The Deserted Village

Summary

The Deserted Village, published in May 1770 and dedicated to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a pastoral elegy in about 430 lines of heroic couplets. The speaker returns in imagination to Auburn, the loveliest village of the plain, where he spent his youth, and remembers its simple pleasures: the cottages, the church, the mill, the games on the green in the evening and the honest labour of its people. But Auburn is now deserted. A single wealthy master has taken the land for his parks, and the villagers have been driven away. The famous lines declare that ill fares the land where wealth accumulates and men decay, for princes and lords may flourish or fade, but a bold peasantry, once destroyed, can never be replaced. The speaker then paints portraits of the village's chief figures. The village preacher, passing rich with forty pounds a year, welcomes beggars and broken soldiers, cares for the dying, and allures his people to brighter worlds and leads the way. The schoolmaster, stern but kind, impresses the rustics with his learning, so that they wonder that one small head could carry all he knew. The poem then attacks luxury and the wealth of trade, which drive the poor into cities or across the ocean to the wild lands of America. In the final lines the speaker bids farewell to Poetry herself, imagining her leaving with the emigrants. Goldsmith probably drew on memories of his Irish childhood village of Lissoy as well as English enclosures. The poem is a classic of social protest and of nostalgia, and its preacher is one of the best portraits of a faithful pastor in English verse.

Plot or Argument

• The happy village

  The speaker remembers Auburn's cottages, green and evening games.

• Desolation

  A tyrant's grasp has emptied the village; ill fares the land where wealth accumulates.

• The preacher and the schoolmaster

  Portraits of the faithful pastor and the learned schoolmaster.

• Luxury and emigration

  Trade and wealth drive the poor to cities or to America.

• Farewell to Poetry

  The speaker imagines Poetry departing with the exiles.

Characters

• The speaker, narrator

  A returning native mourning his village.

• The village preacher, pastor

  A generous, devoted country clergyman.

• The schoolmaster, teacher

  A stern but kind village teacher.

• The villagers, exiles

  Country people driven from their homes.

Lessons

• Wealth and the common good

  The poem argues that a nation is impoverished when wealth grows and people are driven away.

  • What does ill fares the land mean?
  • Who benefits and who loses from the change?
  • How does Isaiah 5:8 compare?

• The faithful pastor

  The village preacher is generous, humble and devoted, and leads by example.

  • List the preacher's actions.
  • What does allured to brighter worlds, and led the way mean?
  • Compare 1 Peter 5:2-3.

• Nostalgia and truth

  The speaker idealises the past. Students should ask how accurate memory is.

  • Is Auburn real or ideal?
  • Why does memory make the past sweeter?
  • Can nostalgia still make a true argument?

Context

Written during the agricultural enclosure movement in England, when common land was enclosed and great estates created parks; Goldsmith also recalled Irish village life. Emigration to the American colonies was rising.

Composition

Published 26 May 1770 by W. Griffin; it ran through several editions in its first year. This text is the 1857 illustrated edition.

Reception

Very popular; it provoked debate over whether villages were really depopulated, and the Canadian Oliver Goldsmith, the poet's grand-nephew, answered it with The Rising Village (1825).

Comparisons

• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

  Gray's elegy for humble rural lives.

• The Cotter’s Saturday Night

  Burns's idealised peasant household.

• Lyrical Ballads

  Wordsworth's rural poor in plainer language.

• The Vicar of Wakefield

  Goldsmith's novel of a country clergyman.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The contrast between past and present Auburn.
• The couplet on the bold peasantry.
• The preacher's portrait and its simile of the cliff.
• The schoolmaster's comic dignity.
• The farewell to Poetry at the close.

Key terms and names

Heroic couplet

Rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines.

Enclosure

Fencing of common land into private estates.

Pastoral elegy

A poem mourning loss in a rural setting.

Luxury

In eighteenth-century debate, excessive wealth and display seen as corrupting a nation.

Peasantry

Country labourers and small farmers.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What happened to Auburn?
2. Comprehension How does the preacher treat beggars and soldiers?
3. Interpretation Why does the speaker blame luxury and trade?
4. Interpretation How do the portraits of the preacher and schoolmaster strengthen the argument?
5. Interpretation Why end with a farewell to Poetry?
6. Big Question Does a nation's wealth depend more on money or on its people?

Faith Connections

• Isaiah 5:8 (Scripture)

  Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.

• 1 Peter 5:2-3 (Scripture)

  Feed the flock of God, being examples to the flock: the village preacher.

• Proverbs 22:2 (Scripture)

  The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Auburn was once happy, pious and full; the wealth of one master has emptied it; a nation that grows rich while its people decay is poorer than it knows; therefore luxury destroys the true strength of a land.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. Balanced contrasts such as wealth accumulates and men decay sharpen the couplets.

Debate: Resolved: that economic progress justifies the loss of village life.

Memory Work

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.

Writing Prompts

Essay: How does Goldsmith use portraits of individuals to make a social argument?

Comparison with Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: Compare how Gray and Goldsmith honour the rural poor.

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Is The Deserted Village an economic argument, a nostalgic elegy or both?

• Poetry

  Write ten heroic couplets about a place you knew that has changed.

• Classroom

  Compare the portraits of the preacher and the schoolmaster with real teachers and pastors you admire.

Further Reading

• The Traveller, Oliver Goldsmith

  Goldsmith's earlier poem (1764).

• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Gray

  A companion elegy.