The Language of the Tribe

I've just managed to get Swift tangled up with Goldsmith. Easily done in this case as the outpourings of the Anglo Irish tradition, tend to leave me tired and cold.

Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" was "de rigueuer" in the classroom in the 1960s and I think I may have got the wrong end of the stick even then.

A quick re-reading today reminds me of how seriously annoying "The Classics" can be and rather than find cause for regret I think the poem could be used
to explain why so many people are very happy to live in cities rather than try to maintain a coherent life in a dying rural community. The question of blame, never far
from the Celt's mind, is thrashed about, as usual, and anybody fresh to Ireland's literature could find much help in the poem to explain how people hereabouts have created a coherent
story which is instantly recognisable to the insider.

Swift did not have much of Goldsmith's "joie de vivre", so I tend to prefer the latter's work overall. "She Stoops to Conquer" is the sort of romp that makes one very grateful for a national road system and the last time I saw it was in the Abbey during the 1980's.
The company was so strapped for cash they made the costumes from calico and spattered it with paint... a memorably unhappy experience of the
last recession which is still, debateably, worse than this one. At least the Gogol play we saw just before Christmas was very pleasingly attired...
something that Goldsmith would have expected in the case of his work.

Readers of both Swift and Goldsmith will doubtless note the common agenda... that people are very peculiar indeed
and that moaning punctuated by "fou rire" is a constant in the writings of their day.

(The offending post, muddling the writers, is on Moderntwist2 today.)