It was one of 23 poems to appear in Alfred's third book of verse, called Nature and Other Poems, published in the first week of October, 1912.

In reviewing the book in his posthumous biography of Alfred, Leonard Clark said:

His joy at the sight of homely folk living graciously in the peace of their own simple surroundings is aroused by a recollection of evening in a Wiltshire cottage. "The Cottager's Evening" instantly recalls Burns, but it really owes little to him. It bears its own individual and wistful mark.

Alfred would have visited many such cottages - firstly out of pure sociability, secondly because they were a rich source of background material as he researched his poetry and prose, but also because he cycled 7,000 miles around the Upper Thames region (in the winter of 1915-16), in a quest to transcribe the lyrics of nearly a thousand folksongs for Folk Songs of the Upper Thames.

Much more insight into the life of ordinary people from South Marston and neighbouring villages can be found in his three great 'villages' books - Round About the Upper Thames, Villages of the White Horse and the first of the series, A Wiltshire Village. This was about his home village, South Marston, and was completed in the same month as Nature and Other Poems, which suggests that if there was a particular cottage that inspired The Cottager's Evening, it is most likely to have been one in South Marston.

To speculate even further, the poem may have been inspired by the cottage belonging to Mark Titcombe. In A Wiltshire Village, Alfred talks about Titcombe's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to save money in order to avoid going to the workhouse in later life, and describes the cottage in great detail:

His dwelling was simplicity itself. There was one very large room downstairs. This was kitchen, parlour, and sitting-room combined. The floor was of large and small flat stones, which the old man smeared over once a week and whitened the whole with free-stone. The fireplace was very wide and old-fashioned, simply the original hearth, with a few bricks and bars which he had bult up himself. Halfway up the chimney, on one side, was a bread oven. There was a cupboard adjoining the fireplace. Here, in a little stone pot, the golden sovereigns, often amounting to a considerable sun, were kept, and the bank-book as well. If it had been suspected that there was so much money there, someone or other might have been tempted to break in and obtain it, but only one beside the old man knew of its existence. There were three small deal tables, and three straight-backed chairs. On the mantelpiece were half a dozen old-fashioned painted clay figures - of dogs, cocks, and other animals. On the wall opposite the window were shelves for the crockery-ware, containing a little good china, the property of his mother, an ancient clock that had long been silent, and two coloured prints, entitled 'Peace' and 'Plenty', which the old fellow one day gave to me with such ceremony, together with his antiquated silver watch, for a keepsake, and which I still have in my possession, out of kindness for his memory.
There was a stout rack affixed to the huge beam that supported the ceiling. This formerly contained the flitch of bacon, and is to be met with in most old farm-houses and cottages. Adjoining this was a good-sized pantry. A broad stairway led to the bedrooms, two in number. The old thatch roof was as full of starlings as it could be. His food was of the plainest kind - bread and a little butter, lard, cheese, or boiled bacon, and potatoes. He drank tea once a day, in the evening. For many years he only had two meals a day - breakfast and dinner combined at noon, and tea about six. After that he made up a good fire of wood, and sat dozing in his chair, looking into the flames, thinking of his old mother and father, and times of long ago. Sometimes when I was sitting with him, very often half asleep myself, warmed with a good glass of home-made wine - a quanitity of which he brewed every year with fruit from his garden - he would suddenly wake up with a start, and nearly jump out of his chair, then rub his eyes and laugh, and tell me what he had been dreaming.

Soon after returning from serving his country in India during the First World War, Alfred and his devoted wife Mary built their own cottage - with their bare hands, which they named Ranikhet, after the hill station where Alfred was stationed in India.

They famously used stone from a disused canal lock, which had to be wheeled in a barrow over a distance of about a mile. However, some of the stone came from none other than the long-unoccupied cottage in South Marston that he wrote about in A Wiltshire Village that had belonged to Mark Titcombe.

Alfred and Mary's last years in their new cottage saw them experience the hardship of cottagers' lives at first hand. Forced to retire from industrial labour through ill health, and largely forgotten as an author, by the late 1920s Alfred was struggling to earn enough to eat.

He died in 1930, from a heart attack, but near-starvation, as well as years of poverty and poor health, exacerbated by his industrial career, undoubtedly contributed to his early death at the age of 53.

Mary died six weeks later.

Overview of Alfred's life story

Chronicle of Alfred's life, year by year

Betty Reynolds' memories of Alfred's last years

Sweet, simple poverty! How I love to see
   The humble labourer's poor and homely fare,
   The rustic fireside's cheerful, ruddy glare,
The blazing log, sawn from the woodland tree,
The singing kettle, spouting furiously,
   The husbandman's return, the good-wife's care,
   The golden-tinted loaf, the steaming ware,
The infant, perched upon the father's knee!
To see them sitting at the frugal board,
   And hear the chosen compliment addrest,
   The general happiness so well exprest,
The fond endearment and the loving word;
Parents and children mutually adored,
   And after, peaceful slumber's balmy rest!

Check out the knitted version of the poem!