Pastoral Elegy in the 1820s:The Shepherd's Calendar

Abstract

‘Adonais’ is often discussed in relation to other poems by Shelley or to other English elegies. This essay suggests that it may also illuminate other writings from the 1820s, by emphasising the traditional association of elegy with the pastoral mode. Both John Clare and James Hogg published collections entitled The Shepherd's Calendar in the 1820s and, though very different from ‘Adonais’, each can fruitfully be read as new versions of pastoral elegy. Although neither Clare's poems nor Hogg's prose stories commemorate the loss of an individual poet, both have strongly elegiac elements and explore questions often regarded as defining characteristics of the elegy, including the workings of memory and melancholy, inheritance and legacy, loss and renewal, the nature of poetry and responsibilities of the poet. The essay focuses on the poet-shepherds of the 1820s, who inherited the pastoral innovations of the later eighteenth century and contributed to the Romantic transformation of the ancient mode. Far from representing the tail-end of tradition, Hogg and Clare were following the examples of their predecessors by demonstrating the recuperative powers intrinsic to true pastoral. The Shepherds Calendars of the 1820s offer an alternative version of pastoral to Shelley's self-conscious neoclassical, post-Miltonic elegy. They adopt Gray's extension of the country elegy to an entire community and draw energy from Burns and Wordsworth, who adopted plainer language and local settings for their influential Romantic versions of pastoral. Hogg's stories drew on his local environment, but far from presenting a sentimental idyll, they exposed the presence of death in the sheep-farming communities of the Scottish Borders, even as they celebrated the distinctive way of life and thriving oral culture. Clare's poems similarly celebrate the rural world of his native Northamptonshire, but his vivid poems are intensified by a recurrent sense of loss and irreversible change. Both poet-shepherds offer a lament for a world under threat from modernity but, in doing so, they develop exciting new literary styles which are perfectly suited to the demands of a modern, predominantly urban reading public. The essay concludes with brief reference to the infusion of pastoral into the Victorian novel and the early work of one of the most significant heirs to Romantic pastoral, Thomas Hardy.