Five modes of ‘listening deeply’ to pastoral sounds

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn his Tales from Ovid Ted Hughes writes that in the Age of Gold people ‘listened deeply to the source’. This essay asks what this might mean, what modes of listening might achieve this and how we would recognise it. Beginning this discussion with a georgic folk song, which appears to be about harvest workers pastoralising their work, this essay opens up the first of five modes of listening by suggesting that there is a playful, harvest home, self-ironic listening mode at work here. Discussion moved from Andrew Marvel’s ‘The Garden’ to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Highlands’ to Keats’ ‘The Nightgale’. The final line of Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is tested with reference to a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Recent research offers examples of listening from the Hawai’an people and from Blackfeet country in Montana.