Oliver Goldsmith's work The Village Schoolmaster (lines 193-216) is an excerpt from his poem The Deserted Village (430 lines). It is a well-known pastoral elegy. The schoolmaster is mourning the death of a young student who has committed suicide. This short poem is composed in iambic pentameter. This means that each line ends with a five-syllable word and that these lines are based on pairs of metrically identical syllables. For example, the first line begins with a long syllable followed by a short one and so forth until the fifth line which also begins with a long syllable. The poem is about how the death of a child has an eternal quality to it and how nothing can ever destroy its memory or take away its beauty. It also describes how the village has been robbed of its most precious resource - the schoolmaster - and what will become of it without him. Finally, it asks whether love can find a way into such a desolate place. Suicide was a controversial topic even at the time it was written. Some people believed that suicide was a sin and that God would not allow it to be done as a form of punishment.