Pastoral elegy
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Pastoral Elegy
The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing the poet’s grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse, expression of the shepherd’s, or poet’s, grief, praise of the deceased, a tirade against death, a detailing of the effects of this specific death upon nature, and eventually, the poet’s simultaneous acceptance of death’s inevitability and hope for immortality. Additional features sometimes found within pastoral elegies include a procession of mourners, satirical digressions about different topics stemming from the death, and symbolism through flowers, refrains, and rhetorical questions1. The pastoral elegy is typically incredibly moving and in its most classic form, it concerns itself with simple, country figures. In ordinary pastoral poems, the shepherd is the poem’s main character. In pastoral elegies, the deceased is often recast as a shepherd, despite what his role may have been in life. Further, after being recast as a shepherd, the deceased is often surrounded by classical mythology figures, such as nymphs, fauns, etc.2.
Explanation of the elegy
An elegy is a meditative lyric poem that has a very mournful and melancholy tone. It is usually written to mourn the death of a close friend or loved one, but also occasionally mourns humanity as a whole. Although this form of poetry reflects on the notion of death, it is not to be confused with a “eulogy,” which is a speech that gives tribute to a person, usually after the person has died3.
Originally, in Greek and Roman poetry, an elegy was a poem written in elegiac verse, which included couplets consisting of a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line. A hexameter line contains six metrical feet while a pentameter line contains five metrical feet. Dating back to the 7th century B.C., the elegy was used to write about various topics, including love, lamentation, and politics. This form of poetry was widely used by poets such as Archilochus, Mimnermus, Tytraeus, Catullus, and Ovid 3.
In English literature, it was not until the 16th century that the term “elegy” began to refer to the content of the poem as opposed to the metrical form of the poem. Since then, the term elegy usually refers to a meditative poem of lamentation with no set metrical form [3]. Examples of modern elegies include Walt Whitman’s "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” which reflects on the death of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which mourns humanity as a whole. Other examples include E.E. Cummings’s “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop’s “Hours,” A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats4."
Explanation of pastoral poetry
Pastoral poetry is a genre that typically relates to country/rural life and often depicts the lives of shepherds. This sort of poetry describes the simple and pure lives of the shepherds, along with the notion that they are free from the corruption of life in the city. Rural life is depicted as being “pure” in pastoral poetry and is usually presented idealistically rather than realistically. The most common themes that are written about in pastoral poetry are love and death, although religion, politics, and other social issues are common as well. Often, the poet and his friends are represented by the characters in the poem. Through these characters, the poet expresses his or her own social, moral, political, and literary views5.
Pastoral poetry was first introduced by the Greek poet Theocritus in his Idylls. Set in the countryside, his poems reflected on folk traditions and involved dialogue between shepherds. This style of poetry was later adapted by the Roman poet Virgil, who frequently set his poems in Arcadia. Over time, the genre was adapted by a variety of different poets to include various themes, including romance, drama, courtship, seduction, and death. One of the most popular subgroups of pastoral poetry is the elegy, in which the poet mourns the death of a friend, often a fellow shepherd5.
Eventually, pastoral poetry became popular among English poets, especially through Edmund Spenser’s “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” which was published in 1579. One of the most famous examples of pastoral poetry is John Milton’s “Lycidas.” Written in 1637, the poem is written about Edward King, a fellow student of Milton’s who had died5.
Historical Overview
History of pastoral poetry
Pastoral elegy, a subcategory of the elegy form of poetry, has its roots in Greek and Sicilian poetry of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Pastoral poetry itself, which deals heavily with shepherds and other forms of rustic life, dates back to the 3rd century BC when Theocritus, a Greek poet, wrote his Idylls about rustic life in Sicily. Virgil was known for writing poems that depicted his sophisticated colleagues and himself as shepherds in simple, rustic settings. Virgil was also the first poet to set his elegies in Arcadia, a favorite location of pastoral literature to come. Developed over centuries, pastoral elegies mourn a subject by representing the mourner and the subject as shepherds. Many hundreds of years later, the pastoral elegy was still practiced by 19th-centrury Romantic and Victorian poets; even Shakespeare and his contemporaries were known to imitate some of the conventions of traditional pastoral poetry6.
History of elegies
In classic literature, an elegy was simply any poem written in elegiac meter and was not restricted by its subject. Elegiac meter was considered alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter. Most classical elegies were actually love poems, not laments. In English literature since the 16th century, the elegy has come to mean specifically a poem of lamentation. Additionally, it may be written in any meter the poet chooses7.
Key poets who shaped the genre
Along with Theocritus, the earliest pastoral elegies were written by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus. Other ancient poets who used the elegiac form include Callimachus of Alexandria, and the Roman Catullus. Some say the best known elegy in English is Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard, by Thomas Gray, a well known English poet. This elegy discusses the actual condition of death, not just the death of a single individual. John Milton’s Lycidas, considered the most famous pastoral elegy, mourns the death of the poet’s good friend Edward King. In the 17th century, John Donne, a contemporary of Milton’s, explored the genre further and addressed matters of human love, which to his metaphysically-inclined mind often resembled death8.
In the English language, some of the greatest pastoral elegies are Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which mourns the death of poet John Keats, and Thyrsis by Matthew Arnold, which mourns the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. In 17th century England, Andrew Marvell was a great exponent of the pastoral form, contributing such works as The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun. In this poem, a nymph or spirit of nature speaks an elegy for her dead pet deer8.
The pastoral elegy in contemporary poetry
Pastoral elegy poetry flourished in Europe between the Renaissance and the 19th century. However, modern poets, such as J.V. Cunningham and Alan Dugan, have re-imaged the elegy in both subject and form, and pastoral elegies have recently shown up in more satirical forms. However, other modern poets, such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden, have written poems that maintain the traditional form and features of the pastoral elegy. Andrew Hudgins has an interesting elegy in which he mourns the lonely gap that exists between him and his still-living father9.
The poem is considered an elegy in the original sense of the Greek word elegeia, because it laments the fact that the father and son diverge in life, so they will most likely diverge in death as well. Though in its prime, the pastoral elegy had wide appeal, it is now sometimes considered dead. By the 18th century, related but distinct fashions of georgics and topographical poetry mostly overshadowed pastoral poetry6.
Examples of definitive pastoral elegies
“Adonais”
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais is a pastoral elegy written by Shelley immediately after hearing about the death of John Keats. The elegy is 495 lines long, consisting of a total of 55 Spenserian stanzas. Adonais was composed during the spring of 1821 and was eventually published in July 1821. Studying the works of many classical pastoral elegies himself, Shelley admired Milton’s poetic voice and form in Lycidas. Thus, Shelley composed Adonais specifically in the tradition of Milton’s Lycidas10.
Introduced to each other by their mutual friend Leigh Hunt in late 1816, Shelley and Keats often exchanged letters of advice about their works of poetry. With the maturation of Keats’s genius, Shelly eventually became a devout and enthusiastic admirer of Keats. Keats’s eventual illness, believed by Shelley to be directly related to the harsh criticism and negative reviews of Keats’s poetry, prompted Shelley to invite Keats to stay with him in Italy. Keats declined Shelley’s request, traveling instead with his companion Joseph Severn. Later proven to be suffering from tuberculosis, Keats died on February 23, 1831. Mourning the death of his friend, Shelley’s grief is captured in the first stanza of the poem where the death of Adonais, who represents Keats, is announced. Shelley’s grief is also palpable in the subsequent mourning11:
"I weep for Adonais - he is dead! Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: ‘With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!11"
“Lycidas”
Written by John Milton, Lycidas is a pastoral elegy that first appeared in a collection of elegies entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago. Lycidas serves as Milton’s commemoration of the death of his Cambridge college mate, Edward King, who drowned when his ship sank off the coast of Wales in August of 1637. Lycidas, along with other collections of elegies in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, was published in 163812.
In the poem’s opening, Lycidas reflects the ideal pastoral image of nature and the country life. Milton describes how he sees the Laurels and “Myrtle brown, with ivy sear,” an image of peace and tranquility that is disturbed when the speaker disrupts the scenic picture by stating the death of Lycidas. This marks the beginning of the elegy and its subsequent presence throughout the poem. The balance between elegy and pastoral imagery throughout the poem has, over time, created the impression that Lycidas is one of the most original pastoral elegies12.
Thyrsis
Written by Matthew Arnold in December of 1865, Thyrsis is a personal elegy that mourns the death of Matthew’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough died in November of 1861 at the age of 42. The poem’s plot revolves around the main character Thyrsis, a shepherd in Virgil’s seventh Eclogue, who loses a singing match against Corydon. Matthew Arnold’s character Thyrsis represents Matthew’s friend Arthur Clough. Keeping with the tradition of pastoral elegy poetry, Arnold displays pastoral elements in the poem as he describes the nature surrounding Oxford13.
Brief summaries of literary criticisms
Literary criticism on Pastoral Literature in the English Renaissance
The pastoral is a literary style that presents a conventionalized picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen in contrast to the corruption and artificiality of city and court. Although pastoral works are written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they are always penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets. Some of the criticism towards this genre stems from its tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, and the actual and the mythical. English Renaissance pastoral has classical roots, but contains distinctly contemporary English elements, including humanism, sentimentality, depictions of courtly reality, a concern with real life, and the use of satire and comedy14.
Literary Criticism on Milton’s Lycidas
"One way of describing more precisely that sense of mingled familiarity and strangeness is to consider what Milton has done with the most formal and conspicuous of the devices by which the pastoral elegist places sorrow: the frame. Some Renaissance elegists (among them Sannazaro, Marot, and Spenser) continue in the classical manner, framing the sorrowful lament within a dialogue between two happier, or at least more detached, herdsmen. Others (as Castiglione and Scève) expose their speakers’ sufferings to our more immediate view by dispensing with the frame altogether. And still others (as Petrarch and Boccaccio) convey sorrow’s gradual encroachment by placing it in a sweet, framing world at the outset but then permitting that world to merge with the world of lament at the close. Milton is, to my knowledge, the only pastoral elegist to dispense with the opening frame while retaining the closing one. And the effect of this maneuver is to reveal the elegist only gradually discovering through the course of the poem itself those assurances of order traditionally conferred by the frame: the poise, the detachment, the knowledge that our sorrows have a place in nature’s world of death and regeneration. We can no longer assume these things at the start. The happy outcome of this elegist’s journey toward his consolation must remain in doubt right up to the final stage of that journey. Milton’s handling of the frame epitomizes his handling of the convention as a whole and his synthesis of the two main Renaissance approaches to the tradition. He brings the self-consciousness, the isolation of the Petrarchan elegist, or of Scève’s Arion on his lonely shore, home to his own version of that consoling pastoral landscape rediscovered and revitalized by Sannazaro, Marot, Ronsard, and Spenser. Milton brings the anguish and singularity of an individual mourner’s grief into nature’s round and into the consolations of an aesthetic order. But he brings them in gradually and not without a struggle15."
-Ellen Lambert, author of Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton
See also
7.1 Elegy [1]
7.2 Pastoral [Poetry] [2]
Notes
1 “Pastoral Elegy,” Quizlet.com
2 “Pastoral Poetry,” Debora Schwartz
3“Definition of Elegy,” Free Online Encyclopedia
4 “Form – Element of Poetry,” Benedicto Carpio
5 “Pastoral literature,” Encyclopedia – Britannica Online Encyclopedia
6 “Pastoral,” Answers.com
7 “Elegy (poetic form),” Encyclopedia – Britannica Online Encyclopedia
8 “Pastoral Elegy,” Everything2.com
9 “Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead (Themes),” Answers.com
10 “Literary Encyclopedia: Adonais,” The Literary Encyclopedia
11 “Percy Shelley: Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” EnglishHistory.net
12 "Milton: Lycidas,” Dartmouth.edu
13 “Thyrsis: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article,” AbsoluteAstronomy.com
14 “Pastoral Literature of the English Renaissance,” Enotes.com
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