[New-Poetry] Poem ID

[Linda Sue Grimes]

Dear New-Poetry Listers,

I have received the following question where I volunteer, and I cannot think what poem this might be.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank,
Linda Sue
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Question: 
I am trying to identify an 18th or 19th century narrative poem I read as an adolescent, whose essence is this:  A wealthy, admired, handsome man, perhaps a judge, is travelling down a country road, where he encounters a peasant girl in the adjacent fields.  Does he ask her for water for himself or his horse?  Perhaps.  In any case, although the interaction, whatever its nature, is exceptionally brief it has an emotional impact on both that belies its apparently triviality.  Each instantly and intensely imagines himself (herself) rescued from their societally-decreed destiny, he to forsake a demanding and artificial life to live as a simple farmer, she to be lifted from the dusty drudgery of the peasant existence to be the mistress of a manor. My faint recollection is that their ardent yearnings were NOT simply a general desire to be transported out of their current lives but included a fair measure of old-fashioned boy-girl attraction, perhaps heightened by the impossibility of its being consummated.  And indeed it was not- each goes on to do exactly what is expected of them , however regretfully. (Although I recall thinking when I read it that the poet, in simultaneously presenting these two essentially contrary fantasies, might have been suggesting that neither way of life was inherently satisfying (or stultifying) and had either attained their desire they would eventually have been as dissatisfied with their new existence as they were with their old, due to "human nature" or their own particular natures.)  But what  poem is this, whose name and author have eluded the fumbling attempts of this novice researcher to ascertain them?
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