The Renaissance has long been viewed as the site of Pastoral’s very own elusive ‘happy place’, that short-lived moment for popular forms that are at once of our world and not of it, prior to the tipping point wherein the familiar becomes hackneyed. The present study takes on board Nancy Lindheim’s recognition that pastoral served as a ‘vibrant, meaningful literary form for men and women in the Renaissance’ and her conviction that we ought to ‘recover their perception of its force’. My focus, however, is the force exerted by pastoral within the poetry of Baroque Spain and Spanish America, and the invention that arises from testing the limitations of the mode. Urgent, unquiet and far from atemporal, it will be suggested that the pastoral mode of the Baroque period is something of a return to form. Pastoral poems have been readily acknowledged as epoch-defining texts; Garcilaso de la Vega’s eclogues, an artistic high point of the Spanish Renaissance, are generally understood to find their Baroque counterpart in the pastoral landscape of Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and his Soledades. The ambition inherent in Spanish pastoral composition following Garcilaso’s eclogues cannot be disengaged from the imperial project, becoming implicated in the consolidation of a vernacular literary legacy. Even as the Gongorist texts are read as provocative responses to the classical and Renaissance modes, Baroque and pastoral have often proven uneasy bedfellows within critical appraisals of the texts. The irruption of violence within the Polifemo seems to inaugurate a new aesthetic order, a new world view which sets itself firmly apart from the world of the Renaissance pastoral novel. This rupture has been understood not merely in the aesthetic terms that correspond to the exhaustion of a form, but as the uncovering of a fissure revealing the pastoral mode’s incompatibility with an encroaching sociocultural reality. Amid a general recognition that the relationship between the artistry of the Hispanic Baroque and that of the Renaissance is one of both continuity and rupture, considerations of the pastoral context have tended to overstate rupture at the expense of continuity.