OK, David, I will forgive your trashing one of my sacred Keats  
quotations, but only because you are David WOK. As for pastoral, I  
take Charlie’s very postmod point, which I learnt to share only when  
I was very far from young. But I belong to a generation and a culture  
(North European) that still produced young men who were unabashed  
(well, slightly abashed) romantics. The question I got from David’s  
post, though, was not ‘How could *we* imagine ourselves (or remember)  
as young men liking to do pastoral?’ but ‘How can we understand what  
made Virgil’s generation of Romans, and all their imitators up to and  
including Spenser [and real pastoral came to an end shortly after:  
18C pastoral doesn’t convince, and its death and rebirth was  
Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’], like to do pastoral as young men?’

The first question is, ‘Is pastoral really about nothing but meta?’  
My answer is No. Pastoral is not poetry about poetry: it’s poetry  
about sophistication, and the young poet’s conflicted relation  
thereto (or therewith). In the old sense of the word as much as (or  
more than) the modern one: ‘Here’s three on’s are sophisticated’. The  
pastoral poet tackles the human failings of society, or the social  
aspect of original sin, via the byway of a metaphor that is nearly an  
allegory: the shepherd. And he does so in a society where, if you  
take the Via Flaminia or any of the other roads out of Rome, it won’t  
take you long to find both plodding farmers at their back-breaking  
Georgic work and ‘working’ shepherds sitting motionless as  
kingfishers for hours while their mindless charges browse.

So the shepherd combines otium with negotium, and does so in a nature  
that to a city lad looks, perhaps for the first time, beautiful.  
Young men tend to look for forms of work that incorporate doing  
nothing for long stretches; young poets like them because they allow  
them to write deathless verse. Moreover, imagining themselves as  
shepherds allows them to look down on those plodding ploughmen and  
dull cowherds, as Leonardo the painter looked down on those sweaty  
dusty sculptors.

By a brief extension this allows a country/city contrast which later  
becomes a country/court one, and which does not need Aesop to  
incarnate it in mice. It criticises mores without the negativity of  
satire. Now here comes the question for the young man: do I want to  
be sophisticated, urban, stressed, harassed, in serious danger from  
Caligula, but elegant and s-o-o-o-o cool, or do I want to be at peace  
and in harmony with the world with a simple bleating flock in a  
landscape where the only thing crooked is my staff? And if the  
latter, how do I defend myself against my city friends’ charge that  
I’m a dullard, a clod, a Gussie Fink-Nottle and irremediably obscure?  
Answer: pastoral.

And remember, this is also where the fence (said Sidney) is lowest.  
This is where you can cut your little sheep’s-milk teeth on the  
tricky bits of poetry. The metres are not too hard, though you can  
get as clever as you like; the metaphors are ready-made and simple;  
and everything you learn here about the techniques of writing poetry  
you can apply later in grander genres.

All this is a bit hard for us to get into, cuz we don’t do  
craftsmanship and genre hierarchies and we’re seriously sophisticated  
but in a different way. We are full of postmod, and Charlie’s  
admirable post is an example. For us anything simple is naïve, and  
anything romantic must be ironic (and/or meta) at heart. My long- 
growing feeling is that if we are to understand older poetry properly  
(as opposed to the fun of running and riffing with it as a Barthes or  
a Derrida might) we need to unlearn about a century of irony, and  
learn a different kind of irony, and even more (and harder by far) an  
absence of irony.

Lord how I have babled. But there it is. David’s fault for asking  
interesting questions.

Roger Kuin







On 7-Jun-08, at 6:14 PM, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:

Several years ago, I organized an online discussion of Virgil's  
Eclogues; we got through #5. If anyone's curious, the record of our  
conversation is still available here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ 
eclogues/messages/1. Last spring I tried again, with some  
undergraduates. We finished this time, in the sense that we read all  
ten poems. But I didn't feel that we'd got IN, if you know what I  
mean, and I was grateful when we moved on to the Georgics.

This summer, I'm trying the Eclogues again, and I'd like to share  
something that's bugging me, in hope that someone can set me my feet  
back on the path of righteousness. Are you ready for it? Virgil's  
Eclogues (and Spenser's SC) are all about poetry. How very meta! (Q:  
Why are University of Chicago students smarter than Harvard students?  
A: Everything Harvard can do, Chicago can do meta.) What's wrong with  
that? There are, it seems to me, at least two objections which meta- 
poetry is open to:

1. It has no content. A dog chasing his own tale is fun to watch, but  
he can't really eat it. To change the metaphor, it's sterile. To  
change the metaphor again, it's cut off from real life.

2. Sure, there is no "singing school but studying / Monuments of its  
own magnificence." But that (the art world of Byzantium) is no  
country for young men. What do young men -- the kind who are supposed  
to write pastoral -- know about poetry? Who but a young poet would  
write twaddle like this? "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of  
the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination." Oh please.  
Double oh please. License to spew thee out of my mouth. The heart is  
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Before I go on, let me say this in favor of youth. If you read  
English history, you get the impression that having a boy king is a  
bad thing. But if you read Bible history, a boy king can be  
wonderful, especially when you need a reformer (like Josiah). Young  
people are willing to rock the boat. They don't measure (because they  
haven't experienced yet) the real cost of their actions. They aren't  
invested yet in the status quo. They can be uncompromising, because  
they haven't themselves been compromised yet by the World. They wield  
a terrible, SWIFT sword. That kind of thing terrifies old men --  
terrifies and shames them.

This doesn't explain, though, why young people should be drawn to one  
of the harder tasks there is in poetry, which writing pastoral is.  
First, you have to master the low/thin/paired-down style. That's  
hard. Shakespeare could do it ("Never, never, never"), but not until  
his forties. Second, if poetry is going to be your subject, you have  
to know something about poetry that is worth saying. On the one hand,  
the world of poetry seems brave to young people, because it is new to  
them; that's something. On the other hand, while they may be  
passionate about Poetry, they usually haven't read very many poems;  
their tastes tend to be narrow. Mine were, anyway. If it wasn't  
romantic/Romantic, I wasn't interested. Satire was lost on me. I  
liked comedy, but I didn't value it. Which brings me back to problem  
#2, what do young people know about poetry?

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this  
death?

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Dr. David Wilson-Okamura    http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]
English Department          Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University    Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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