What is The Deserted Village about?

The Deserted Village is a pastoral elegy written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1770. The poem centers on the decline of Auburn, the narrator’s boyhood home, which serves as a symbol for the loss of a traditional rural way of life.1

The work critiques the social and economic forces of the time, specifically the greed of landlords and the impact of enclosure laws. These policies allowed aristocrats to consolidate land, displacing small-scale farmers who were forced to abandon their homes for a difficult life in cities or in America. By idealizing the village life that was being destroyed, Goldsmith highlights the human cost of these political and economic shifts. The poem’s sentimental tone later prompted a more cynical response from George Crabbe in his own work, The Village.1