A Role of Settings In Oliver Goldsmith's poem"The Deserted Village".

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A Role of Settings

In Oliver Goldsmith’s poem

“The Deserted Village”

Sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of the plain

Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain…

Having read Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The deserted village”, I was deeply impressed by the author’s ability to share with a reader his inner vision of a countryside and nature treasures.  Various metaphors and personifications lead us into the imaginary world of fairyland covered with sounds, pictures, feelings. It makes us forget about city environment and remember green mysterious forests, lush spring meadows, gentle deep skies.

The setting takes the central part of the lyrical poem. The author describes it with all the details, with all shades that attract our attention. The native land – Auburn – represents as if the main character in The Deserted Village. The reader knows everything about it – how it looked before and how it looks now after the farewell. We knew all the niceties of the rural life that was shown with a sort of great observance. The setting creates here the feeling of something very close to the heart, something that we know very well and it makes us remember our childhood. Goldsmith focuses particularly on the transmission of his own memoirs of youth – the setting perform this exercise at its fullest extent.

The author tries to describe the way of a rural life in a most poetical manner. He grew up in rural isolation where he could enjoy nature everywhere and note all the details and differences between countryside and city districts. How fresh his conception of colours and actions, sights and landscapes is! How realistically he describes the scenes:

The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,

The never-failing brook, the busy mill,

The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,

The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade

 Here, I believe,  Auburn reproduced Lissoy, the native village of Goldsmith. Nostalgic memoirs of the Irish place Lissoy, where the writer has spend his childhood, are twisted in the poem.

 The setting express here delightful rural descriptions, tender melancholy of its metrical cadences. Here we can observe the author’s attentiveness which he pays to everything that happens around him beginning with environment and finishing with people’s inner thoughts and disappointments.

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Throughout the poem Goldsmith celebrates the extraordinary in the everyday realities of country life.  His use of simple language accentuates the naturalness of the poem and perfectly suits the simple rural scene that it describes.

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,

Seats of my youth, when every sport could please

…How often have I paus’d on every charm,

The shelter’d cot – the cultivated farm,

The never-failing brook – the busy mill,

The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill

         Oliver Goldsmith does his best to let us believe we are in the presence of described place, ...

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