You are not the first who has noticed the Omission of the Hay-making: the best excuse I have to offer is, that in composing the Poem I was determined that what I said on farming should be EXPERIMENTALLY true. There was on that small farm no hay to make; it formed no part of my business; and Thompson has described it most charmingly. [1]
Notes
* Quoted in Joseph Holland's An Appendix to the Season of Spring, in the Rural Poem, "The Farmer's Boy" (Croydon, 1806), p. 3 BACK
[1] Thompson: James Thomson, whose Georgic poem The Seasons was Bloomfield's inspiration as a young writer. BACK