The poem opens with a description of a village named Auburn, written in the past tense.
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed (lines 1 4).
The poem then moves on to describe the village in its current state, reporting that it has been abandoned by its residents with its buildings ruined.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;
And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,
Far, far away thy children leave the land
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay (lines 47 52)
After nostalgic descriptions of Auburn's parson, schoolmaster and alehouse, Goldsmith makes a direct attack on the usurpation of agricultural land by the wealthy:
... The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds:
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth (lines 275 300)
The poem later condemns the luxury and corruption of the city, and describes the fate of a country girl who moved there:
Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.
She once, perhaps, in village plenty blessed,
Has wept at tales of innocence distressed;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn:
Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,
Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,
And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,
When idly first, ambitious of the town,
She left her wheel and robes of country brown. (Lines 326 36)
Goldsmith then states that the residents of Auburn have not moved to the city, but have emigrated overseas. He describes these foreign lands as follows:
Far different there from all that charmed before
The various terrors of that horrid shore;
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,
And fiercely shed intolerable day (lines 345 8)
The poem mentions "wild Altama", a river in Georgia, an American colony founded by James Oglethorpe to receive paupers and criminals from Britain. As the poem nears its end, Goldsmith gives a warning, before reporting that even Poetry herself has fled abroad:
Even now the devastation is begun,
And half the business of destruction done;
Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,
I see the rural virtues leave the land.
Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail (lines 395 9)
The poem ends with the hope that Poetry can help those who have been exiled:
Still let thy voice, prevailing over time,
Redress the rigours of the inclement clime;
Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain,
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him, that states of native strength possest,
Tho' very poor, may still be very blest;
That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away;
While self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky. (Lines 421 30)
Output: In the poem, while wealth accumulates, who decays?