![]() The village he imagined is now deserted because all the people have emigrated, the main reason being the “enclosure” or (as we would now say) privatization of their land by rich people. The village Goldsmith is writing about he calls “Auburn”: it probably wasn’t a single real village, but was an imaginary ideal one, created nonetheless from villages he has observed. To some extent this passage, the portrait of an agreeable village school-teacher, needs to be set in context. This is an extract from a longer poem by Oliver Goldsmith called “The Deserted Village”, one of the best known poems of the eighteenth century. long words (probably from Latin).Ģ2 rustics: working-class country people. “Tides” means “times”, as in “Eastertide” for example.ġ8 gauge: calculate more complex things (like the liquid contents of a container or the area of a piece of land).Ģ1 words of learned length: i.e. he could predict (presage) where boundaries should be and the dates of religious festivals. flowering gorse (the beautiful yellow flowers).ħ boding tremblers: anxious (and so) shaking school-children – a gently comic phrase.ġ4 fault: here pronounced “fought”, to rhyme with “aught”.ġ7 terms and tides presage: i.e.
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