"Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, Like other farmers, flourish and complain"
About this Quote
Crabbe lands a needle in two quick couplets: the rural class that likes to imagine itself as England's moral backbone is, in practice, as self-interested and contradictory as anyone else. "Round" does double duty. It flatters the farmers as prosperous, well-fed, almost comically stout with success, while hinting at a kind of dull completeness: they are sealed off inside their own contentment. Then comes the pivot - "well pleased with constant gain" - an unromantic premise that cuts against the sentimental pastoral tradition of humble toil and rustic virtue.
The punchline is the last three words: "flourish and complain". Crabbe isn't accusing them of hypocrisy so much as capturing a national habit: prosperity doesn't quiet grievance; it funds it. Complaining becomes a performance of innocence and entitlement, a way to claim hardship even while the ledger looks good. "Like other farmers" also matters. It's a refusal to mythologize the countryside as a separate species of person. The rural economy is an economy; its winners sound like winners everywhere, rehearsing scarcity while accumulating.
Contextually, Crabbe wrote against the fashionable pastoral idealizations of his day, favoring a gritty realism shaped by local observation and the social churn of late-18th/early-19th century Britain. The line reads like reportage sharpened into satire: a corrective to urban readers who want the country to stay quaint, and to rural elites who want their profits to read as virtue.
The punchline is the last three words: "flourish and complain". Crabbe isn't accusing them of hypocrisy so much as capturing a national habit: prosperity doesn't quiet grievance; it funds it. Complaining becomes a performance of innocence and entitlement, a way to claim hardship even while the ledger looks good. "Like other farmers" also matters. It's a refusal to mythologize the countryside as a separate species of person. The rural economy is an economy; its winners sound like winners everywhere, rehearsing scarcity while accumulating.
Contextually, Crabbe wrote against the fashionable pastoral idealizations of his day, favoring a gritty realism shaped by local observation and the social churn of late-18th/early-19th century Britain. The line reads like reportage sharpened into satire: a corrective to urban readers who want the country to stay quaint, and to rural elites who want their profits to read as virtue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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