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1. "The Landscape of Memory" from DLB The locale of the poem is, as Roger Londsdale has termed it, "The landscape of memory"; and it is every reader's landscape. As the speaker muses amid the ruins of the deserted Auburn, it becomes simultaneously the mournful illustration of the effects of luxury and pride and the symbol of Everyman's idealized past. Goldsmith's elegy for the "lovely bowers of innocence and ease" is likewise the reader's lament for a lost yesterday(157). 2. Literary Conventions in "The Deserted Village": Virgil's Georgics and James Thompson's topographical poem(his Augustan humanism) from "Literary Conventions in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"" by Leo F. Storm. Goldsmith adapted two literary kinds current in eighteenth-century poetry to The Deserted Village: a standardized English version of the Virgilian georgic and the topographical or locodescriptive poem...It(Virgilian georgic)'s theme is "The glorification of labor; the praise of simple country life in contrast with the troubled luxury of palaces."...but while the rules of practice and advice to the husbandman...may by then have been indifferently preserved, the main argument, the rhetorical purpose of the classical georgic, remained intact. This purpose was to celebrate the contentment and innocence of the country as contrasted to the wealth and luxury of the city. ...The pastoral celebrates the idyllic and it is mainly artificial or idealized. The georgic, on the other hand, more realistically describes the peasant's life as one of virtually unremitting toil(245-46). ...Goldsmith's technique was essentially this: he juxtaposed a scene of Auburn before depopulation(recreated in the poet's imagination) next to a scene of Auburn's present desolation and ruin. The secure and innocent village of the past belongs to the georgic convention; the desolated village of the present is taken entirely from topographical "ruin" poetry(251)....The basic concern of the poem is to defend the conservative social order, which under the changing social conditions of England in 1770 could not long endure(253). 3. The Conservative Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Humanism from "Image and Structure in The Deserted Village" by Richard J. Jaarsma. At the heart of The Deserted Village is a lament for the dissolution of social order and the destruction of the humanistic values on which, Goldsmith feels, society ought to be based. This ethical theme is presented in three ways: an account of England's present sterility and decline, a series of contrasting pictures of an ideal past and an all too real present, and the positioning of a generalized "I" between the extremes of the society of the past and the social order of the present....Richard Quintana...suggests that Virgil's first Eclogue was Goldsmith's model for The Deserted Village. Elsewhere in his works, too, Goldsmith comes out consistently and squarely against simplistic views of society; and his attacks on rural innocence and noble primitivism with their supposed corollaries, virtue and ethical purity, ally Goldsmith firmly with the conservative tradition of eighteenth-century humanism, which saw innocence tending toward ignorance and ignorance leading toward ethical culpability(449). ...In the context of eighteenth-century conservative humanism, social individual ethical concerns are inseparable...Goldsmith does not...present a sentimental picture of the villagers leaving the shores of England, but instead comments deliberately on the moral and ethical virtues that are in the process of forsaking England(455, 458)...In the middle of this scene of ethical dissolution, Goldsmith somewhat surprisingly placed Poetry itself as one of the "virtues" that stand ready to leave(ll. 407-430)...By means of his identification with the muse of Poetry, the persona resolves the problem of the individual trapped between two societies, in neither of which he can comfortably exist...Auburn and "trade's proud empire"(l. 427) recede into insignificance, their virtues and vices abstracted and recast within the mold of the poetic experience which releases the individual from the chains of temporal social systems and preserves his individual ethical freedom(459). 4. The Deserted Village as a tombstone of a historical self from "The Auburn Syndrome: Change and Loss in "The Deserted Village" and Wordsworth's Grasmere" by Laurence Goldstein. Godstein's quotation of ll. 287-302. "this is no quiet Virgilian praise of retreat."(357) "The Deserted Village" ends with a witty address to poetry which laments that verse is "unfit, in these degenerate times of shame,/ To catch the heart or strike for honest fame"(409-10). The poem in this sense becomes monumental, like a tombstone, the embodiment of a historical self. Poetry has none of the power that Romantic poets will claim for it; it offers no religious comfort, no rebirth, no marriage of man's desire to external nature. Rather it is the verbal expression of the wound other poets must heal...In this poem Goldsmith faces physical ruin and accepts the irreversible dislocation of his past and present experience. The poem is evidence of failure, an index of loss. Those who follow have the duty to "redress of the inclement clime"(422).
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