GOLDSMITH’S DESERTED VILLAGE: OR PARADISE MISLAID

Abstract

Eighteenth-century verse is consciously rhetorical: that is, it sets out with the reader in mind, not simply with didactic purpose or designs on his emotions, but with an appeal to pre-determined responses supplied by the reader's awareness of poetic kinds. There is a 'public voice' embodied in the form and subject-matterpastoral, elegy, topqgraphic poem, satire-for which the speaker is characteristically an unobtrusive mouthpiece, a focus or guide, who leads the reader through his gallery of pictures. The'!' of the poem is seldom more concrete than the symbolic poet or traveller, a generalised embodiment of moral and aesthetic value. But when this decorum breaks down and the speaker's intrusion upsets the poetic equilibrium, one of two critical triggers may be set off, depending on the nature of the irony that arises. On the one hand, a lack of credibility may provoke the reader to accuse the speaker, and presumably the author, of being sentimental, selfindulgent, or just bad. On the other, as a result of a more subtle irony, a distance is created between the reader and the speaker, who is absorbed into the structure of the poem to become a dramatic component within the totality of the work. The rhetorical effect of the whole is not something we can attribute to the speaker alonehe is one voice among others-and we do not assume without question the point of view he offers. The relationship between the 'public voice' of poetic decorum and the personal voice of the narrator is particularly complex in Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. That Goldsmith was familiar with the poetry of Virgil, Denham, Milton and Pope, to mention only the most obvious echoes, seems unexceptionable. These figures, along with Shakespeare, were part of the literary lapguage. But there is a distinction to be made. Pope, Dryden, Addison, the 'classic' Augustan authors, were the property of the schools and the literary establishment, known and admired, but less deeply embedded in the popular imagination than either Milton or Shakespeare.' The point is that literary echoes work on two levels: on the one hand in the author's conscious use of conventional forms and, on the other, at a deeper level of language and assumed values, which,