Contents

The Invitation

The Drunken Father

The Forester

The Shepherd’s Dream: Or, Fairies’ Masquerade

The Soldier’s Home

Rosamond’s Song of Hope

Alfred and Jennet

Introduction

By 1811, Bloomfield was finding that, despite the enormous sales of his first three
collections, the income from his poetry was no longer sufficient to provide him and
his family with a living. There were many mouths to feed—not just his immediate family
but those of his brothers Isaac and George. There were also spiralling expenses repairing
his mother’s house in Suffolk. He sought to reduce outgoings by moving from London to the Bedfordshire
village of Shefford, hoping to rediscover the placedness in village life that he recalled in his Suffolk
youth. But in Shefford poverty loomed as Vernor and Hood went bankrupt and the book trade retrenched. From 1816, the postwar economic recession
made matters worse, making it hard to interest publishers in new works. Changing taste,
in a nation used to daily news of battles, played a part: Byron’s and Scott’s chivalric
tales, full of thrilling, heroic action, became the new vogue; Bloomfield’s village
tales, bucolic and comic, seemed tame by comparison.

It was at the nadir of Bloomfield’s fortunes that one of his old gentlemen friends
got in touch with him again. Thomas Lloyd Baker, a wealthy Gloucestershire landowner, wrote in 1821, sending a banknote, but also
presuming on their past membership of a companionate circle centered on his wife and
her sisters to lecture Bloomfield about his conduct:

It has been remarked that for some time past neither yourself nor any of your family
have been in the habit of attending any place of worship whatsoever. It has also been
observed that you are in the habit of reading some periodical works which are very
hostile to the government of this country. Perhaps from these two circumstances coupled
together has originated the idea that you have imbibed both Deistical & Republican
principles. The latter tending to the subversion of that Government under which we
have all lived so long free from those calamities which have befallen almost every
other part of Europe—The former tending to the destruction of Christianity, & herein
of every thing most valuable to us all (but most of all endangering the eternal welfare
of those who are unhappy enough to become its Dupes) and both being so frequently
united in the same persons—These considerations have induced many of your friends
& patrons upon principle to withhold from you their accustomed protection & assistance,
thinking that by doing as they had done, & as they still wish to do, they should be
giving countenance to a dangerous man. I cannot think they are right. I cannot adopt
such an opinion of you. In full hope that all maybe explained away, & that you may
again stand as high in the esteem of your friends as the religious and moral tendency
of your former life & works had placed you, I take advantage of being in your neighbourhood
to give you this information, & to assure you that I shall have much pleasure in making
known to your former friends any answer to this letter which you may think it right
to favor me with for this purpose. (Letter 351, 23 May 1821)

The letter is one example of the ideological strife of post-Waterloo Britain: it places
in stark illumination the repression by which the ruling classes maintained their
grip on power, all the while fearing revolution. Bloomfield knew he was now living
through a reactionary era, in which the classes were polarised, and his public response
was to create, in his final collection of poems May-Day with the Muses (1822), a pastoral fantasy wherein the literary circle once offered him by literary
gentlemen and women—Capel Lofft, the Duke of Grafton, Lloyd Baker and his wife and sisters-in-law—is reconstituted in an idealised village.

Lloyd Baker’s insensitive letter reached Bloomfield when May-Day was already in press with Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. Writing to Baldwin on 5 June
(Letter 355), Bloomfield made plain his financial plight, and the reduced worth of his poetry.
He noted that Baldwin had been uninterested in buying a share of the copyright, not
wanting to risk the firm’s money on the publication: this was not the arrangement
that had operated for The Farmer’s Boy, Rural Tales, and Wild Flowers. He needed money so badly that he asked Baldwin for a loan, to be repaid in instalments
from future sales receipts: effectively giving up, in all but name, a quarter of his
copyright. Baldwin agreed to this, and to a later request to buy a further quarter,
for which Bloomfield received £100. In spring 1822 a first edition of a thousand copies
was published, priced at two shillings and sixpence (3000 had been printed for both
the first and second editions of Wild Flowers). A second edition, in duodecimo at four shillings, also of a thousand copies, appeared
later in the year—but this was not enough to redeem Bloomfield’s fortunes. He was
a poor man when he died the following summer, dying so indebted that his family had
to hold, in their home village, a public sale of his books and household goods.

May-Day is a collection set in a village in which poetry is able to substitute for money
and rent can be paid in verse. Built on a conceit, it is ostensibly the fruit of a
poetry slam organized to celebrate the traditional May Day festivities. The local
squire, Sir Ambrose Higham, Bloomfield imagines, invites the villagers to recite poems
about village life, accepting them in lieu of rent. Thus the landowner renews old
customs, preferring poetry to money as a sign of value, and patronizes, in the best
sense, rustics who are able to voice their rural experience as verse. The squire respects
his tenants and they him: the ideal village, for Bloomfield, is self-policing. This
was an old-fashioned and forlorn hope, perhaps, in face of the capitalization of farming
and the coerciveness of squires such as Lloyd Baker, but it was one to which Wordsworth,
Southey, and Gilpin also subscribed as did Cobbett: despite their political differences,
their common commitment to the superiority of the remembered rural society of their
youth over the capitalist one of the present led them all to romanticize a rural paternalism
that was both radical and conservative in its opposition to the liberal, laissez faire
ideology of ‘improvement’ that enriched the landowning classes while impoverishing
their labourers.

Comprising ballads and lyrics, May-Day is effectively a conservative revisiting of Rural Tales and Lyrical Ballads, with a frame narrative that, like Wordsworth’s Preface (which Bloomfield had admired in 1802), was designed to outline the poems’
social import and to prepare for their proper reception by the reader. Wordsworth
himself had embarked on a conservative reworking of the radical Lyrical Ballads in his ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’ (1807), in which the poet is imagined
as a having the valued role of a bard singing of the deeds of the local Lord Clifford
in the presence of that lord, his retainers, and tenants. In May-Day not only does it seem that to be a rural poet is to be a cherished villager and vice
versa, but also that poetry is a face-to-face oral activity of a united community.
The benevolent squire, moreover, respects tradition and exacts no political toll for
his benevolence, which he in fact regards as his duty. Meanwhile, the individual poems
that the villagers recite also tell of a traditional society in which authority is
vested, at local level, in the community at large, presided over by a single figure
who can therefore be addressed, appealed to, and even, potentially, rebuked and chastised
face to face—the squire.

The community at large is invoked in ‘The Drunken Father’, a comic tale narrating
a potentially tragic story of paternal neglect. The poem evokes ‘The Idiot Boy’ because
it features a mother worrying about her young child, out on an errand at night. As
in that poem, the errand is a comic journey that might have been tragic—the child
rescues his drunken father from the alehouse and navigates him safely home in the
dark. The mother is relieved; her emotion, however, is the center of the drama. Domestic
harmony is endorsed; the father agrees to reform and become, in the eyes of the villagers,
an upstanding family man. If this ending imagines the village as being largely free
of exploitation and mostly capable of healing its own social ills, then ‘The Forester’
offers a more critical view, implicitly endorsing a radical politics of nature. Bloomfield
has his narrator use the oak-tree motif that had served to legitimize the monarchy
since the time of Charles II. A mighty oak in the squire’s park has fallen:

The astonished deer, keen to ‘learn and muse’ what the unexpected change means, stand
in for the local rustics. They also prompt an act of political interpretation by the
narrator: he reminds his audience—and us, the readers—that monarchs, however mighty,
are dependent on the people. There is a hint of Jacobinism about this lesson; the
royal oak can represent a ‘bigot’ as well as a ‘sage’ king, and bigots can be swept
away. The political resonances of this passage were picked up on by the reviewer for
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (vol. 11, no. 55 (June 1822), 722–31), who noted that the poem’s speaker ‘seems somewhat
radically disposed’, and added: ‘We presume from the opinions of his Keeper, that
old Sir Ambrose Higham was a Whig, and voted with the majority.’ The poem concludes
not with a patriotic declaration of loyalty to king and country, but by imagining
nature as a levelling principle that guarantees individual liberty:

(lines 89–96)

Bloomfield’s position here is close to that of Wordsworth in 1798: the wilds and forests
are a reliable refuge and resource for revolutionary freedom, at least for the individual
poet if not for the masses. Cowper’s rural radicalism stands behind both writers,
and Bloomfield honours it by borrowing the oak-tree symbol through which Cowper had
most searchingly interrogated power.

The next poem, ‘The Shepherd’s Dream: or, Fairies’ Masquerade’, was arguably even
more contentious. This was read, in spite of Bloomfield’s description of it as ‘a
lay, / Harmless and wild and fitting for the day’ (lines 23–4), as a parable on the
recent wars with France. As the Monthly Review (99 (1822), 89–94) succinctly put it: ‘The shepherd now repeats a very fanciful dream,
which is in fact an allegorical description of the French Revolution and the great
political events that have followed it.’ Critical opinion on this poem was mixed.
The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (277 (11 May 1822), 289–91) dismissed it as ‘a sort of allegorical account of Buonaparte’s
last campaigns; and furnishes no extract we could wish to adduce’, while The Literary Speculum (2 (1822), 1–12) stated that ‘the political allusion’ to Napoleon’s fate ‘might have
been spared, as it is out of place’. As above, the review in Blackwood’s is enlightening. ‘The old shepherd’, it admitted, is ‘beautifully introduced’, but
the poem itself was a more difficult proposition. ‘It must have puzzled the audience
not a little’, claimed the reviewer, ‘and on the first reading it was to us an enigma’:

It is no less an affair than a poetical summary of some of the principal events in
the later parts of Napoleon’s life—the Russian expedition—his subsequent campaigns,
his banishment to Elba—return to Paris—Waterloo—and St Helena.—It will be remembered,
that Mr Bloomfield was the protegé of Capel Loft [sic], a gentleman who believed with Sir Richard Phillips, that Napoleon was a man of
pacific disposition, fond of home-comforts, and an empassioned lover of freedom. It
is laughable to observe honest Robert Bloomfield adopting such insane absurdities:
but the poem, notwithstanding, is excellent.

Few poets have more honestly won, or more meekly worn their honours than Robert Bloomfield.
That he is a poet, we will maintain in the face of all critics Northern and Southern,
who would insinuate to the contrary. Had he been so fortunate as to come into the
world fifty years earlier, no one would have thought of depreciating his claims. But
the literary world has been of late pampered into daintiness. The Farmer’s Boy was
too loftily bepraised at its first appearance. It owed, it is true, much of its temporary success
to the well-meant endeavours of its Editor and Commentator; and so far the Poet was
under great obligations to his Maecenas. But the ebb-tide of popular feeling has fallen
proportionably below the mark, and has left the poet scarcely afloat.

It has been brought as a heavy and annihilating charge against Bloomfield, that he
is not either Burns or Clare. To compare him with the former, were absurd, for Burns was not an uneducated man;
and it were not less invidious to set up young Lubin to the disparagement of old Giles.
But, as such a comparison has been hinted at, we will just take the liberty to remark,
that had Giles been left to follow the plough, instead of stooping over the last in
Bell Alley, or vegetating at the Shepherd and Shepherdess in the City Road,—had he
remained a peasant and a pupil of Nature till his limbs had acquired their full development,
his frame had been strung to health, and his education as a poet had been completed
by the woods and the streams, the winds and the sunshine, and the quiet of the country,
our Farmer’s Boy would have led off with the Muses on May-day in a far higher style
than must now be expected from him. The man has brain enough, as his ample forehead
testifies. The ‘anterior cerebral lobes,’ as Mr. Lawrence would say, are sufficiently
developed to admit of his excelling as a poet. And he has certainly heart enough,
for never was a more passionate lover of rural Nature. All that seems wanted is, a
greater portion of physical elasticity, that should have given a healthful vigour
to his thoughts, and tone to his feelings. The feebleness which is occasionally betrayed
in his productions, is that induced by the languid action of a crazy frame, originally
unworthy of the mind which it serves, and rendered still more inadequate to the higher
functions of imagination by perpetual ill-health and concomitant anxieties, ‘I have
written these tales,’ he tells us, ‘in anxiety and in a wretched state of health;
and if these formidable foes have not incapacitated me, but left me free to meet the
public eye with any degree of credit, that degree of credit I am sure I shall gain.’
They have not incapacitated him for pleasing those who are disposed to be pleased
with wild-flowers and May-blossom, and such simple things as go to form a May-day
wreath; and he must be a ruthless and a heartless critic who would by rough handling
doom them to fade a moment before their time.

This was special pleading. Readers are asked to look kindly on the poems because they
pity Bloomfield’s disability and recognise the difficult circumstances in which he
had learned to write: condescension is sought because admiration is not to be expected.
Bloomfield’s vogue has given way to the fashion for Clare, the new ‘peasant poet’
(who, ironically enough, was influenced by Bloomfield not simply as an example of
a labourer poet but as a craftsman in verse).

The Monthly Review, reviewing the second edition, also acknowledged Bloomfield’s ‘yesterday’s man’ status,
but offered a more robust endorsement of his powers, though suggesting, between the
lines, that his rural tales were good because they ignored the realities of pain and
poverty that other poets confronted:

While in Italy we find poets and scholars assuming the character of shepherds, and emulously
enrolling themselves among Gli Arcadi, in England our villagers and yeomen not unfrequently exchange the plough for the
lyre, and the pruning-hook for the pen. Of the two metamorphoses, undoubtedly the
latter is the most natural and rational; and it is an honorable proof of the extensive
influence which our free institutions exert over our habits and feelings, that our
literary history affords so many instances of eminent authors who have risen to such
celebrity from the lowest situations. This is as it should be in the ‘Republic of
Letters,’ where genius and talent are the only title to superior distinction.—The
English public have always recognized the claims of merit, however nameless and humble;
and among those who have been raised from their obscurity by the public approbation
and encouragement, no one has deserved his elevation more justly than Robert Bloomfield.

As the author of ‘The Farmer’s Boy,’ this votary of the Muses has long been a favorite
with those whose feelings are calm and healthy enough to be delighted with poetry,
which borrows its only charm from the innocence and simplicity of rural occupations,
and the exhibition of homely affections. In these quiet and unobtrusive descriptions,
no writer has been happier than Bloomfield. Unlike Crabbe, who is always most successful
when he is painting some scene of wretchedness or knavery,—a young girl breaking her
heart at the faithlessness of her lover, or a parish-apprentice cheating the overseers,—Bloomfield
delights to describe the virtues and happiness of rural life, and thus affords us
most certainly a more pleasant and more satisfactory picture. We rejoice, therefore,
to find him once more appearing before the public; giving a proof not only that he
is not dead, but that he has not forgotten how to weave together his village rhymes
as pleasingly as heretofore.

Noting that there were several poems in Bloomfield’s best, ballad style, there were
also some in which ‘we observe a straining to reach a higher tone of feeling than
is natural to the poet’, the reviewer concluded by ‘assuring our readers that they
will not find many pleasanter modes of whiling away a gloomy afternoon in Autumn than
in the perusal of May-Day with the Muses.’ This was to offer modest, if not faint,
praise.

PREFACE

I hope my old Sir Ambrose stands in no need of defence from me or from any one; a
man has a right to do what he likes with his own estate. The characters I have introduced
as candidates may not come off so easily; a cluster of poets is not likely to be found
in one village, and the following lines, written by my good friend T. Park, Esq. of Hampstead, are not only true, but beautifully true, and I cannot omit them.

written in the isle of thanet,

August, 1790.

The word ‘fancy’ connects itself with my very childhood, fifty years back. The fancy
of those who wrote the songs which I was obliged to hear in infancy was a very inanimate
and sleepy fancy. I could enumerate a dozen songs at least which all described sleeping
shepherds and shepherdesses, and, in one instance, where they both went to sleep:
this is not fair certainly; it is not even ‘watch and watch.’

I must say, that if I understand any thing at all about keeping sheep, this is not
the way to go to work with them. But such characters and such writings were fashionable,
and fashion will beat common sense at any time.

This, to my feelings, is a balm at all times; it is spirit, animation, and imagery,
all at once.

I will plead no excuses for any thing which the reader may find in this little volume,
but merely state, that I once met with a lady in London, who, though otherwise of
strong mind and good information, would maintain that ‘it is impossible for a blind
man to fall in love.’ I always thought her wrong, and the present tale of ‘Alfred
and Jennet’ is written to elucidate my side of the question.

I have been reported to be dead; but I can assure the reader that this, like many
other reports, is not true. I have written these tales in anxiety, and in a wretched
state of health; and if these formidable foes have not incapacitated me, but left
me free to meet the public eye with any degree of credit, that degree of credit I
am sure I shall gain.

I am, with remembrance of what is past,

Most respectfully,

Robert Bloomfield

Shefford, Bedfordshire,

April 10th 1822.