Print

---

> When I was younger the ³pastoral² moments I actually lived through, and hence
> are most attractive and memorable to me, involved heightened and leisurely
> conversation in ideal natural surroundings with either sex, friendly and
> enlightening with clouds floating overhead, or sheltered in lilacs, or water
> drifting by, but not competitive at all.  Competition was saved for
> classrooms, CV¹s and soccer fields... Of course many college campuses
> interweave the classroom, playing field and landscape as an ideal state of
> existence, but even so (I should think) the pressures of the one are meant to
> be reflected on later while reposing within the other, a transitory state of
> meditative discovery heightened by youth and inexperience fast becoming
> experience, depending on how heady the lilacs are.
> 
> Which is funny, in that (as a recent article in The New Yorker notes) Milton
> spent much of his time teaching, and this pedagogical focus comes out in his
> Eden, full of Adam¹s and Raphael¹s instructions, for example, and in the
> didactic fervor of the ecclesiastical digression in ³Lycidas,² or that poem¹s
> emphasis on the old Cambridge days and praise of tutor Daemetas.  By analogy
> any ³meta² could be discourse on poetry or experimentation with its forms so
> as to teach the reader about it.  Pastoral is leisurely schooling.
> Unfortunately and necessarily such teaching implies authority and experience
> and constriction:  perhaps Milton and Edward King, or Diodati, had an equal
> relationship in the fields, perhaps like Spenser and Bryskett; but how relaxed
> a companion is Milton ever with his readers?  --TH
> 
> 
> 
> A last thought: would young men be so attracted to pastoral if it were not
> always cast as a kind of contest?
>  
> Penny.
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>