Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823)—farmer’s boy, and, through the influence of the Duke of Grafton, government clerk, with a somewhat unhappy lot in both positions—“The Farmer’s Boy” (1798), “Rural Tales” (1802), “Wild Flowers,” and other pieces; volumes of cheerful description of rural life with much moral feeling and smoothness of versification: his great fault is his want of passion—his great excellence, the truth and reality of his delineations: some of his lines, those for example on the “Soldier’s Home,” Wilson thinks equal to Burns’.

Personal

  Bloomfield was dull in conversation; but humble, simple, mild, and unpretending…. I never saw a man more humble in manner, without losing his dignity, than Robert Bloomfield; but he was not easy in the company of men born and moving in a rank of society much above him; and I do not think he gained anything by suffering himself to be drawn into it.

  It is little to the credit of the age, that the latter days of a man whose name was at one time so deservedly popular, should have been past in poverty, and perhaps shortened by distress, that distress having been brought on by no misconduct or imprudence of his own.

  Having now become hypochondriacal and half blind, he retired to Shefford, where he died in great poverty on 19 Aug. 1823, leaving a widow and four children. Had he lived longer, he would probably have gone mad.

  No British poet ever had a harder life than Robert Bloomfield, whose misfortune it was to suffer from poetry and poverty alike. He cannot be said to have been worsened by his gift of verse, such as it was, but he can hardly be said to have been bettered by it, since it neither developed his character nor strengthened his mind. But perhaps it did all that could be expected, his mind being, as Lamb observed, a poor one, and his character a weak one. He was the creature of circumstances, crushed by inherited poverty, and cursed with a feeble constitution and constant illness. Nature does not make heroes out of sickly shoemakers only five feet four inches long, still less great poets.

General

  Such indeed are the merits of this work [“The Farmer’s Boy”] that, in true pastoral imagery and simplicity, I do not think any production can be put in competition with it since the days of Theocritus. To that charming rusticity which particularises the Grecian are added the individuality, fidelity, and boldness of description which render Thomson so interesting to the lovers of Nature. Gresner possesses the most engaging sentiment, and the most refined simplicity of manners, but he wants that rustic wildness and naïveté in delineation characteristic of the Sicilian and of the composition before us. Warner and Drayton have much to recommend them, but they are very unequal, and are devoid of the sweet and pensive morality which pervade almost every page of the “Farmer’s Boy;” nor can they establish any pretentions to that fecundity in painting the economy of rural life, which this poem, drawn from actual experience, so richly displays. It is astonishing, indeed, what various and striking circumstances peculiar to the occupation of the British Farmer, and which are adapted to all the purposes of the pastoral Muse, had escaped our poets previous to the publication of Mr. Bloomfield’s work.

  Don’t you think the fellow who wrote it (who is a shoemaker) has a poor mind? Don’t you find he is always silly about poor Giles, and those abject kind of phrases which mark a man that looks up to wealth? None of Burns’ poet dignity. What do you think? I have just opened him, but he makes me sick.

  I have received many honourable testimonies of esteem from strangers; letters without a name, but filled with the most cordial advice, and almost a parental anxiety, for my safety under so great a share of public applause. I beg to refer such friends to the great teacher, Time; and hope that he will hereafter give me my deserts, and no more.

  In his “Rural Tales,” he has succeeded in the patriotic attempt to render the loves and joys, the sports and manners, of English peasants interesting. I recollect no poet before him who, by a serious, unaffected delineation of humble life, as it actually exists, had awakened strong sympathy, in people more prosperously circumstanced, towards the lower classes of the community.

  Beyond any example, save that of Clare, Bloomfield seemed to be a poet almost by intuition; for in point of taste, melody, and accuracy, his early verses, composed without almost a glimpse of education, were never excelled by his after efforts.

  The success of the poem was immediate and complete. It was warmly received by the public, and praised in all quarters as a masterpiece of natural poetic simplicity and beauty. Twenty-six thousand copies were sold in the first three years of its issue, seven editions having been called for. The position secured by the “Farmer’s Boy” on its first publication has been held until the present day. All lovers of poetry read it with delight. It is natural and graceful as the song of a bird “warbling his native woodnotes wild.” When the English song-bird sings in captivity there seems to be a touch of pathos in his note; and one can hardly resist the same impression in reading these sweet rustic melodies in verse which came from the lips of the shoemaker-poet imprisoned in a London garret. Yet there is something much more stimulating in Bloomfield’s lines than this. They are sweet and joyous, and full of that glowing enthusiasm for beauty which all fine natures feel. Besides the editions sent forth in this country, the “Farmer’s Boy” was printed at Leipsic, and was translated into French, Italian, and Latin.

  It was not in the nature of a man like Lamb to respect a man like Bloomfield. There was nothing in common between them, the one being a scholar and a thinker, the other an unlettered rustic, with a knack at versifying. The reputation of Burns, who died four years before, prepared the way for a self-made rhymester like Bloomfield, whose temporary vogue prepared the way in turn for a little school of self-made rhymsters who sprung up around him. There are tracts of literature wherein, as in old, neglected pastures, mushrooms are sometimes found, and with these mushrooms hundreds of other fungi which are often mistaken for them by the ignorant and the credulous. Byron described Churchill as the comet of a season. If I were to describe Bloomfield, it would be as a glow-worm, whose mild and fitful radiance twinkled awhile, and then went out in the darkness.

  We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields were homesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate with this longing the “Farmer Boy” of Bloomfield, which my father got for me. It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mild woodcuts in it. I read it with a tempered pleasure and with a vague resentment of its trespass upon Thomson’s ground in the division of its parts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have felt this. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfield better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllables which I preferred to any other verse.

  Bloomfield’s poetry is characterised by a smoothness and ease of versification which came quite natural to him. He had an ear for music which guided him in the formation of his verse. If his vocabulary was not extensive it was quite large enough for the themes upon which he wrote; and his choice of words is often felicitous…. But it is as a poet of Nature rather than of Humanity that Bloomfield claims recognition. His descriptions of natural scenery are both faithful and characteristic. His pictures of the farmer’s boy engaged in various labours of the farm are those of one who draws direct from Nature, and who has himself experienced the life that he depicts. These show both minuteness of observation and fidelity of description, which entitle him to an honourable place among the earliest of modern worshippers at the so long neglected shrine of Nature.

  One of those unfortunate “prodigy” poets whom mistaken kindness encourages…. His “Farmer’s Boy,” an estimable but much over-praised piece.