Pastoral Poems Research Articles

Quevedo y los Lusus pastoralis de Navagero (una cala)

This article aims to approach the possible literary influences that the Lusus of Navagero exerted on Quevedo’s pastoral poems. For this purpose, different bucolic ideas shared by both authors will be analysed, such as divine rituals, floral garlands, the presence of country animals, the motif of the dawn, the female visuality and the constellations. Thus, the comparison between the bucolic verses of the Venetian and the author from Madrid allows us to notice some tenuous concomitances that would invite us to continue investigating this academic line in later studies, valuing the notable circulation of the poetic anthologies of the Italian cinquecento during this period.

A Stylistic Analysis of Nature in Two Selected, English and Arabic, Pastoral Poems

A Stylistic Analysis of Nature in Two Selected, English and Arabic, Pastoral Poems

Parody and performance: Paul Muldoon’s subversive pastoral

ABSTRACT Although a pastoral strand runs continuously throughout Muldoon’s work, he is infrequently characterised as a pastoral poet. However, ignoring the pastoral in Muldoon’s work is to ignore the very particular function his pastoral serves. Muldoon’s often overlooked pastoral poems not only perform what Oona Frawley has called the “necessarily hybrid” function of memorialising landscape in a space scarred by empire, but offer simultaneous critiques of the upshot of colonialism in Ireland – namely, a commodification of culture and cultural tropes. This essay argues that Muldoon’s pastoral poems rely on subversive performances of “stock Irish” characters, particularly those of child narrators or father figure characters, in order to both push back against and, sometimes, celebrate those expected cultural tropes. These pastoral poems, spanning decades of Muldoon’s career, all work in remarkably similar ways, relying on this narrative “voice throwing,” as Muldoon himself has described it, in order to engage in both politics and play.

Contrast in Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy and Kahlil Gibran’s Al-Mawakib: A Contrastive Stylistic Analysis

Poetry is regarded an interesting area of inquiry in linguistic studies due to its eccentric and aesthetic use of language. A lot of studies have been carried out so far for the analysis of poetry, yet few have dealt with pastoral poetry. The present research attempts to investigate the language of pastoral poetry in two different languages i.e. English and Arabic with the aim of finding similarities and differences. The data of the study consists of one English and one Arabic pastoral poems. Leech and Short's (2007) checklist is used as a model for analysis. The findings of the study reveal that there are more similarities than differences between English and Arabic pastoral poems as the poems rely on contrast in the use of the lexical categories with differences in the distribution of these categories only.

Comparing Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming’s Landscape and Pastoral Poems

Comparing Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming’s Landscape and Pastoral Poems

Response to the article “Olaus Sirman runojen vertailevaa luentaa” [The comparative interpretation of Olaus Sirma’s poems] (SUSA 97, 2019)

The article communicates a possible interpretation of Olaus Sirma's pastoral poem / love song Morse faurog as a part of the European baroque literature. The folklore features of the poem--the so called rhyme anticipation and the irregularity of the metre and the rhythm--may be attributed to the literature of the baroque period as well, and the poem doesn't diverge from the baroque literary conventions. The generic inconsistency, expressed by a hesitation of the lyrical subject, was perhaps intended as a signal for the reader to understand the pastoral as an anagoge.

Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy

ABSTRACT This article investigates two sites of Wordsworthian entanglement: the spider’s web across the abandoned well in “The Ruined Cottage” and the “web spun” in a neglected room in “The Brothers, A Pastoral Poem.” Both webs show Wordsworth’s attention to a theory of ecological entanglement that was emerging in the late 1790s, and more: Wordsworth’s experimental weaving of ecology and elegy. Wordsworth’s two surrogate elegists, the Pedlar and the Priest, use webs to track the subtle but active ways in which nature reacts to human grief and death. I show how both elegists develop distinct elegiac crafts to test different versions of the ecological elegy. Through their divergent poetics, they consider how elegy can incorporate ecological knowledge, how ecology reshapes past elegiac conventions, and how mourning itself becomes entangled in nature. Together their experiments allow Wordsworth to probe the close but precarious alliances between pathos, poetry, and ecology.

A LOOK BACK ON THE VERSE OF PHAN VĂN TRỊ AFTER 130 YEARS

Phan Văn Trị (潘文值1830–?) was a prominent writer in Cochinchina in the late nineteenth century. He achieved the rank of senior bachelor (舉人 cử nhân) in the Confucian court examination at a young age but never joined the imperial bureaucracy. Despite living an agrarian life as a layman, he was popular all over Cochinchina for his talent in poetry creation. When the three provinces of Eastern Cochinchina were taken by the French, Phan Văn Trị led a patriotic writing movement against Tôn Thọ Tường (尊壽祥) and his idea of surrendering to the colonizers. Phan Văn Trị was famous for his polemical poems, object poems, and pastoral poems. This article provides a brief literature review of Phan Văn Trị’s writings, describes the condition of his texts, and evaluates his poetry.

The Study of the Theme of Nature in Robert Frost’s Pastoral Poems

As one of the most celebrated and popular American poets in the 20th century, Robert Frost created a lot of poems that are frequently quoted and widely loved. In his poetry, Frost’s pastoral poems are the most distinctive, therefore winning him the reputation of “the pastoral poet in the industrialized society”. His pastoral poems primarily explored that the beauty of nature was the real beauty, and this beauty could purify men’s souls and bring sublimation to men’s spirits.

Die Geleerde Digter: Antieke Griekse Pastorale en Epigrammatiese Poësie by W.J. Henderson

Reviewed by: Die Geleerde Digter: Antieke Griekse Pastorale en Epigrammatiese Poësie by W.J. Henderson Johan Thom Henderson, W.J. 2018. Die Geleerde Digter: Antieke Griekse Pastorale en Epigrammatiese Poësie. 3 vols. Pretoria: Imprimatur. Pp. 179, 226, 239. ISBN 978-0-6399219-0-7, 978-0-6399219-1-4, 978-0-6399219-2-1. ZAR600 ea. Professor Bill Henderson is a well-known Classicist who has established an international reputation over many years for his work on ancient Greek poetry. Noteworthy in the present context, however, is the fact that he has made an exceptional contribution over several decades to the study of these poems in Afrikaans. Important book publications in this regard are Kalliope I (1986) and Kalliope II (1988), both in collaboration with J.H. Barkhuizen and C.A. van Rooy; Op Griekse Lier (2004); Vir Griekse Fluite (2009); and Die Berispende Stem (2011).1 In the present publication Henderson continues this outstanding tradition. The three-volume book functions as the next instalment in his series on Greek poetry. His previous publications focus on lyric, elegiac, and iambic poetry of the Classical period, while this volume deals with pastoral poetry and epigrams from the Hellenistic Age. The book is divided into three separate volumes, each with its own pagination. This division is probably due to the limitations of a paperback binding (the three volumes taken together contain almost 650 pages), but each volume has its own bibliography and glossary and thus functions more or less independently. The first volume begins with a general introduction to the culture and poetics of the Hellenistic period. It continues with an introduction to pastoral poetry, followed by an introduction to selected pastoral poemsof the poets Theocritus of Syracuse, Moschus of Syracuse, and Bion of Smyrna, each with an Afrikaans translation and commentary. The second volume contains an introduction to Greek epigram from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, again followed by introductions, a selection of poems in translation, and discussion, of works by Simonides of Ceos, Erinna of Telos, Anyte of Tegea, Nossis of Locri, Leonidas of Tarentum, Hedulus of Samos, Asclepiades of Samos, and Posidippus of Pella. The third volume contains selections and discussion of epigrammatic poems by Callimachus of Cyrene, Theocritus of Syracuse, Rhianus of Biene, Theodoridas of Syracuse, Dioscorides of Nicopolis, Alcaeus of Messene, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager of [End Page 295] Gadara. The introductory chapters and sections of the work aim to orientate the general educated reader in the cultural and literary history and background of the poets and their poems, and of the genres concerned. These include brief summaries of the life and works of each of the poets. The introductions do indeed provide lucid, succinct, and informative discussions, well worth reading on their own. The selection of poets and poems included in this publication has been carefully made to be most representative of the genres on which the book focuses. As indicated by the title of this work (which can be translated into English as 'The Learned Poet') the poetics of the Hellenistic period was characterized by a conscious and sophisticated use of 'literary' language and intertextual allusions. This 'literariness' can make these poems daunting for the non-specialist reader and poses exceptional challenges to the translator. Henderson succeeds in providing lucid translations that are nevertheless faithful renderings of the Greek. To achieve this, he frequently makes use of the ability of Afrikaans to create new compounds to emulate the Greek: see, for example, 'liefdeliewende rose', 'soetlokkige Heliodora', 'welgevlegte hare' (vol. 3, p. 163), all from Meleager's Epigram 46 G-P. Most of his discussions of the poems are brief and to the point, focusing on providing the reader with just enough information to appreciate the poetry. More technical information is relegated to endnotes. In the case of the longer pastoral poems in the first volume he does, however, devote several pages of interpretation to each poem. In addition to the introductions, translations, and interpretations, the volumes contain other useful information to guide the non-specialist reader. Henderson gives very extensive references to the most important modern publications on the respective poets and poems that encourage further study. Each volume contains a...

Grasses, Groves, and Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green

Laudien argues in “Grasses, Groves and Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green” that Behn moves beyond the stylized and artificial backdrops of most pastoral to explore the unique ways the landscape can be manipulated to investigate gender difference and the dynamics of desire and representation. Laudien suggests that in prioritizing the pastoral as political allegory in Behn, we overlook the descriptions of nature and the importance she places on the natural environments she creates. Through close readings of several of her pastoral poems, Laudien reveals that Behn’s landscapes destabilize existing notions of the pastoral space as an idealized and organized place and disorient the reader’s conventional expectations of pastoral nature.

Mary Robinson and the Costs of Animal Labor

ABSTRACT Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800) has long been understood as a retort to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and has long been admired for its multi-genre presentations of radical social, political, and sexual politics. This essay is on the collection’s understudied poem “The Shepherd’s Dog” and its focus upon the radical relationship between human and animal, colleague and companion, soldier and soldier of the working class. By privileging the working animal’s sentience, his complicated service to humans, and his similarity to revolutionaries, Robinson’s poem functions as a uniquely non-anthropocentric and postsecular precursor to “Michael,” Wordsworth’s famous pastoral poem from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This examination of “The Shepherd’s Dog” emphasizes Robinson’s authority among first-generation Romantics and among those she inspired after them, especially the nineteenth-century women writers who continued to assert the value of both the female and non-human gaze.

Born Orphans of the Earth: Pastoral Utopia in Contemporary Taiwanese Poetry

Abstract In 2011, amid a string of controversies in the Taiwanese countryside surrounding industrial pollution, urban expansion, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and the destruction of the natural and rural environments, poet and editor Hong Hong announced ‘the last pastoral poem’, suggesting that the representation of the countryside as bucolic landscape was an out-of-date and politically impotent trope. This paper argues, contrary to Hong Hong’s polemic, that depictions of pastoral utopia remain a vital and powerful alternative to the forces of urbanisation and industrialisation in Taiwan and the larger Sinophone world. The paper analyses poetry by contemporary poet Ling Yu against the background of the tradition of utopian pastoral writing represented by the book of Genesis, Virgil, Laozi, Tao Yuanming, and Gary Snyder. The paper argues for a poetics that symbolically mediates between nature and culture, and building and dwelling, by means of slow ‘cultivation’, in both the agricultural and aesthetic senses. The paper further draws on transnational Hong Kong poet Liu Wai Tong’s concept of ‘you-topia’ to suggest a means of reconciling Chinese tradition and contemporary ecocritical discourse.

Affecting Pastoral Dialogues: An Ecocritical Reading of Seamus Heaney’s Eclogues in “Electric Light” (2001)

Pastoral serves as a keyword when understanding Seamus Heaney’s literary production, both in terms of stylistic features and imagery. Although critical attention has focused on the connection between his pastoral works and contemporary Irish politics, the growth of ecocritical scholarship in the last few decades has made evident the importance of broadening such an analytical scope to relationships between humans and the environment while studying this genre. In this alignment, the present essay offers an ecocritical reading of some selected pastoral poems by Heaney, with a specific focus on his revival of the eclogue through the collection “Electric Light” (2001). Precisely, the poems “Virgil: Eclogue IX,” “Bann Valley Eclogue,” and “Glanmore Eclogue” will be read through the innovative perspective offered by the recent engagement of affect theory with ecocriticism: by doing so, I argue that Heaney’s poems can be understood as valuable nature narratives that stress the connectedness between the human and the nonhuman, while resonating with the urgencies posed by the current environmental crisis to re-think more ethical forms of relationships between them. Furthermore, through the lens of econarratology, attention will be paid to the ecological potentials expressed by the formal features of the eclogue: this observation considers, on the one hand, the notion of ‘relationality’ within the practice of the shepherds’ dialogue/singing and, on the other hand, how this literary form stresses the attachment between the human and the environment, both in the real world and in the storyworld. Hence, when exceeding a strictly politically oriented critical analysis of his work, Heaney’s eclogues become visible as compelling ecocritical accounts that favor investigating the role of (pastoral) literature in fostering critical discussions about human/nonhuman ethics as a way to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Sigmund von Birken, der Literaturbetrieb, Netzwerke und Werkpolitik

Abstract Sigmund von Birken belongs to the »Trio of poets from Nürnberg«, together with Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Johann Klaj whose posthumous fame is mainly due to their pastoral poetry with fullsounding verses in praise of peace and love. Birken started his career with an enormous upshot as organizer of multi-media spectacles during the peace ceremony in Nürnberg in 1650. Apart from his hymns and pastoral love poems, Birken’s poetry does not belong to the canon of early modern literature in Germany. If he had lived longer, he would probably have edited later all those poems which he had written on demand for special occasions and immediately published as separate brochures or leaflets in at least four huge volumes. He would have properly arranged love poems, odes in praise of friendship, poems dedicated to noblemen and civilians, hymns and secular songs, starting like his famous predecessors with his Latin verses. This ambitious publication project is outlined in his manuscript collections, but was not realized during Birken’s lifetime. To correct for this oversight, the commented edition of Birken’s complete poetic manuscripts, which was recently finished by Hartmut Laufhütte, gives a broad impression of his talents as a playful virtuoso in all kinds of genres, teacher of poetry, advisor, ›ghostwriter‹ and promotor of young poets, male and female alike. His diaries and correspondence account for his enormous productivity and versatility, thus enabling modern readers to watch him during the creative procedure more closely than any other German poet of his time. The edition of Birken’s manuscripts is on the same scale as a few other recently completed long term editions of early modern German ego-documents and poetry and sets high standards for further editions.

William Wordsworth’s Theoretical Contribution to Canon of Literary Criticism in Light of Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802) is both a revolutionary manifesto and a kind of foundational text in the context of the canon of Romantic poetry because of its normative analysis on the nature of poetry and its basic constituent parts although when compared to the systematic approaches in the twentieth century literary theory, Wordsworth does not present an autonomous critical method capable of providing universally valid principles in evaluation of the text. This paper mainly aims to discuss Wordsworth’s contribution to canon of literary criticism on the theoretical level by giving concrete examples from Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802) as well as scrutinizing Wordsworth’s definition of poetry and the poet, his ideas on the origin of poetry, the subject matter of poetry, and the language of poetry respectively in order to show that it is revolutionary in terms of prescribing some principles in evaluation of a literary work.

Vergilius Provence-ban: Marcel Pagnol Bucolica-fordítása II.

In the long history of French translations of Vergilian Eclogues, the work of M. Pagnol (1895–1974) has a special place. The novelist, playwright and filmmaker (the first one of them elected to Académie Française) published his version of pastoral poems in 1958, two years after the highly artistic edition of P. Valéry. In a sociocultural approach, Pagnol’s translation is usually considered as a sophisticated tool of marketing used to remodel the image of the author. The popular and rich star of French theatre and cinema is not really accepted neither by academic literature nor by the movements of literary radicalism because of his regional features and his cheap sentimentalism. By translating Virgil in a quasi-academic way, by editing a text with a preface, commentary and notes, Pagnol would highlight his erudition and postulate a place for himself among the Classics. Nevertheless, his very funny and personal way to interpret Virgil, his cultural commentaries, and his ethical remarks based on the norms of modern urban society make the Latin poet accessible for a very wide audience. The current paper focuses on the aesthetic features of his work. Being born in Provence, passionate of the Mediterranean landscape and highly influenced by classical mythology, Pagnol appears to emphasize the Latin origins of his homeland, the cultural and ethnical continuity between the Antiquity and the 20th century, with a strong apparent wish to revive thousand-year-old traditions.

만주국 안에서 생산된 전원시(田園詩) 속에 드러난 인정욕구에 대한 고찰

만주국 안에서 생산된 전원시(田園詩) 속에 드러난 인정욕구에 대한 고찰

Vergilius Provence-ban

In the long history of French translations of Vergilian Eclogues, the work of M. Pagnol (1895-1974) has a special place. The novelist, playwright and filmmaker (the first one of them elected to Académie Française) published his version of pastoral poems in 1958, two years after the highly artistic edition of P. Valéry. In a sociocultural approach, Pagnol’s translation is usually considered as a sophisticated tool of marketing used to remodel the image of the author. The popular and rich star of French theatre and cinema is not really accepted neither by academic literature nor by the movements of literary radicalism because of his regional features and his cheap sentimentalism. By translating Virgil in a quasi-academic way, by editing a text with a preface, commentary and notes, Pagnol would highlight his erudition and postulate a place for himself among the Classics. Nevertheless, his very funny and personal way to interpret Virgil, his cultural commentaries, and his ethical remarks based on the norms of modern urban society make the Latin poet accessible for a very wide audience. The current paper focuses on the aesthetic features of his work. Being born in Provence, passionate of the Mediterranean landscape and highly influenced by classical mythology, Pagnol appears to emphasize the Latin origins of his homeland, the cultural and ethnical continuity between the Antiquity and the 20th century, with a strong apparent wish to revive thousand-year-old traditions.

Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus” and the Evangelical Epic Poem

Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus” and the Evangelical Epic Poem Matthew Leporati (bio) William hayley’s call in his essay on epic poetry (1782) for british poets to “ascend Parnassus’ highest mound” and “In triumph there the Epic Trumpet sound” was met by an unprecedented resurgence of the genre.1 More epic poems were written in Britain between 1790 and 1820 than at any other time in history.2 Traditionally dealing with questions of nation and empire, the epic genre served as a vital form that Romantic-era poets revived to examine their nation and its place in the world after the French Revolution. Many of these poems have passed largely into obscurity, but studying under-read epics can help to reveal how this poetic form offered unique tools for writers not only to engage developing national, imperial, and religious ideologies, but to construct and position their public identity within explorations of broader national and global contexts. This article examines one such under-read epic: laboring-class poet Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus, a Fragment,” from her final collection The Rural Lyre (1796). This national epic concerns the founding of Britain by the Trojan Brutus, and one of its central figures is the British goddess Liberty (likely inspired in part by Liberty’s appearance in Hayley’s Essay). Situating this poem in the epic revival as well as the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century, I argue that Yearsley deploys the resources of the epic genre to affirm broadly several imperial assumptions. However, subtle strategies in her epic allow her to subvert imperialist discourse from within and challenge common hierarchical views of colonialism, race, and conversion. The Rural Lyre as a whole is curiously invested in classical literature. After Yearsley’s opposition to “rule” and “precedent” in her Poems, on Various Subjects (1787), readers might well have expected her to extend the idea that “poetry might after all come direct from minds unfettered by classical [End Page 265] education,” as Mary Waldron suggests.3 Had Yearsley underlined her “untutored” status in The Rural Lyre, it might have furnished an implicit attack on her former patron Hannah More: since Yearsley had presented herself in her first collection as a grateful “convert” of More—a “savage” whose “unciviliz’d” mind had been illuminated by her patron—she might have emphasized her lack of formal education in The Rural Lyre to demonstrate that she no longer had any need for More’s influence.4 Yet The Rural Lyre is indebted to the classics, as if to foreground Yearsley’s possession of the kind of cultural knowledge that was often assumed to be beyond the laboring class. In addition to opening with an abbreviated epic, the volume features another poem that reflects Yearsley’s reading of Platonic philosophy (“Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade Flourishing on an Height”), along with several pastoral poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics. The classical influence on this collection may be explained by the political pressures of the age. During the “war hysteria” of the late eighteenth century, Waldron suggests, a woman stepping out of the “private and domestic” sphere might be seen as “subversive.”5 It may thus have been imperative for Yearsley to cleave to conservative literary forms (along with patriotic themes). Also considering the political climate, Moira Ferguson notes a patriotic turn in Yearsley’s work after 1793, observing that it coincides both with Britain’s declaration of war against France and with Yearsley’s opening of a successful circulating library in Bristol, providing her a steady source of income.6 The relative conservatism or radicalism of Yearsley’s politics, as well as her construction of her own class identity, has long been a source of contention among critics. Where some, such as Ferguson and Donna Landry, see Yearsley primarily as championing the working class, others such as Waldron suggest that Yearsley identified “chiefly with the bourgeois rather than the proletarian.”7 Interpretations of Yearsley’s class identity often [End Page 266] guide the ways that critics read her politics. Those who position her with the proletarian tend to emphasize a subtle radicalism expressed in her work. Others, such as Julie Cairnie, who see Yearsley as...