Marinelli - Pastoral

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e.g., Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e.g., Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject-matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

Towards the beginning of the eighth book of Wordsworths The Prelude, a book entitled Retrospect Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man, there occurs a passage of almost two hundred lines which is of distinct importance to the pastoral tradition. It begins with a notable paragraph on the growth of the poets love of humanity, a paragraph which terminates in a simple assertion about a class of simple men:

For me, when my affections first were led

From kindred, friends, and playmates, to partake

Love for the human creatures absolute self,

That noticeable kindliness of heart

Sprang out of fountains, there abounding most,

Where sovereign Nature dictated the tasks

And occupations which her beauty adorned,

And Shepherds were the men that pleased me first.

(1218)

The word Shepherd, rendered more prominent by the capitalization, is for any reader in the European tradition an evocatory one. But the resonances of the word may move us too suddenly into a wistful recollection of the meadows and pastures of the golden Arcadias of classical pastoral, and therefore Wordsworth is prompt to clarify his meaning. He does so by interposing a series of idyllic reminiscences which lovingly record the development of the earlier pastoral, and at the same time divide it sharply from his own conception of that form of life and of the literature it inspires. He approaches the issue by a series of negative definitions. The Shepherds with whom he is concerned are not those whom Saturn ruled in the Latian wilds and who have left even to us toiling in this late day,/A bright tradition of the golden age. They are not such as mid Arcadian fastnesses made a tradition of Felicity, in Grecian song renowned. They are not such as entered with Shakespeares genius the forests of Arden or the rustic setting where Perdita and Florizel Together danced, Queen of the feast, and King. Nor, finally (and the concision of the allusion is attributable perhaps to the wealth of pastoral forms to be found in this author), are they such as Spenser fabled. The Shepherd who plays so significant a part in Wordsworths own spiritual development is rather a type whose rural ways and manners were the unluxuriant product of a life/Intent on little but substantial needs. The line Smooth life had flock and shepherd in old time points the contrast neatly: the fanciful creatures of old pastoral on the one hand, and the actual shepherd of modern times on the other. And though there are points of contact between the two the latter also tunes a flageolet to liquid notes of love, he too occasionally spends hours of unlaborious pleasure, with no task/More toilsome than to carve a beechen bowl the poet is constantly aware that his contemporaries more usually move under skies less generous and serene than those of the ancient Mediterranean, in landscapes of wintry snows, hard labour, terrifying winds and an overawing solitude. In the poets idealizing imagination, the actual Shepherd assumes a giant shape: he becomes, beheld single against the sky, A solitary object and sublime. It is, perhaps, because the modern shepherd unites sublimity and reality that Wordsworth can draw the ultimate comparison between the delicate creatures of Arcadian fiction and what is essentially a moral being: