THE VILLAGE SCHOOL MASTER

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

The Village Schoolmaster

Glossary

1 way: road.

2 blossom’d furze: i.e. flowering gorse (the beautiful yellow flowers).

7 boding tremblers: anxious (and so) shaking school-children – a gently comic phrase.

13 aught: anything.

14 fault: here pronounced “fought”, to rhyme with “aught”.

16 cipher: calculate, do maths.

17 terms and tides presage: i.e. he could predict (presage) where boundaries should be and the
dates of religious festivals. “Tides” means “times”, as in “Eastertide” for example.

18 gauge: calculate more complex things (like the liquid contents of a container or the area of a
piece of land).

19 owned: i.e. admitted.

21 words of learned length: i.e. long words (probably from Latin).

22 rustics: working-class country people.

POETIC DEVICES
 The poem makes use of visual imagery in the descriptions of the setting of
the old schoolhouse. There's a "straggling fence" peppered with
"blossom'd furze": the fence is now rather dilapidated, but the furze
bushes seem to bloom extravagantly.

 There, in his noisy mansion, skill'd to rule,

The village master taught his little school. It seems like the mansion is
actually noisy, but it is not the mansion. What Goldsmith is describing is
 the noisy students. As the adjective used for students is transferred to the
mansion the poetic device used here is ‘Transferred Epithet’.

 Repetition of similar sound in closely related lines is Alliteration

E.g. While words of learned length show a repetition of sounds of ‘l’ and
‘w’.
Alliteration is in the following phrases:-

“days disasters.”
learned length
thund’ring sound
"terms and tides";
"rustics rang'd"
 Antithesis– When two opposites are combined to create a contrast.
E.g. Mansion and little school are opposite ideas.