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Re: pastoral jottings Let me report that, in my part of Texas, I have yet to hear anyone claim to like Africa in its entirety, although I personally am amused by the poet’s wish-fulfilling account of a triumphant laureation. I’ll keep listening for any other hints of appreciation out this way....

To Hannibal: Petrarch did write a set of 12 eclogues at age 42, his Bucolicum Carmen (1346), not appearing until well after he had begun the Africa and the Canzoniere. So his allegiance to the rota is somewhat questionable, although it is also true to say that he had not completed much of his poetical writings prior to the pastorals.

A few points: Yes, Penny, I am entirely in agreement that there is (or should be) no difference between poetry and “what is real”; some of the greatest charm of pastoral is that it is “real” even when it appears to do its best to keep from seeming so—hence all the exaggerated conventions and even  innovations, such as the partial and unconvincing attempt at Northern dialect (offensive to Sidney) in the conversation of Thenot and Hobinoll at the beginning of Aprill.  

The pastoral poet, like the lyric poet, wears a mask, but the one the pastoral poet puts on generally has many more holes in it so that one is more strongly tempted to see if there something underneath than when the mask is more convincingly done up, as in the personae of the sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, and Shakespeare. Although I risk awakening the wrath of some Pope-ist lurking in our Sidney-Spenser cote, I find Pope’s pastorals polished and elegant but therefore disappointing, even cloying: he knows all the conventions but lacks the capacity to stray from them, to open new dimensions like those in Spenser’s hologram-like pastorals, which offer the impression of considerable depth when viewed from one or several of their proper angles. Pope’s pastorals are uniformly brilliant but entirely conventional in technique, and they lack the vitality and tension that (to me) seem essential to pastoral—they project little sense of ongoing conversation with the tradition or between the pastoral characters. Pope published his pastorals at the age of 21, Spenser his at 24—both seem conscious of the rota and its relation to the poetic vocation, but Pope gives the impression of holding to it more fully as apprentice-work than Spenser. There is also the question of whether Spenser ever escapes pastoral, whatever he may profess in the Proem to FQ, and whether he may have wished to do so. Could it be that the rota, like the willow and the shepherd’s pipe, is yet another pastoral convention, something that contributes to the hole-y mask of the pastoral poet?

Dan


On 6/11/08 7:15 AM, "Colin Burrow" <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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)

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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Penny M
Sent: 11 June 2008 11:18
To: [log in to unmask]">[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:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lochman, Daniel T
Sent: 10 June 2008 16:45
To: [log in to unmask]">[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" <[log in to unmask]">[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.