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Since Hannibal so kindly cites me, I'll just add that Ronsard, of  
course, didn't finish his epic and blamed (with some justice) his  
getting off on the wrong metrical foot (sorry, didn't mean the pun)  
by following, as I recall, Charles 9's request to use decasyllables  
instead of the alexandrines the form in French really needs and also  
(with less justice) the failure of his patrons go give him enough  
dough. He begins his career with little odes and then sonnets, with  
very little pastoral. One 16th c. French poem, and at the moment I'm  
blanking on where I saw it--Ronsard, I think--says pretty much  
explicitly that the youthful love sonnet is a way to signal a higher  
career to come. One more thought: in addition to Virgil and David as  
two rotae, so to speak (one guy I read praised Beza for beginning all  
secular and frivolous and then closing his career "with draughts from  
Zion's font"), I think that for writers like Ronsard and possibly  
Spenser there's an additional spoke to the generic wheel in the form  
of the hymn, with precedent in Homer (or "Homer"). In any case,  
Hannibal is quite right to note that psalms can crown, not start, a  
career. I have a lovely if somewhat startling 15th c. painted page  
showing David looking longingly at Bathshebe and he's easily 60 (and  
overweight)--he's going to write Psalm 51 in a few months and he's no  
spring rooster. For David, if I may take his authorship more  
seriously than would modern scholars, psalms were for all of life,  
although strictly it's not clear that when he cured Saul it was  
psalms he was using . Anne.

On Jun 11, 2008, at 10:19 AM, HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:

> But Petrarch doesn't really follow the rota except in his  
> aspiration toward epic, does he?  Where's the pastoral?  The Rime  
> don't qualify, surely?  It seems to me that the rota virgilium  
> works much as the genres themselves do, in that it provides a  
> template that poets can follow, reject, or adapt as suits theirs  
> needs and inclinations.  Does any poet after Virgil really follow  
> the wheel precisely?  It seems the most one finds is some  
> correspondence at either end: pastoral beginnings and epic  
> aspirations.  But what of georgic (the middle child always  
> neglected)?  Thomas Moffett writes georgic, but nothing else (same  
> with Tusser).  Spenser blends it into FQ, along with pastoral, in  
> ingenious ways, with his Redcrosse St. Georgos and his idea of  
> knightly labor (the sallying forth which Milton picks up in  
> Areopagitica).  I like Colin's (Burrow that is) idea of Spenser as  
> permanent pastoralist.  Is the same true of Sidney?  The Arcadia is  
> his epic if anything is, but it's even more pastoral than FQ.
>
> Further questions:
>
> Why is it that so many Renaissance epics are incomplete?  Does this  
> say something about the rota?  Milton makes it through PL, but  
> neither FQ nor the Arcadia make it to the end.  One might perhaps  
> add to this list Raleigh's Ocean to Cynthia.  Any others?
>
> The rota is further complicated by adding in genres Virgil never  
> considered.  Romance is obviously key for Spenser and Sidney (and  
> Milton), but biblical genres are important too.  For a long time it  
> was a critical commonplace that Psalms functioned for poets like  
> pastoral -- something to cut your poetic teeth on but then to move  
> away from.  This does seem true for some (Crashaw for instance),  
> but for others Psalms were not juvenalia but the highest form of  
> poetry.  Milton says this, though he doesn't exactly practice it  
> (note Mary Radzinowicz however on how psalmic PL is).  Psalms might  
> be in the epic position for Sidney, since the Sidney Psalter seems  
> to have been his last major literary project (again, incomplete).   
> Spenser is trickier -- according to Ponsonby he wrote a version of  
> the Penitential Psalms, not extant.  Ken Borris suggested at SCSC  
> some time back that the common meter headnotes to the cantos in FQ  
> were derived from Sternhold and Hopkins.
>
> Anyway, as Anne P. has argued, David and Virgil were competing  
> models for Renaissance poets, and it's interesting to see how  
> individual writers negotiation between them.  (I've written on the  
> importance of Psalm 23 and biblical shepherds/sheep for Renaissance  
> pastoral, for instance.)
>
> Hannibal
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Colin Burrow <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 8:16 am
> Subject: Re: pastoral jottings
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
> > I like Africa. Isn’t its learned over-achievement what aspiring  
> sparks sub tegmine fagi aspire to? So all those years of getting  
> better and aspiring onwards and practising those hexameters and  
> what do you get? The ability to write Africa. Isn’t that one of the  
> best jokes there is?
>
> > Learn from it, oh ye youths.
>
> > Spenser is always pretty ironical about settled achievement  
> (which is why he is so interested in going back to being young,  
> starting again, not getting where you thought you’d got to), and  
> this is partly why I like him (all right, I’ll confess it, even  
> more than I like Africa). It’s an aspect of being a permanent  
> pastoralist. Pastoral is a place where middle aged men can pretend  
> to be young. And because Spenser is a permanent pastoralist we have  
> Book VI and not another book; and this might also explain how Colin  
> Clouts Come Home Again (which I think is the best pastoral poem  
> written in the sixteenth century, perhaps the best by an English  
> writer apart from Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis) fits in near the end  
> of his career, and why retrospection and regression (I think these  
> are better words than ‘nostalgia’) are such permanent interests of  
> his.
>
> > Penny has however suggested that there might be a ‘real world’  
> out there. I must contemplate this dreadful possibility for some  
> moments before I continue to eradicate false quantities from the  
> fifteenth draft of my hexameter epic on Stephen Hawking.
>
> > Ivorily,
>
> > Colin Burrow
>
> > Senior Research Fellow
>
> > All Souls College
>
> > High Street
>
> > Oxford OX1 4AL
>
> > 01865 279341 (direct) 01865 279379 (Lodge)
>
> > [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> > From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:SIDNEY- 
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf OfPenny M
> > Sent: 11 June 2008 11:18
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: pastoral jottings
>
>
> > Dan,                             (and, if you could hang on to  
> the bottom of the page, Colin)
>
> > Thank you so much for immediately demonstrating what you would do  
> with ‘O fons’ -  very impressive; and you’ve drawn my attention to  
> the possible dark side. I had remembered simply a kind of clear  
> gem, amid his other mostly rather worldly odes. A bit like the  
> simple song for Tatiana’s birthday in Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, which  
> for all the affectation of the singing master, one can’t mock.  
> Except that Horace’s ode is not composed of a simple melody, but is  
> itself sophisticated.
>
> > I admit I have not stuck strictly to pastoral, as in Julian’s  
> flocks; I have been thinking in terms of meta-, escapism (rural),  
> and ‘what is real’. I think with ‘remote from experience’, I wanted  
> to put a wedge between your ‘place of escape’ and your ‘remote from  
> experience’. Or perhaps I wanted to remove a wedge between poetry  
> and real life. There can be false consciousness about ‘real urban’  
> and ‘false rural idyll’: Neil Powell, an editor of P.N. Review,  
> wrote a good piece ages ago questioning the critic X (I genuinely  
> can’t remember who) who had carped at some poems about the country  
> by saying no-one should still be writing about roses round the  
> door. Powell said a) he himself does have a house with roses round  
> the door and b) the critic X had lived in the same village until a  
> few months before.
>
> > But I have to accept your point about Petrarch (Touchstone too,  
> one could add) and his hankering for the world of ‘experience’ as  
> you define it. However, isn’t it quite interesting that the Romans  
> didn’t define it that way on? We have ‘work’ and ‘doing nothing’,  
> while they had ‘otium’ and its ‘neg’.
>
> > Re the career wheel raised by Colin Burrow: Isn’t Spenser teasing  
> us or challenging us to see that he doesn’t believe in the  
> Vergilian progression? In the Epistle, he says: (very first  
> example, which notably destroys his argument) ‘So flew Theocritus,  
> as you may perceive he was all ready full fledged’? Then he has  
> Vergil – O.K. Then he has Mantuan . . . not full somd. Then  
> Petrarch, Boccaccio, Marot, Sannazarus, all meant to be examples of  
> not fully somd when writing eclogue. But surely in at least some of  
> the cases, he must have considered their eclogues their crowning  
> glory?  Do you actually know any fans of ‘Africa’? (Oh, I suppose  
> there must be a handful in All Souls – but in the ‘real world’?)
>
> > Penny.
>
>
> > From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:SIDNEY- 
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf OfLochman, Daniel T
> > Sent: 10 June 2008 16:45
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: pastoral jottings
>
>
> > Penny,
>
> > I’m by no means an expert on Horace or Rome, and I’m not sure I  
> understand what you mean when you write that Horace’s farm was not  
> remote from experience (perhaps you could explain?), but in reply  
> to your question I’d note first that Horace’s  poem (see below) is  
> an ode rather than an eclogue; though it has pastoral elements in  
> it, the words are directed at the fount rather than at a present or  
> imagined person, and it is more in the vein of the epideictic  
> rather than the deliberative. That said, it has pastoral elements,  
> not just in its setting but in its assertion of the durability of  
> the song. And I think it is pastoral also in that, though  
> celebrating the pristine purity of the waters (and attempting to  
> turn our gaze away from the world of experience), the poem has  
> pressing upon it the ironic pollution caused by the sacrificial  
> animal’s blood, the sacrifice itself recalling in its youth a  
> projected loss of  maturity seen in human terms: “venerem et  
> proelia.”  And even if we accept that the spring may be shielded  
> from the “flagrantis Caniculae” the speaker’s awareness implies  
> that an unpleasant alternative exists outside this place and that  
> the spring is somehow in need of the memorial the poem provides.
>
> > Beyond this, one might examine features of the poem’s verses and  
> language that contribute to the sense of contrast between the  
> pleasure of seclusion given meaning by implied contrasts with less  
> pleasant or at least human realities: poetry and love as well as  
> sacrifice and war.  So, to the extent that the ode is pastoral, the  
> world of experience (meant in a vaguely Blakean sense) seems to me  
> to suffuse and give significance to the fons and Horace’s real  
> farm. In pastoral, one may wish, like Petrarch in referring to the  
> pleasant rustics in his letters about Vaucluse, to idealize that  
> which one wishes to escape to, but, once among them, one cannot  
> help but contrast one’s immediate experience with the world of  
> “experience”: at Vaucluse Petrarch complains about the pastoral  
> yokels and their lack of educated sophistication; they cannot offer  
> him any serious conversation.
>
> > I apologize for the length here, and I’d appreciate any  
> corrections or instruction about Horace’s poem. Penny, thanks for  
> drawing my attention to Horace’s poem, and I’m fascinated to see  
> all the various threads sprouting from David’s first brave  
> assertion as well as your interesting observations about Cuddy’s  
> underdog position in Spenser’s August.
>
> > Clearly, diachronic conversations persist!
>
> > Dan
>
>
> > O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro,
> > dulci digne mero non sine floribus,
> >   cras donaberis haedo,
> >     cui frons turgida cornibus
>
> > primis et venerem et proelia destinat.
> > frustra: nam gelidos inficiet tibi
> >   rubro sanguine rivos
> >     lascivi suboles gregis.
>
> > te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae
> > nescit tangere, tu frigus amabile
> >   fessis vomere tauris
> >     praebes et pecori vago.
>
> > fies nobilium tu quoque fontium,
> > me dicente cavis impositam ilicem
> >   saxis, unde loquaces
> >     lymphae desiliunt tuae.
>
>
> > [O Fount Bandusia, brighter than crystal,
> > worthy of sweet wine and flowers,
> > tomorrow shalt thou be honoured with
> > a firstling of the flock whose brow,
>
> > with horns just budding, foretokens love
> > and strife. Alas! in vain; for this
> > offspring of the sportive flock shall
> > dye thy cool waters with its own red blood.
>
> > Thee the fierce season of the blazing
> > dog-star cannot touch; to bullocks wearied
> > of the ploughshare and to the roaming flock
> > thou dost offer gracious coolness.
>
> > Thou, too, shalt be numbered among the
> > far-famed fountains, through the song I
> > sing of the oak planted o'er the grotto
> > whence thy babbling waters leap.]
>
> (> http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/horaces-villa/poetry/Ode3.13.html)
>
>
> > On 6/10/08 4:49 AM, "Penny M" <Barnard MailScanner has detected a  
> possible fraud attempt (DO NOT CLICK THE LINK) from "new- 
> webmail.osu.edu" claiming to be [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Dan, re ‘the form had received painterly strokes of civility and  
> Roman political ambition that removed it from any thought of escape  
> or remoteness from experience’ . . . . Horace had a real farm to  
> which he said he escaped from the city, but which was not ‘remote  
> from experience’.  What will you do with odes like ‘O fons Bandusiae’?
>
> > Prompted by your thought about social tensions appearing (as they  
> necessarily will) again in the utopian world: I love the ambiguity  
> of Cuddie in S.C.’s August. He is only a goat-herd’s boy, not even  
> a shepherd, but he is made to adjudicate between Willy (could be  
> Philip Sidney? – anyway, higher in the social scale) and Perigot.  
> Either because he genuinely can’t decide, or out of hierarchy- 
> induced fear, he splits the prize between them; then sings a  
> ‘proper’ song by Colin (slightly higher in the hierarchy (I think)  
> as a shepherd’s boy) which is obviously better than those of the  
> previous contestants, and E.K. says of him that he ‘seems to’ claim  
> the prize, or if not claim it, know he is best. Doesn’t this show a  
> paradox inherent in the coteries around Elizabethan pastoral- 
> writing – that a commoner with talent can be acknowledged king of  
> the contest, but the status is precarious within and without that  
> charmed temporarily egalitarian world?
> > And Cuddie’s status is highly problematic even as a commoner:  
> ‘proper’ could mean ‘his own’, i.e. he covertly is none other than  
> Colin. That song is, incidentally, the same song (transposed) as  
> the sestina of 8 by A.W. in Poetical Rhapsodie, and sonnet 20 by  
> the William Smith of Chloris. Are they all Colin? Yes. Pastoral (at  
> that time) was used for disguise, among other things.
>
> > Penny.
>
>
>
>
> > Spam
> > Not spam
> > Forget previous vote
>
>
>
>
> Hannibal Hamlin
> Associate Professor of English
> The Ohio State University
> Book Review Editor and Associate Editor, Reformation
>
> Mailing Address (2007-2009):
>
> The Folger Shakespeare Library
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> Washington, DC 20003
>
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>
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>