The Pastoral
The pastoral, often taken as the central genre of nature poetry, has roots in Theocritus (3rdC BC) an urbane urban Alexandrian.[i] Virgil (1stC BC) affirmed the genre as portraying idealised (obviously fictionalised) easy-going lives of shepherds, in contrast to complex worldly lives of courtiers and city dwellers. He called the poems in the Eclogues buccolica in imitation of the Idylls of Theocritus. The pastoral world is not very wild, it is a world of singers, the beech tree whose shade they use is inscribed.[ii] The rebirth of pastoral began in Italian courts with Sannazaro’s ‘Arcadia’ (1481-6), followed by Tasso, Aristo, Spenser[iii] and Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ (c1580s).
Louis Montrose shows the dramatic disparity between rural life and pastoral forms in Elizabethan times.[iv] The Pastoral is fantasy, Sidney ignores Arcadia’s formation from the destruction of a village [emparked].[v] In his pastoral poem 'To Penshurst' (1616), Ben Jonson appreciates a fecund estate but as Raymond Williams writes, 'The world of Penshurst or of Saxham [Thomas Carew] can be seen as moral economy only by conscious selection and emphasis.'[vi] William Gilpin conceived of the picturesque method of looking at landscape as a sequence of changing vistas from a visit to the famous English landscape garden of Stowe (1740s) – itself emparked. George Monbiot went to school there and notes, ‘Kent and Brown constructed a paradise, in fact part of the grounds are called The Elysian Fields, but their classical wilderness was an artefact of social cleansing.[vii] These parks became emblems of English landscape but Richard Flanagan complains of landscape itself in the Tasmanian context, ’The idea of landscape is Terra nullius it is about removing people and essentially removing ourselves; - about finding the vista, the long view rather than understanding how we exist within the land and the land within us - and that’s the art towards which I would hope we would be striving now.’[viii] John Muir like Thoreau thought the indigenous Indians lived a way of life that was a natural part of nature. What he did not understand was their labour. The Edenic meadows, the floor of Yosemite, was made by the Ahwahneechee Indians repeatedly firing the area for grazing.[ix] We now know how much Aboriginal people transformed Australia, including the outback.[x] This is still, controversy over the extent of their impact.[xi]
Judith Wright also costs the pastoral, ‘Well, there are luxuries still,/ including pastoral silence, miles of slope and hill,/ the cautious politeness of bankers.’[xii] Pastoral visions linger in the garden, so important in urban history, though even there the promise of Eden is thwarted.[xiii] Spencer had warned of too much artifice in a garden[xiv] and Marvell was ambivalent.[xv] Anthony Low suggests Marvell's garden poems are georgic by dealing with agricultural labour while suggesting Marvell is ‘among the most subtle of English pastoralists.’[xvi]
The poet John Kinsella has noted that the term pastoral, ‘The anti-pastoral, the post-pastoral, the radical pastoral, the neo-pastoral are all terms that are in frequent use among pastoral theorists and practitioners in the late twentieth century.’[xvii] What is of interest to me are the first signs of attention to local natural environments and treating them on their own terms not as allegories emblems. Malcolm Andrews argues it was not until the 18thC that, ‘The gradual naturalisation of classical pastoral poetry and the imaginative recreation of Milton’s Eden in the Thames Valley or a Worcestershire landscape prepares us for the Picturesque practices.’[xviii]
Whereas the pastoral was North America’s nature genre, from the beginning the georgic shadows Australian literature. Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) was the first poetry book published in Australia, though his prose is finer. ‘[T]he foliage is scanty, and of a peculiar pale green tint, without any gloss. Hence the woods appear bright and shadowless: this, although a loss of comfort for the traveller under the scorching rays of summer, is of importance to the farmer, as it allows grass to grow where it otherwise would not.’[xix] Kenneth Slessor locates the beginning of a fracture from 'English ideas' in lines from an 1853 poem of Charles Harpur, 'The Creek of the Four Graves.’ In the poem, 'A farmer goes exploring with four hired hands to try to find new pastureland for his sheep and cattle. . . The moon rises and suddenly they are attacked by blacks.' he admits, 'there is nothing truly Australian in the setting as a whole. . . the landscape is still as English as one of Cobbett's rural rides.' Slessor cites the shift beginning with:
With upward tapering feathery swamp-oaks,
The sylvan eyelash always of remote
Australian waters . . . [xx]
I find that an outlandish claim.
[i] Thomas Hubbard notes, ‘has its origins in the intensely self-conscious, learned literary circles of Alexandria.' Thomas K. Hubbard, The Pipes of Pan. Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral tradition from Theocritus to Milton, Ann Arbor, The U of Michigan P, 1998, p5.
[ii] In Virgil's fifth eclogue Mopsus sings what he had written on a beech tree. Ec. 5. 13-14, ‘the songs I recently carved on the green bark of a beech.’ For an account of the Eclogues see W. V. Clausen, ‘Theocritus and Vergil’ in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Latin Literature, Ed., E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen, Cambridge 1982, p309-313.
[iii] Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clout, recognisably English, highlights the contrast between Christian simple goodness and court (not a contrast Virgil makes). The Faerie Queen influenced poets, as did Addison’s essay, Spectator, no 419, on the ‘fairy way of writing’.
[iv] Louis A. Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The politics of Elizabethan Form’ ELH, V50:3, 1983, p415-59. This is one of the beginnings of New Historicism.
[v] Raymond Williams writes, 'It is not easy to forget that Sidney's Arcadia, which gives a continuing title to English neo-pastoral, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants.' Raymond Williams, 1973, p22.
[vi] 'The painted partrich lyes in every field / And, for they messe, is willing to be killed.' In fact, his host Sir Robert Sidney, was in debt and what really counted was class, 'Thou are not, Penshurst, built to envious show / Of touch or marble, nor canst boast a row / Of polished pillars . . . but stand’st an ancient pile . . .' For Jonson, social order is the natural order. I have already argued that there is no 'order' but within a new ecological framework, perhaps new social relationships can evolve and democracy reinvigorated. See Raymond Williams, 'Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral' in The Country and the City, Chatto & Windus, 1973, p31.
[vii] He notes, ‘in 1500 acres of deer parks and avenues and lakes, and fake gothic temples and Greek temples, landscaped by William Kent and Capability Brown. But the place within those grounds, which intrigued me most, was an old church, hidden in some woods. The church was the only visible sign of what was once a village. The village was deemed by the Dukes to spoil the view, so they demolished it . . . But the declaration of terra nullius is by no means over. You can see it every time you turn on the television to watch a wildlife program. Wildlife programs present the natural world as a pristine wilderness, unaffected by humanity. They remove us to a parallel planet, the Garden of Eden . . . the founding myth of the colonist, the self-justificatory notion which permits those who seized the land from its inhabitants to extract from their fathomless guilt a story of primordial innocence.’ ‘Gardens of Eden’ George Monbiot with Rachael Kohn The Spirit of Things, ABC Radio National , 14/09/2003 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/. DL 1.10.2003
[viii] ‘Arts Today’ ABC, Radio National, 6.3.2001 Michael Cathcart in discussion with Tim Bonyhardy and Richard Flanagan.
[ix] Simon Schama has little patience is the notion that landscapes are natural. See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, A.A. Knopf, 1995, p8-9.
[x] Explorer Ernest Giles wrote in the Central desert, ‘The natives were about burning, burning, ever burning: one would think they were of the fabled salamander race, and lived on fire instead of water.’ quoted Flannery, ibid, p217.
[xi] Tim Flannery argues that 40-60,000 years ago the new migrants – Aborigines, started killing the mega-fauna which gave rise to change in vegetation patterns. Because of poor soils, heathland was prevalent for millions of years. It seems the fire resistant plants escaped from this environment with extinction of mega herbivores and the Aborigines accentuated the burning, so we have the first environmental melt down. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters, Reed Books, 1994.
[xii] From ‘To My Brothers’ in For A Pastoral Family ,(1985), REF> Unfortunately, this year her family lost their land to the banks. John Barrel has shown how ideologically conservative this sense of lost authenticity, of a lost Eden is. J. Barrell, Poetry, Language, Politics (Manchester University Press, 1988.
[xiii] ‘Rather, [Ian Hamilton] Finlay would have us recognize, as did the ancients who saw their most pastoral scenes inhabited by deities capable of stunning violence and capricious cruelty, that any experience of nature, Rousseauvian, Romantic, or otherwise, must include a recognition of that violence that makes such peace possible. Where Poussin placed a skull in his grove – ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ - Finlay, neoclassically, finds there a camouflaged Nazi tank.’ Mark Scroggins, ‘The Piety of Terror: Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Modernist Fragment, and the Neo-classical Sublime’, http://webdelsol.com/FLASHPOINT/ihfinlay.htm [DL.16.2.99]. Shepherd noted how important gardens and parks have been in the urban history. Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature, (1967) A&M Press, 1991, 2nd Ed.
[xiv] ‘Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne / Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride / Did decke her, and too lavishly adorn.’ This is Spenser’s description of the Bower of Bliss, (Bk 11. 11.50). Though there is still pleasure to be had, ‘Of many a Ladie, and many a Paramowre: /Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, / For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre.’(11.75) In the next book he describes a different garden, the garden of Adonis was 'of the trees owne inclination made' (Bk 111.V1.44). It is not natural in that Spenser suggests the enchanted garden rel;ies on Platonic principles (11. 36 – 38) 'substance' temporarily takes physical form during life.
[xv] In ‘Damon the Mower’, Damon brings Juliana a ‘harmless snake . . . Disarmèd of its teeth and sting,’ L35-36. REF Marvell probably wrote his garden poems long before they were published and before he became a busy public figure as MP; he saw gardens as temporary retreats. Upon Appleton House’ describes Nunappleton, the estate of Lord Thomas Fairfax, as an ordered world of man in nature, though there is a cost. Damon scythes the meadow and mourns the consequent death of the grass through his violence. Though of course it is a sound ecological practice necessary for healthy meadows and no brutality. The poem is a genteel mock georgic, instead of the labour of ploughing, the ground is cleared by mowing the lawns,
A new and empty face of things,
A levelled space, as smooth and plain
As cloths for Lely stretched to stain. L444
‘The Garden’ was probably written pre 1653, by which time Milton knew him. Barry Weller, ‘The Epic as Pastoral: Milton, Marvell, and the Plurality of Genre’, New Literary History 30.1, 1999, p145. In stanza VI, ‘all that's made’ is mowed down to the ground, leaving ‘a green Thought’, like a seed, which the poem is has possibilities for the world.
[xvi] Anthony Low, Georgic Revolution, Princeton, 1985, p274.
[xvii] John Kinsella, ‘Herding the Sheep: A Letter to Poets’, http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/herding.html. Terry Gifford coined the term post-pastoral, ’What this book has been arguing is that post-pastoral nature poetry in all its forms is developing our understanding of the paradoxes of our relationship with nature.’ Green Voices: understanding contemporary nature poetry, Manchester UP, 1995, p174. His definition of post-pastoral literature is not post-modern but imaginatively engages with the question. of the nature of our natural environment to be found in some of Blake and Wordsworth.
[xviii] Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800, Scolar Press, 1989, p23. James I replaced the Bishops' Bible of 1568 with the Authorised Version, a task that took fifty translators six years. John Layfield, a Greek scholar from Trinity College Cambridge wrote the opening chapters of Genesis. He had been chaplain to an expedition to Puerto Rico and taken by is exotic cultural and natural landscapes wrote his luscious description of Eden. See Adam Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible, HarperCollins, 2003.
[xix] Charles Darwin read it before writing an account of the Australian bush in The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, quoted by Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, Cheshire, 1967, p19. This is interesting, well written and more poetic than the poems of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin who made the great leap forward by dismantling the Great Chain of Being and seeing evolution as historical, contingent and fluid i.e. an ecological process. Erasmus Darwin anticipated his grandson's theory of evolution in The Botanic Garden (1789, 1791), Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1793), Phytologia (1800), and The Temple of Nature (1803). His poetry influenced Shelley and impressed Coleridge. Prior to this the world was created and stuck for ever as Linnaeus, put it in Systema Naturae (1735), 'Nullae species novae', no new species in a perfect world.
[xx] Slessor said that reading these last lines, 'I felt a sudden 'pricking of the thumbs', a stirring of the blood, a quickening of the imagination.' Kenneth Slessor, 'Australian Poetry –Charles Harpur', in Dennis Haskell Ed., Kenneth Slessor, UQP, 1991, p101-2.