Today The New York Sun offers an excerpt from “The Village,” a long 1783 poem by George Crabbe (1754–1832). To say that Crabbe is underappreciated these days would be to give the wrong impression, for the truth is not that our present-obsessed age has forgotten a once-canonical poet. The truth is that general readers have never widely appreciated Crabbe. Figures from Jane Austen to T.S. Eliot have urged us to read him, to little effect. Only his fellow writers seem to have grasped just how good George Crabbe is.

The general preference for lyrical poetry may have something to do with the man’s lack of notice, as he tended toward narrative verse. And then there’s the question of length: From Francis Turner Palgrave’s standard Victorian anthology, “The Golden Treasury,” down to current collections, anthologies have preferred short pieces, and Crabbe usually wrote long. But perhaps the cause is most of all that he typically used heroic couplets, the technique of the high 18th-century poets, while describing ordinary people in rural scenes, the subject of the Romantics — all to do something neither the Augustans or the Romantics did: writing an unsparing realism in poetry.

As we noted yesterday, when the Sun offered E.A. Robinson’s tribute to Crabbe as its Poem of the Day, the poet was a Suffolk clergyman and doctor who moved to London in 1780 to attempt a literary career. Crabbe was taken up by Edmund Burke, who helped him from poverty by finding a living for him. Such work as the poet’s 1812 poetic “Tales” received some praise, but his long poems, “The Village” (1782) and “The Borough” (1810), remained a literary choice, not a truly popular one. 

Lord Byron called him “nature’s sternest painter, yet the best,” and you can see what Byron meant in today’s extract from “The Village.” “Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor, / Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door,” Crabbe declares as he tells what, off in an English village, actual life and actual death are like.

The Village (excerpt from Book I)
by George Crabbe

Thus groan the old, till, by disease opprest,
They taste a final woe, and then they rest.
Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents’ care;
Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot, and the madman gay.

Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruin’d age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride embitters what it can’t deny.

Say, ye, opprest by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance
With timid eye to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure;
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath,
Where all that’s wretched paves the way for death?