Rural Tales, Ballads And Songs

Putting Credentials in Order

The other day I was at a function and a man who ought to have known better assured me with a straight face that Robert Bloomfield was not part of the canon. I had been considering giving my unread (by me) copy of his second book, Rural Tales: Ballads and Songs (1802), to a specialized university library. I was vaguely aware of Bloomfield's place in the tradition of Rural Poets, a tradition that has attracted a modest stream of sentimental admirers in Departments of English since, perhaps, Blunden's publication of John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript (1920). I read the Tales and such references as are found in my home library. Indeed, those who have written about Clare document the admiration the two felt for each other, and that extends to Blythe's admiring review of Robert Bloomfield: Selected Poems (1998) that bemoans "the unthinking dismissal of his gifts." The student may be pointed to books about Clare, whose indices invariably contain many useful references to Bloomfield. I hope to identify some pleasures that can be had from a reading of his work
Simpson argues that Clare receives scant attention from academics: Bloomfield's work rarely claims the attention that the work of the younger poet is accorded. The merit in his Rural Tales jostles against that of the contemporary canonical work of Burns, Wordsworth, and Clare. Cowper, who died in 1800, had been silent as a poet for the better part of ten years when Bloomfield's first work, The Farmer's Boy (1800) was published, and in any event, little of Cowper lives. Crabbe's claim for a place in the canon excites scant sympathy, and the latter poets stand aside from the pastoral traditions of Theocritus that came to both Bloomfield and Clare from James Thomson. Bloomfield had left the farm and become a shoemaker under his brother in London when Thomson's Seasons captivated him. Blunden says:
It may be that without Thomson's "Seasons" to show him the method of poetry . . . Bloomfield would never have written "The Farmer's Boy"; but it is also probable that the thinness and platitude and external polish which are the poem's defects, and which are so far removed from the expressed enthusiasms of a farm-labourer in his own surroundings, are due to an exaggerated respect for the literary model. (119-20)

The Rural Muse has eighteen poems, the longest is "The Miller's Maid" at twenty-three pages, and only three are shorter than a page and a half. Seldom would a reader whose taste runs beyond the epigrammatic level a charge of gratuitous verbosity. "The Miller's Maid" is action-filled with dizzying plot pivots calculated to bring happiness to the maid after she comes to fear that the favored suitor is her brother. As genre, we feel the work is calculated to appeal to the non-scholarly reader, where the appeals to morality, virtue, and thrift are celebrated, and whose lurid action is of a type that characterizes vernacular literature. The miller and his wife, a virtuous couple, adopt a battered waif who appears at their door on the conventional dark and stormy night. The Miller identifies and articulates the beneficent feelings the reader is expected to entertain. The author's good taste, the metrical expertise, and the considerable foreshadowing that lets the dramatic suspense resonate, leads, on reflection, to the position that the writer is competent.
The most useful example for those who wish to posit a subtext of libidinal agitation may be "The Shepherd and His Dog Rover" whose "grey Cock" and "Come" suggests a ribaldry similar to that which many take for granted in Donne or Shakespeare. It is the diction of the poem that renders the dog a simulacrum of the poet's masculinity; the young rustic is joyously saying, "Come, my dick, you and I, let us together discover the world (participate in sexual adventure.)" The opening stanzas may give a taste of the experience:
Rover, awake! The grey Cock crows!
Come, fhake your coat and go with me!
High in the Eaft the green Hill glows;
And glory crowns our fhelt'ring Tree.
The Sheep expect us at the fold:
My faithful Dog, let's hafte away,
And in his earlieft beams behold,
And hail, the fource of cheerful day.

Half his broad orb o'erlooks the Hill,
And, darting down the Valley flies:
At every cafement welcome ftill;
The golden fummons of the fkies.
Go, fetch my staff; and o'er the dews
Let Echo waft thy gladfome voice.
Shall we a cheerful note refufe
When rifing Morn proclaims, "rejoice."

Though there is considerable reliance on shopworn clichés and hackneyed conventional language, in some executions they seem almost Miltonic. Certainly "Half his broad orb o'erlooks the Hill" is dated language, but proscriptions against charm in verse do not yet carry the full force of law.
At his best, the sentiments feel honest, and his sympathy for the poor, for the veteran, for the generally democratic, and his horror at exploitation matches the work of others who are considered forerunners of the romantic revolution. The songs do not always attain complete lyrical majesty, and the poetical language is not always of an authentic voice, but at his best, as in, for instance, "Nancy: a Song" the writing has the wit and conviction of Burns. In that poem, perhaps the best in the volume and the one that I would choose for an anthology, the maid has asked the swain why he supposes she favors him. His answer is saucy and convinces the reader that she does indeed. The poem develops a picture of young love that is as individual and charming as any found in Wordsworth, whose chastity is often distressing. Neither does the poem draw on Petrarchan conventions; rather we have the sense of an honest love, honestly expressed in a language of banter, but in which we have the feeling that the lovers deserve their happiness because of how well they observe (and how well the poet observes) the niceties of courtship. The revelation of the kiss is electric:
Remember the Viper:--'t was clofe at your feet,
How you ftarted, and threw yourfelf into my arms;
Not a Strawberry there was fo ripe nor fo fweet
As the lips which I kifs'd to fubdue your alarms.

The pleasure of the couple is palpable, the rendering perhaps bringing to mind the forthright love of Romeo and Juliet.
The Dictionary of National Biography assures us that had Bloomfield not died so young, he surely would have gone mad, but to read this text for signs of disequilibrium asks us to elevate conjecture to proof. Too often, and by some large measure, the work is marred by sentiments of a cheap and pedestrian sort. Hazlitt's observation, though precious, seems not far from the mark: "The fault indeed of his genius is that it is too humble" (126) he says in a generally appreciative notice in the lecture on Cowper and Thomson. However, the sensitive reader who doesn't expect his poets to be perfect may join with Blunden in seeing "an actuality of impression and a secret glory of soul which may scarcely be called anything but poetry" (106-7). There are many reasons why Bloomfield ought to be read; I find convincing none that justify his continuing neglect.


Works Cited
Bareham, Terence. George Crabbe. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977.
Blunden, Edmund. "The Farmer's Boy: Duck, Bloomfield." Nature in English Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. 106-31.
Blythe, Ronald. Rev. of Robert Bloomfield: Selected Poems, ed. John Goodridge and John Lucas. The John Clare Society Journal. 18. (July 1999): 85-6.
Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the English Poets and the English Comic Writers. Ed. William Carew Hazlitt. London: Bell and Daldy, 1869.
Simpson, David. "Is The Academy Ready for John Clare?" The John Clare Society Journal. 18. (July 1999): (70-78)
Stevenson, E. ed. and introd. Early Reviews of Great Writers: 1786-1932. London: Walter Scott, n.d.
Storey, Mark. The Poetry of John Clare: A Critical Introduction. London, Macmillan, 1974.
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