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10 - Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry

from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
David Fairer
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

Thomas Parnell's lines about the pastoral world take us to the heart of an age-old problem. ‘Oft have I read’, he begins, ‘that Innocence retreats / Where cooling streams salute the summer Seats; / Singing at ease she roves the field of flowers / Or safe with shepherds lies among the bowers …’ Having passed through a country fair, however, he had found ‘No Strephon nor Dorinda’, but a motley crew of randy, idle and drunken rustics:

Are these the Virtues which adorn the plain?

Ye bards forsake your old Arcadian Vein,

To sheep, those tender Innocents, resign

The place where swains and nymphs are said to shine;

Swains twice as wicked, Nymphs but half as sage.

Tis sheep alone retrieve the golden age.

Where is pastoral innocence to be found? And how can any modern writer not view Arcadia ironically? By a shift of focus typical of early eighteenth-century satire, the sheep move centre-stage: the incidentals of pastoral become the guardians of its soul. The poet is self-consciously listening to his own bland rhetoric (‘the Virtues which adorn the plain’, etc.) before the final rueful comment emerges – conclusive, yet almost in parenthesis, as if he is turning away from the scene. After two thousand years of pastoral poetry Parnell (d. 1718) can find only one unsullied image remaining, and there seems no more to be said.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 259 - 286
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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