Pastoral poetry

“ This love-story of Polyphemus is pastoral poetry in its highest passionate condition. Of pastoral, in the sense in which it is generally understood, a briefer or [Pg 94] better specimen cannot be given than in the opening passages of our poet’s volume. You are in the circle of pastoral at once, and in one of its loveliest spots. You are in the open air under pine-trees by fountain-heads, in company with two born poets, goatherd and shepherd though they be; poets such as Burns and Allan Ramsay might have been, had they been born in Sicily. ”

“ In the history of human nature, he observes, the shepherd’s life is in the natural course of the transition from barbarism to social cultivation. It is, he adds, precisely in this 399 stage of the developement of human wants and energies, that the mind is particularly awakened to poetic activity: and as in pastoral life man is surrounded by the sweetest tranquillity of nature, so must pastoral poetry be the true poetry of nature. ”

“ The principal difficulty in pastoral poetry, when it attempts an actual delineation of nature, (which we have seen is too seldom its object,) lies in the association of delicate and affecting sentiments with the genuine manners of rustic life; an union so difficult to be accomplished, that the chief pastoral poets, both ancient and modern, have either entirely abandoned the attempt, by choosing to paint a fabulous and chimerical state of society ”

“ Ordinary writers, for instance,
compare aged men to trees in autumn—a gifted{15}
poet will in the fading trees discern the fading
men. [43] Pastoral poetry is a description of
rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and
corrected from the rude health of nature. Virgil,
and much more Pope and others, have run into{20}
the fault of coloring too highly; instead of
drawing generalized and ideal forms of shepherds, they
have given us pictures of gentlemen and beaux.
Their composition may be poetry, but it is not
pastoral poetry.{25}
[43] Thus:—
"How quiet shows the woodland scene! ”

“ The indications of a native pastoral impulse, manifesting itself in the burlesque of the religions drama and the romance of the popular ballads, we have already considered. The connexion which it is possible to trace between this undefined impulse and the later pastoral tradition is in no wise literary; in so far as it exists at all and is one of temperament alone, a bent of national character. ”

“ In their error I would not have you fall, lest you incur their censure. [459] Understand, therefore, a Pastoral to be—a Representation of Shepherds and Shepherdesses, with their Actions and Passions, which must be such as agree with their natures; at least, not exceeding former fictions and vulgar traditions. They are not to be adorn’d with any art, but such improper ones as nature is said to bestow, as Singing and Poetry ”

“ On this note, the realization at once of the delicate loveliness and of the unsubstantiality of the pastoral ideal, we may close our survey of its growth and blossoming in our dramatic literature, and before finally turning from the tradition which fascinated so many generations of European artists, pause for one moment to inquire of the critical expression it has received at the hands of more philosophical writers. ”

“ All that we know concerning the songs of pastoral nations leads us to suppose that they bear a close resemblance to the type of popular verse current wherever poetry exists, folk-songs of broad humanity in which little stress is laid on the peculiar circumstances of shepherd life. ”

“ We are, for instance, often told that it is the earliest of all forms of poetry, that it characterizes primitive peoples and permeates ancient literatures. Song is, indeed, as old as human language, and in a sense no doubt the poetry of the pastoral age may be said to have been pastoral. It does not, however, follow that it bears any essential resemblance to that which subsequent ages have designated by the name. ”

“ This tendency of the drama to absorb pastoral elements rather from the lyric and the idyll than from regular plays in that kind is significant. It is the acknowledgement of an important fact, which pastoralism failed to recognize; namely, that as the expression of the pastoral idea gained in complexity of artistic structure it lost in vitality. The pastoral drama, born late in time, was the outcome of very especial circumstances, emphatically the child of its age, and little calculated to serve the artistic requirements of any other. ”

“ Throughout a tendency is manifest to find fault with the artificiality of the piece, and to blame the author for not representing the true 'simplicity' of pastoral life. That the pastoral tradition was a wholly impossible, not to say an absurd one, bearing no true relation to nature at all, may be admitted; and it may be lamented by such as love to shed bitter tears because the sandy shore is not a well-swept parquet, or because anything you please is not something else to which it bears not the smallest resemblance. ”

“ As I started by pointing out at the beginning of this work, pastoral is not capable of definition by reference to any essential quality; whence it follows that any theory of pastoral is not a theory of pastoral as it exists, but as the critic imagines that it ought to exist. 'Everything is what it is, and not another thing,' and pastoral is what the writers of pastoral have made it. ”

“ I notice that I have used the expression 'pastoral ideal,' and the phrase, which comes naturally to the mind in connexion with this form of literature, may supply us with a useful hint. It reminds us, namely, that the quality of pastoralism is not determined by the fortuitous occurrence of certain characters, but by the fact of the pieces in question being based more or less evidently upon a philosophical conception, which no doubt underwent modification through the ages, but yet bears evidence of organic continuity. Thus the shepherds of pastoral are primarily and distinctively shepherds ”

“ But we, now, understand that pastoral affairs will not admit a tragic pathos. And the continuance of the pastoral vein, through five long acts, is found insipid, or even distasteful. This poem then has returned to that form which its inventors gave it, and which the subject so naturally prescribes to it.
II. But, though the common end of poetry, which is to please by imitation, together with the subjects of its several species, may determine the general plan, yet is there nothing, it may be said, in the nature of things to fix the order and connexion of single parts. ”

“ Thus Pope in the Discourse on Pastoral, prefixed to his eclogues in 1717, writes: 'A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character.... If we would copy nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment.' Shallow formalism this ”

“ On the one hand the spontaneous and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance. As a resuit the earlier native fashion affected in a noticeable degree later pastoral work, colouring and blending with instead of being overpowered by the regular tradition. ”

“ If no fond joy sits smiling in thine eyes,
No nymph of heavenly birth shall crown thy love,
Nor shalt thou share th' immortal feasts above.
[1] In this fourth pastoral, no particular landscape is delineated. The whole is a prophetic song of triumph. But as almost all the images and allusions are of the rural kind, it is no less a true bucolic than the others; if we admit the definition of a pastoral, given us by an author of the first rank, [A] who calls it "A poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects upon country life." ”

“ It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ample scope for his wit in anatomizing the foible of the day, fashionable society continued none the less to encourage the exquisite inanity, and to be flattered by the elegant obscurity, of the allegorical pastoral. ”

“ The church has been the celestial crucible in which whatever of human art or invention had within it the essential attributes of higher and spiritual goodness has been purified and adapted to the service of religion. Has poetry sought to please the imaginations of men? the church of Christ unfolded before her the annals of Christianity, with her grand central sacrifice of infinite love, and all her demonstrations of heroic suffering and courageous faith; and poetry drew holier inspiration from the view, and incited men by higher motives to a higher life. ”

“ O hands that hold the highest thoughts in thrall!
O wit that weighs the depth of all desert!
O sense that shews the secret sweet of all!
The heaven of heavens with heavenly power preserve thee,
Love but thyself, and give me leave to serve thee.
To serve, to live to look upon those eyes,
To look, to live to kiss that heavenly hand,
To sound that wit that doth amaze the mind,
To know that sense, no sense can understand,
To understand that all the world may know,
Such wit, such sense, eyes, hands, there are no moe. ”

“ But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These 35 outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread. ”

“ Words and phrases that are large enough for intercourse with our fellows become cramped and inexpressive when we speak to God. Praise and penitence alike would often be silent in the congregation of the saints if they could not at once veil and reveal their profoundest feelings in psalms and hymns. Poetry gives to devotion those robes of glory and beauty without which it would, at times, be almost unseemly 2 to join in the public worship of God or to disclose the heart’s secrets in the presence of fellow-worshippers. ”

“ As they listen to the poetry of the familiar passage read by the clergyman, their memories awaken, and vague hopes for they know not what are stirred to a restless life. All the surroundings and accompaniments reënforce these suggestions, for that is the transformed purpose of modern rites. The music throbs in their ears, now plaintive and low, now bursting into triumphant peals. Incense fills the air, and the lights burn dimly. ”

“ The church is dense with emotion; ordinary gentlemen, shopkeepers, labourers and their wives, men and women of all degrees of endurance, chivalry, good intention, uncertain aims, sentimental virtuousness, hypocrisy not dissevered from hardship, vanity not ignorant of tenderness, hard ambition, the desire to be respected,—men and women throw all kinds of strange meaning, heartfelt and present, imaginative, retrospective, expectant, into the vague words of the hymn. I can see one strong man shouting it with an expression as if he were pole-axing a bull. ”

“ And in all your sweetest vein
Still Aglaia strike her strain;
But when she her walk doth turn,
Then begin as fast to mourn;
All your flowers and garlands wither
Put up all your pipes together;
Never strike a pleasing strain
Till she come abroad again. ”

“ Public liturgical worship is a kind of art, a very delicate and beautiful art; and just as the appeal of what is spiritual comes to some through worship, it comes to others through art, or poetry, or affection, or even through some kinds of action. There is no hint that Christ laid any stress on liturgical or public worship at all ”

“ The priesthood of nature, the mood that can hold communion with her in her every place and time—these come only when the boy’s material age is past, and the childish dreams come back, mightier now and clearer, to clothe with their rare grace the expanding, growing soul. ”

“ Low sallows, on whose blooming bees do fall;
Fair woodbines, which about the hedges twine;
Smooth privet, and the sharp-sweet eglantine,
With many moe whose leaves and blossoms fair
The earth adorn and oft perfume the air. ”

“ I have been with her in the wards where the men have craved some simple religious service—the reading of Scripture, the repetition of a psalm, the singing of a hymn, or the offering of a prayer—and invariably the men were melted to tears by the touching simplicity of her eloquence. ”

“ So stands the Church athwart the landscape of our lives. In each community the church is like a living thing! How every stone grows significant and dear! How the lights and shadows of its arches, the dim, faint-tinted windows, the carvings and tracings, the atmosphere and coloring, all sink into the heart, and make a background for memories that never pass away! Who ever forgets the tones of the old organ, the voice of the choir, the accent, look, and bearing of one's early pastor, the rustle of the leaves without the window, the rush of the fresh summer air, the soft falling of the rain? ”