The Fitzroy Blacksmith, with Apologies to Longfe

Name: The Fitzroy Blacksmith, with Apologies to Longfellow
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson

"The Fitzroy Blacksmith, with Apologies to Longfellow" is Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson's comic parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's sentimental 1840 poem "The Village Blacksmith." Where Longfellow's original enshrines a New England smith as a paragon of quiet Christian virtue — a mighty, sober, God-fearing man who labours honestly under his spreading chestnut tree, worships each Sunday, weeps at his daughter's voice recalling her dead mother, and earns from the poem's speaker (and by extension the reader) unqualified moral admiration for a life "onward through life he goes" in humble industry — Paterson strips away the piety and transplants the figure bodily into Fitzroy, then one of inner Melbourne's roughest, most notoriously larrikin-infested working-class suburbs. The poem works stanza by stanza (or at least sentiment by sentiment) as a deliberate travesty of its model, retaining the metre and some of the structural beats of Longfellow's verse while inverting or deflating every one of its earnest claims. The "mighty man" is still physically strong and still recognisable by trade, but the qualities that made him admirable in the original are undercut or replaced with the vices and habits associated with the Fitzroy "push" culture of the era: pugilism, drink, larceny, gambling, and a general disregard for the churchgoing respectability that Longfellow's smith embodies. Paterson's characteristic ear for Australian vernacular speech, larrikin slang, and knockabout humour is put to work turning a solemn Victorian moral fable into a rollicking, disreputable comic sketch — the blacksmith becomes less a village elder to be revered than a local hard case, more likely to be found squaring off in a bare-knuckle bout or ducking the police than raising a family in exemplary Christian toil. The satirical method is essentially one of bathos: each lofty Longfellow image or sentiment (the smith's honest sweat, his untroubled sleep bought by clean living, his weekly worship, his tears of fond memory) is answered with a deflating, larrikin-inflected Australian equivalent, so that the poem's comedy comes from the gap between the two registers — American transcendentalist uplift versus colonial Melbourne street humour. This is entirely consistent with Paterson's broader practice of parodying or "answering" well-known poems (he did similar things elsewhere in his lighter verse), using a familiar, much-recited schoolroom classic as scaffolding on which to hang distinctly Australian, irreverent, working-class colour. Read as a whole, the piece functions as gentle mockery both of Longfellow's moralising sentimentality and, affectionately, of the rough Fitzroy "push" milieu itself — Paterson pokes fun in both directions at once, sending up the earnest didacticism of the original poem while also caricaturing (with evident enjoyment rather than contempt) the pugnacious, hard-drinking, larrikin stereotype long associated with that particular corner of Melbourne. The title's own apologetic gesture — "with Apologies to Longfellow" — signals the poem's self-aware status as a cheeky send-up rather than a serious character study: it is a bit of light verse squarely in the Australian bush-balladist's tradition of taking a solemn, well-known original and giving it a knockabout colonial twist, trading Puritan virtue for Fitzroy vice for comic effect.

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Satirical Poetry, Parody, Australian Literature · 242 words

First lines

Under the spreading deficit, / The Fitzroy Smithy stands; / The smith, a spendthrift man is he, / With too much on his hands; / But the muscles of his brawny jaw / Are strong as iron bands.

Pay out, pay out, from morn till night, / You can hear the sovereigns go; / Or you'll hear him singing "Old Folks at Home", / In a deep bass voice and slow, / Like a bullfrog down in the village well / When the evening sun is low.

The Australian going "home" for loans / Looks in at the open door; / He loves to see the imported plant, / And to hear the furnace roar, / And to watch the private firms smash up / Like chaff on the threshing-floor.

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The Fitzroy Blacksmith, with Apologies to Longfellow is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson
Date: 1940 CE
Language: English
Genres: Satirical Poetry, Parody, Australian Literature, Narrative Poetry, Humorous Poetry
Length: 242 words
Structure: 1 section, 5 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Satirical Poetry — The primary genre: the poem satirizes a spendthrift character through ironic observations about the blacksmith who earns constantly but immediately spends all his earnings on schemes and loans.
Parody — Explicitly subtitled 'with Apologies to Longfellow,' it directly parodies Longfellow's 'The Village Blacksmith,' adopting its narrative structure and central figure while inverting the moral and thematic content.
Australian Literature — Composed by Andrew Barton Paterson, one of Australia's most prominent poets, set in Fitzroy (Melbourne), and infused with Australian cultural references and economic concerns of early 20th-century Australia.
Narrative Poetry — Presents a narrative arc describing the blacksmith's perpetual cycle of work, spending, and financial schemes, following him through his daily routines with sequential temporal progression.