images.
The poet also pictures his characters, his ideal
village, and all those natural scenes of life by calling
upon the patrons of memory. The poem is
therefore fashioned with a purpose. The village
will not become idealized as long as its name is
cherished through the retrospect of rustic and
pastoral vision. Sweet memories will occupy the
heart. This village, sweetly remembered, will
remain forever the poet's pasture landscape,
sprinkled with the charm of village shyness, an
idyllic rural, rustic, and reflective painting at once
- "And the eyes of the smile." He is too polarizing as
he divides all human values throughout. Hence, the
good-hearted teacher is of such a summer blue-
eyed angelic soul compared with the learned lutes
of the schools and expert manias of cities. The focal
points remain not only the village but also the
village teacher of the poet's childhood.
4.1. Memory as a Reflective Tool
When 'The Deserted Village' was published, this
form of nostalgia was not only idealistic - the past
was better, according to Goldsmith - but was
directly related to contemporary historical events.
America was revolting, and Goldsmith took it as an
opportunity to criticize the colonialism of his own
nation in two stanzas, alongside denunciate the
approaching changes that capitalism would bring
to his own country and other nations. The
landowners were taking people's land away from
them to raise livestock and increase their profits.
The author criticizes the need for progress that
these men have, talking about how change is
necessary, but not the one that was imposed on the
villagers. Change was going to affect not only them
but every other person who was living in a rural
environment within England.
In this context, memory becomes a tool for
reflection, mainly because it impacts how the
character is represented in the poem. The villagers
(and indirectly the actual Irish people) are
remembered fondly, as Goldsmith calls them "the
best". When a character is remembered this way,
they are represented as oppressed and/or
aggrieved. The poem does content with actual,
factual loss, but individuals are written in such a
way through memory so as to evoke empathetic
responses. On the surface, 'The Deserted Village'
remembers a cared-for place much as it does
philanthropic characters. However, the titular
village already is, in a sense, actually deteriorated
and partially deserted at the same time one recalls
it as the idyllic "Sweet Auburn" of old.
5. Nostalgia and Emotion in the Poem
Nostalgia is an "emotion" that attracts "serious
sentimentalism" as it takes the reader into the
world of "recollections of one's own life".
Goldsmith realizes the evocative force of nostalgia
and plays on the memories that will be stirred up
in each type and section of audience he envisions.
The thirty years and more of public opinion,
critical judgment and historical interest confirm
the poem's total impact of emotional effects, moral
sentiment and the "grave philosophy" conveyed in
Goldsmith's "maturest work".
The Deserted Village elicits pathos and an entire
range of feeling from its readers in many strategic
ways. The very idea of nostalgia is grounded in
emotion. This is the elegiac note of much
eighteenth-century topographical poetry of
Norwich. Such poetry and The Deserted Village
both connect with our emotions in ways other
literary forms do not. A widely discussed poem
that counts as late Augustan poetry and underlines
"its direct appeal to the emotions". Consequently
with his stage management of time of day, seasonal
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instance and memorabilia, the poem extols the
emotion of nostalgia as it moves through the
tonalities of emerging sentiment to a final
"emotion of tranquillity". The movement from a
sensibility predominating, by varying degrees,
mirth, gossipy minuteness, melancholy, anxiety
and beneficent sadness to informed despair.
5.1. Sentimentalism and Emotional Impact
The context of sentimentalism indeed reveals that
nostalgia
and
feelings
stemming
from
remembrance and memory provide a very strong
emotional impact. Sentimentalism, as a literary
and artistic trend, does not solely relate to feelings;
it also refers to the emotional impact of certain
surroundings or the influence of time and memory.
This is the aspect that "The Deserted Village"
primarily exemplifies. By elaborately investigating
the feelings present in the poem, we may come to a
fuller understanding of how the emotional grip is
exerted, and to what extent nostalgia actually
captures the emotions of people, including modern
readers.
One of the most dramatic sentiments is perhaps
pity in the poem. The comparison of medieval
scenes and the contemporary forlorn ones only
pays off a solemn-luxurious emotional effect. The
general impression is gloomy, but this last
comparison makes the effect more specific and
profound, and the reader can more distinctly
realize the unhappy change. Religious sadness
then begins to ascend in the abased mournful
feeling. Although the poet is not deeply religious,
he is, as we hinted before, anti-materialistic, and
there is almost another degree of the feeling
beyond sensibility in him. Meanwhile, pity,
attending the abandon of rural life on a daily
painful level which is again unbearable, fades
gradually out. Not like Goldsmith, truly celebrated
age poets utilize divine feelings and matters in
their works, and readers can find them again in
"The Seasons," for that very instance. The poem
possesses the most human-hearted kind of
feelings, aroused by unity of relations, the control
of disillusioned emotional effects and faiths. These
sometimes hyperbolic sentiments can inspire
candid readers. In so doing, from sadness the
moral mood of the reader will become positively
uplifted, with a lesson accompanied: nostalgia can
in fact instruct and guide behavior and caution.
CONCLUSION
Oliver Goldsmith hauntingly portrays a bygone
rural town's vibrant past in "The Deserted Village,"
evoking a sense of nostalgia and mixed emotions.
Using poetic imagery and sincere lyrics, Goldsmith
mourns the village's fall and blames the invasion of
riches and urbanization for its ruin. The poem is
homage to the rural way of life, contrasting it with
the modern world and all its complexity and
modernity. The nostalgia that Goldsmith sows as
he recounts the thriving history of the community
makes one want for a simpler time when people
lived closer to one another, and nature thrived.
Ultimately, "The Deserted Village" is a thought-
provoking piece that delves into the effects of
societal change and encourages readers to value
and protect the intangible assets of tradition and
memory.
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