The Village School Master

About the Poet

Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) was an Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase "goody two-shoes"

Summary and Explanation

The village Goldsmith is writing about is called "Auburn": it is not real, but an imaginary ideal one, possibly one of the villages he had observed as a child and a young man in Ireland and England. Goldsmith, the poet, returns to the village that he knew as vibrant and alive, and finds it deserted and overgrown

The setting of the particular passage is described in the first three lines. Then Goldsmith discusses the character of the schoolmaster himself. In his appearance, he is very severe and stern. The reader would suppose him humourless, except that he likes to tell jokes. When Goldsmith says "the boding tremblers learn'd to trace/The days disasters in his morning face," the reader comes to understand that the schoolmaster does not mince his words. In the last two lines, he indicates that the schoolmaster was no more. All of his fame has gone and the schoolhouse, nce vibrant is no longer in use.

The schoolmaster was a big presence in the village. In an age when literacy and numeracy were powerful the people of the village, looked up to him. He seems a kind of god. The children are fearful of him. They laugh at his jokes, even if they are not funny. “Full well “(9-10)

The adults are equally impressed with the way he can survey fields ("lands he could measure", 17) and work out boundaries or the times of holy-days like Easter. He can even do more complex calculations ("gauge", 18). This is all ironic: the school-teacher appears knowledgeable to the "gazing rustics" (22).

The poem's jokes are gentle. The tone of the poem is balanced and gentleness and humour imply a frame of mind that Goldsmith sees as important, as having a moral value in itself.

Audio Recital

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Figures of Speech in the Poem

A figure of speech is a way of saying a message. Many figures of speech are not meant to be understood exactly as they are said: they are not literal, factual statements.

Linguists call these figures of speech "tropes" -- a play on words, using words in a way that is different from its accepted literal or normal form. DiYanni wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense".

Metaphors are very common examples. A common figure of speech is to say that someone "threw down the gauntlet". This does not mean that a person threw a protective wrist-covering down on the ground. Instead, it usually means that the person issued a public challenge to another person (or many persons).

For alist of common figures of speech, click here

Alliteration: "terms and tides"; "rustics rang'd"

Anaphora: "Full well they laugh'd"; "Full well the busy"

Analogy: it's a part to whole. The schoolmaster (part) is compared to the village (whole)

Imagery: 3 types

setting-based imagery: "straggling fence"; "noisy mansion"; "little school" intellectual/educational imagery: "Lands"; "terms and tides"; "small head" rhetorical/linguistic imagery: "words"; "jokes"; "story" Rhyming couplets: pairs of rhyming lines ("spot" / "forgot")

End-stopped lines (punctuation "." or "," or ";" at the end of a line)

Caesura: punctation in the middle of a line ("Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught,")

Speaker/Tone: loves the school master; poem is a dedication to him