The Village and The Newspaper

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George Crabbe (#3 in our series by George Crabbe)
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Title: The Village and The Newspaper
Author: George Crabbe
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5203]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
VILLAGE AND THE NEWSPAPER ***
Transcribed by Mark Sherwood, e-mail:
[email protected]

The Village and The Newspaper by George Crabbe (1754-1832)
Contents
The Village
Book 1
Book 2
The Newspaper
THE VILLAGE
BOOK I.--THE ARGUMENT.
The Subject proposed--Remarks upon Pastoral Poetry--A Tract of
Country near the Coast described--An Impoverished
Borough--Smugglers and their Assistants--Rude Manners of the
Inhabitants--Ruinous Effects of the High Tide--The Village Life more
generally
considered: Evils of it--The Youthful Labourer--The Old
Man: his Soliloquy--The Parish Workhouse: its Inhabitants--The sick
Poor: their Apothecary--The dying Pauper--The Village Priest.
The Village Life, and every care that reigns
O'er youthful peasants
and declining swains;
What labour yields, and what, that labour past,

Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
What form the real Picture
of the Poor,
Demand a song--the Muse can give no more.
Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet
praised his native plains:
No Shepherds now, in smooth alternate
verse,
Their country's beauty or their nymphs rehearse;
Yet still for
these we frame the tender strain,
Still in our lays fond Corydons
complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The
only pains, alas! they never feel.

On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the
Golden Age again,
Must sleepy bards the nattering dream prolong,

Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall
we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?
Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains,
Because the Muses never
knew their pains:
They boast their peasant's pipes; but peasants now

Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough;
And few, amid the
rural tribe, have time
To number syllables and play with rhyme;

Save honest DUCK, what son of verse could share
The poet's rapture
and the peasant's care?
Or the great labours of the field degrade,

With the new peril of a poorer trade?
From this chief cause these idle praises spring,
That themes so easy
few forbear to sing;
For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask;

To sing of shepherds is an easy task:
The happy youth assumes the
common strain,
A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain;
With
no sad scenes he clouds his tuneful prayer,
But all, to look like her, is
painted fair.
I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes
or for him that farms;
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace

The poor laborious natives of the place,
And see the mid-day sun,
with fervid ray,
On their bare heads and dewy temples play;
While
some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet
sustain their parts
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel
trappings of poetic pride?
No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,
Which neither groves nor
happy valleys boast;
Where other cares than those the Muse relates,

And other shepherds dwell with other mates;
By such examples
taught, I paint the Cot,
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not:

Nor you, ye Poor, of letter'd scorn complain,
To you the smoothest
song is smooth in vain;
O'ercome by labour, and bow'd down by time,


Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
Can poets soothe you,
when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtles round your ruin'd shed?

Can their light tales your weighty griefs o'erpower,
Or glad with
airy mirth the toilsome hour?
Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light
turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of
burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither'd ears;

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and
rob the blighted rye.
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,

And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock
the hope of toil,
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy
and