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.

Top Lessons

• Wealth and the common good

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

• The faithful pastor

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

• Nostalgia and truth

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

Verified Quotes