In the Country of Convention

English Pastoral Verse1

‘Pastoral’ is a term that has been extended by usage until its original meaning has been largely eroded. For example, I have occasionally talked of the countryside where we live in Wicklow as being pastoral rather than rural, trying to impose notions of a beautified landscape on the word, in order to keep ‘rural’ for the unselfconscious face of raggle-taggle farmland. And we have been hearing about Hardy and Hemingway as writers of pastoral novels, which seems a satisfactory categorization. Originally, of course, the word means ‘of or pertaining to shepherds or their occupation’ and hence ‘a poem, play, etc, in which the life of shepherds is portrayed, often in conventional manner: also extended to works dealing with country life generally.’

The editors of The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse have stayed within the limits set by the dictionary, and have confined themselves, in their choice of verse from the Romantic period and later, to those ‘works dealing with country life’ which refract the pastoral convention as it manifests itself in the English poetic tradition from the late sixteenth until the eighteenth century. Consequently, there is a relatively small showing of nineteenth-century work, and only three poems by writers who can be considered modern: one each by Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. The bulk of the work comes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the editors end their introduction with a sentence that drops like a portcullis:

The Pastoral vision might still have life elsewhere—in the Third World, or in North America perhaps—where there are still occasional frontiers to confront the regulating effect of urban development; but now and in England, the Pastoral, occasional twitches notwithstanding, is a lifeless form, of service only to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages, ‘modernized to a high standard’.

The anthology, then, could be subtitled ‘the rise and fall of the pastoral convention in England’. It is a packed and well-groomed book, not so much a region to wander in as an estate to be guided through, and John Barrell and John Bull are always intent on being a little ahead of us, to make sure that we see the ground from their point of view. They divide the book into seven sections, each with its separate introduction, which means that we are given a brief history of the form in seven short chapters, dealing consecutively with ‘The Elizabethan Pastoral’, ‘The Pastoral Drama’, ‘The Seventeenth-Century Pastoral’, ‘Augustan Pastoral’, ‘Whigs and Post-Augustans’, ‘Some Versions of Anti-Pastoral’, and ‘Romantics and Victorians’.

Through all this, the editors’ approach is consistent to the point of being, in the end, constricting. They insist that

the pastoral vision is, at base, a false vision, positing a simplistic, unhistorical relationship between the ruling landowning class—the poet’s patrons and often the poet himself—and the workers of the land; as such its function is to mystify and to obscure the harshness of actual social and economic organization.

This is the approach elaborated by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City and to a certain extent this book is a companion volume to Mr. Williams’s, incorporating most of the texts he refers to and underlining or extending his discussion of them. Now this sociological filleting of the convention is a bracing corrective to an over-literary savouring of it as a matter of classical imitation and allusion, but it nevertheless entails a certain attenuation of response, so that consideration of the selected poems as made things, as self-delighting buds on the old bough of a tradition, is much curtailed. The Marxist broom sweeps the poetic enterprise clean of those somewhat hedonistic impulses towards the satisfactions of aural and formal play out of which poems arise, whether they aspire to delineate or to obfuscate ‘things as they are’.

In spite of the assent which their thesis earns, and gratitude for the abundance of material with which it is illustrated, the value of the book seems to me to be lessened by the editors’ decision not to print translations of Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, Mantuan, Marot—those informing, influencing voices that were ‘modified in the guts of the living’. While there was indeed mystification (a word I am reluctant to regard as altogether pejorative in poetry) of economic and social realities in Renaissance and eighteenth-century pastoral, there was surely also the purely literary ambition to provide a poetry in English that would adorn and classicize the native literature. Spenser, Milton, Pope and Thomson were as automatically conscious of the classical penumbra behind their own efforts as most of today’s students are unconscious of it, and since this book is likely to attain textbook status it is a pity that the ancient hinterland, the perspectives backward, are withheld.

We begin, therefore, in the middle of things English, with Barnabe Googe, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh and Drayton. It is impossible to miss the note both of exhilaration and consolidation in this work as English poetry vaults into the saddle of the Mediterranean Pegasus and harnesses him to Cuddys and Hobbinols and heighos and roundelays. It is hard, for example, to separate the tang of folksong from the whiff of the classics in ‘Come live with me and be my love’. The editors take cognizance of this conventional vision of the period as a takeover move on humanism by the vernacular with a nice discussion of Spenser’s ‘attempt to find an English Doric’ in The Shepheardes Calendar, two sections of which are included. Here they note the way the language at one time, in its homely guise, points to an image of recognizable rural reality, and at another, in its ‘higher’ modes, tends towards masquerade. Such disjunctions are symptomatic of the conflict explored by the anthology as a whole, between pastoral as realistic observation and pastoral as artificial mode.

As the editors point out in the beginning, a similar conflict presents itself in the Eden myth which, together with the classical dream of the Golden Age, lies behind most versions of pastoral. Eden was a garden, an image of harmony between man and nature; it was a place where the owners of the land were the workers of the land, for whom the very land itself worked and produced of its own accord. Yet while the Genesis story gives shape to this persistent dream of paradise (and, by transference, utopia), it also acknowledges the world outside the garden as a place of thorns which man enters in sorrow, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Hence the idealized landscape with contented figures, the garden, the harmonious estate, all the recurring features of the convention, are sanctioned by the race’s nostalgia; yet they misrepresent the quotidian actualities of the world man inhabits outside Eden, and in the end beget a form of anti-pastoral in which sweat and pain and deprivation are acknowledged.

Nostalgic dream versus contemporary reality, propertied interests versus the labourer’s lot—variations on these themes occur all through the book. Spenser, for example, finally opts for the enamelled world, the dream of an aristocratic English Arcadia, which finds expression in his idealization of Sir Philip Sidney who becomes, in Astrophel, ‘a gentle shepherd borne in Arcady’, and who is represented in Book VI of The Faerie Queene first as the chivalrous Sir Calidore and then as Sir Calidore turned shepherd:

Which Calidore perceiving, thought it best

To chaunge the manner of his loftie looke;

And doffing his bright armes himselfe addrest

In shepheards weed; and in his hand he tooke

Instead of steele-head speare, a shepheards hooke.

But the editors, in the introductory passage to these Elizabethan poems, have already done some enamel-stripping:

We can see fairly clearly here the Golden Age being relocated in the myth of the recent feudal past.… the first act of the masquerade is followed by a second, as the courtier disguises himself next as a shepherd. The world thus created—in The Faerie Queene and in the poems from the Arcadia—has far more to do with the dream of an old social order than with that of a prehistoric Golden Age.

This gilding of the age just past is a persistent feature of the poems in the anthology—one thinks immediately of The Deserted Village—and it is a strategy by which the disagreeable encroachments of the present are evaded and disagreeable facts in the past elided. When, early in the seventeenth century, Jonson celebrates Penshurst, the house which had been the home of Sir Philip Sidney and so, in a sense, the birthplace of English pastoral, he envisages it as the microcosm of patronage and paternalism. The estate, moreover, is Edenic in its apparently automatic productiveness and harmonious social relationships. But Jonson also acknowledges it as exceptional and, by implicitly indicting the bourgeois individualism of the times, condones the feudal structures of the past and mystifies the economic organization of the present:

The blushing apricot, and wooly peach

Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

And though thy walls be of the countrey stone,

They are rear’d with no mans ruine, no mans grone,

There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them downe;

But all come in, the farmer and the clowne.

Jonson’s poem is echoed bitterly by the last poem in the anthology, Yeats’s ‘Ancestral Houses’, but it also points the way to a more equable and bourgeois mode, where the Virgilian shepherd disappears to have his place taken by the Horatian farmer. The convention of high artificiality at once expires and is apotheosized in the seventeenth century in ‘Lycidas’, while in Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, the new poetry of retreat mutates naturally out of the old idealized landscape:

The Garden is a world within the world and not a separation from it; it is a state of individual harmony that has no geographical placement, and is not to be achieved by the labour of men as conventionally understood. The traditional oppositions of pastoral are reconciled in Marvell’s ‘happy Garden-state’, and the Golden Age is relocated in the world of puritan individualism.

While the pastoral idiom and nomenclature reasserted themselves to some cynical purpose after the Restoration, it was the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century that gave the more conventional expressions of the form a new lease of life and in the end inevitably bred the anti-pastoral. The debate, as Pope expressed it in his ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’, about whether ‘we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then (in the Golden Age) to have been’ was actively renewed. Joseph Addison commended the naturalism of Ambrose Philips who had ‘given a new life, and a more natural beauty to this way of writing by substituting in the place of these antiquated fables, the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country’, although Philips’s Colinets and Cuddys, in their intonation, manner and matter, are still obviously the invention of an urban literary man. There is a more robust and realistic grip on country matters in John Gay’s eclogue on ‘The Birth of the Squire’ which ends with a vision of his death:

Methinks I see him in his hall appear,

Where the long table floats in clammy beer,

’Midst mugs and glasses shatter’d o’er the floor,

Dead-drunk his servile crew supinely snore;

Triumphant, o’er the prostrate brutes he stands,

The mighty bumper trembles in his hands;

Boldly he drinks, and like his glorious Sires,

In copious gulps of potent ale expires.

By 1720, Astrophel was turning in his grave. But some of the most enjoyable, if not exactly deft writing in this Augustan section comes in the attempts at a native georgic, such as John Philips’s ‘Cyder’, more diction than drink:

                              Now prepare

Materials for thy Mill, a study Post

Cylindric, to support the Grinder’s Weight

Excessive, and a flexile Sallow’ entrench’d.

Rounding, capacious of the juicy Hord.

Nor must thou not be mindful of thy Press

Long e’er the Vintage; but with timely Care

Shave the Goat’s shaggy Beard, least thou too late,

In vain should’st seek a Strainer, to dispart,

The husky, terrene Dregs, from purer Must.

Two-and-a-half centuries later, this is as unintentionally funny as the squibs by Swift and Richard Jago designed to ridicule a too naïve urban version of the country.

Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’, of course, is central to any consideration of English pastoral verse. It is not a nostalgic poem, because Thomson’s Golden Age is contemporary England as after-image of Augustan Rome, a Golden Age characterized not by the absence of labour but by its successful organization. ‘The owners of the land that Thomson describes are content to live by the sweat of someone else’s brow, if not their own.’ But Thomson maintains a crucial synthesis of two attitudes to nature which in the course of the century tend to separate into divergent forms of expression. There is, on the one hand, his sublime celebration of nature’s untamed prodigality in the tropics, where paradisal abundance and absence of human cultivation constitute a positive value; on the other hand, there is his commendation of progressive agricultural England, where it is the processes and rewards of labour and the subdued and humanized face of nature that generate the fervent rhetoric. From the first strain of sensibility comes the poetry of the solitary in the unspoiled landscape, a contemplative romantic kind, very different from the Horatian ‘happy the man’ school: it is represented later in the anthology by extracts from Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’, Beattie’s ‘The Minstrel’, Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’, and others. From the second there continued the English georgic—Dyer’s ‘Fleece’, Grainger’s ‘Sugar-Cane’ and Christopher Smart’s ‘Hop Garden’, the latter containing such rousing advice to gentlemen-farmers as this specification for a foreman:

One thing remains unsung, a man of faith

And long experience, in whose thund’ring voice

Lives hoarse authority, potent to quell

The frequent frays of the tumultuous crew.

He shall preside o’er all thy hopland store,

Severe dictator!

Still, Stephen Duck’s reaction to just such a prop of the economy makes refreshing reading:

He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day;

He swears we’ve idled half our Time away;

‘Why look ye, Rogues, d’ye think that this will do?

‘Your Neighbours thrash as much again as you.’

Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools,

To drown the hated Names, of Rogues and Fools.

But wanting these, we just like School-boys look,

When angry Masters view the blotted Book:

They cry, ‘their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’

We, ‘the Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green’.

With Duck, Crabbe and Clare there emerges the voice that the editors have been waiting to hear, a voice protesting on behalf of the agricultural labourer, who no longer appears as jocund swain or abstract Industry but as a hard-driven human being. It is a voice that has some trouble with its accent—Duck’s natural country vigour is soon smoothed out and co-opted by the conventional diction of the period—and it was the unique achievement of John Clare to make vocal the regional and particular, to achieve a buoyant and authentic lyric utterance at the meeting-point between social realism and conventional romanticism. His ‘Lament of Swordy Well’, printed here, must be one of the best poems of its century.

This anthology is at once an introduction to pastoral and a revisionary reading of it, and I have given little idea of the way it provides a context for the more celebrated examples of the kind. It is a book definitely worth doing and worth having. A sense of the old validity of the pastoral and of its diminution of force in the nineteenth century emerges until one almost agrees with the editors’ brisk dismissal of its further possibilities.

Yet I wonder if the story ends as quickly as all that. Obviously, we are unlikely to find new poems about shepherds that will engage us as fully as ‘Lycidas’, but surely the potent dreaming of a Golden Age or the counter-cultural celebration of simpler life-styles or the nostalgic projection of the garden on childhood are still occasionally continuous with the tradition as it is presented here. If Hopkins’s ‘Harry Ploughman’ gets in, what about Edward Thomas’s ‘Lob’ or Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’ or Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Island Funeral’? I can see a case against MacNeice’s eclogues, yet they do represent the form as an enabling resource; but is Housman not a definite candidate for inclusion, if only as arch-mystifier? Is the work of David Jones, in pieces like ‘The Sleeping Lord’, or ‘The Tutelar of the Place’, not a version of pastoral, based on a visionary nostalgia for an early British Golden Age? It is true that Irish writing was outside the field of reference, but in this area such seminal texts as Synge’s Aran Islands (prose, granted) and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, pastoral and anti-pastoral respectively, are not to be regarded just as ‘occasional twitches’. And more recently we have had John Montague’s The Rough Field. Or are these latter works held at bay in the term ‘frontier pastoral’?

The Times Literary Supplement, 1975