Oliver Goldsmith

The poem is an excerpt from a longer poem by Goldsmith called "The Deserted Village" and conveys the speaker's sentiments about a teacher. The word "village" in the title clearly suggests that the...

The schoolmaster is noted to be "severe." His reputation as a strict and serious teacher is supported in these lines: Full well they laugh'd with counterfeited glee,At all his jokes, for many a...

At first, it seems that the dog bit the man simply because he went mad. Nothing unusual there, we might think. Biting people is what mad dogs often do. Indeed, just about everyone in the poem...

Oliver Goldsmith’s poem "The Village Schoolmaster" is part of a longer work, "The Deserted Village." The poem describes and condemns the depopulation of the village, as its inhabitants move to the...

The central idea of the poem is that the villagers respect the schoolmaster for his education. The poem describes a small village school. Most of the residents in the village do not have much...

The schoolmaster in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem has numerous language skills. He tells jokes, he can write, and he is especially fond of arguing, according to the parson—even after he has lost the...

Onomatopoeia is defined as words that are used to imitate sounds they describe. There are two usages of onomatopoeia. One is fairly easy to recognize. It is easily illustrated by Batman's "Biff!...

Irony exists when what is expected and what occurs are in conflict with each other. As a literary device and a figure of speech, it highlights inconsistencies and is intended to draw attention,...

In the poem "The Village Schoolmaster" by Oliver Goldsmith, the poet is passing by his former schoolhouse and recalls the teacher who taught him when he was young. To be able to decide whether the...

This poem by Oliver Goldsmith describes a village schoolmaster who occasions "wonder" in the people of the village, because of "how much he knew." The people in the village have never known anyone...

In "The Village Schoolmaster," Oliver Goldsmith (c.1728-1774) presents a vivid picture of a certain schoolmaster. With each line, the reader peels away the layers of the schoolmaster's identity....

Before he became famous as a playwright, Oliver Goldsmith was renowned for his sparkling prose, which attracted the attention of no less a figure than Dr. Johnson, the foremost man of letters in...

Oliver Goldsmith uses quite a bit of alliteration in his poem "The Village Schoolmaster." Alliteration occurs when words in close proximity begin with the same consonant sounds. We note...

An elegy is a generally serious poem written to honor an individual who has died. By calling the poem an elegy, Goldsmith raises our expectations and encourages us to believe that the poem will be...

Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Village Schoolmaster” has a nostalgic tone for a simpler time in which society was more stable. The benign authority and predictability of the schoolmaster himself...

"If" is probably Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem (and one of my favorites), and it serves a didactic purpose of instructing a person on the various steps of becoming a good man. The first stanza...

The speaker of this poem begins by describing the current appearance of a former schoolhouse. The fence is falling down, and the bushes are overgrown now, though the schoolhouse used to be like a...

I do not think we necessarily have to interpret the line about the "village master" to mean that the school is like a village. Instead, we can understand this line as referring to the schoolmaster...