This week's theme: obviously, love poetry:
( Poem #997) The Passionate Shepherd to His Love Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love,
-- Christopher Marlowe |
The first pastoral verse in English was written during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth the First. Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and their
contemporaries at court discarded the elaborate framework of convention that
governed the masques and morality plays of medieval times to create a new
genre that was light-hearted, direct and unpretentious. "The Passionate
Shepherd" is an excellent example of the type: it's not a poem that demands
a great deal of analysis or explication, yet that very simplicity is its
strength, and the source of its lasting popularity.
thomas.
[Minstrels Links]
Marlowe is capable of both beauty and bombast, often in quick succession. I
have to confess that I prefer the energy of his plays to the often vapid
sentiments of his poetry (but then, I'm not a big fan of pastoral verse in
the first place; give me the metaphysicals any day :)). By way of contrast
to today's poem, check out:
Poem #75, The face that launch'd a thousand ships
Poem #506, Lament for Zenocrate
both of which are actually verse extracts from his plays (Faustus and
Tamerlane, respectively).
[Britannica on the Pastoral]
Pastoral literature: a class of literature that presents the society of
shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of
the idylls written in its name are far remote from the realities of any
life, rustic or urban. Among the writers who have used the pastoral
convention with striking success and vitality are the classical poets
Theocritus and Virgil and the English poets Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick,
John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold.
The pastoral convention sometimes uses the device of "singing matches"
between two or more shepherds, and it often presents the poet and his
friends in the (usually thin) disguises of shepherds and shepherdesses.
Themes include, notably, love and death. Both tradition and themes were
largely established by Theocritus, whose Bucolics are the first examples of
pastoral poetry. The tradition was passed on, through Bion, Moschus, and
Longus, from Greece to Rome, where Virgil (who transferred the setting from
Sicily to Arcadia, in the Greek Peloponnese, now the symbol of a pastoral
paradise) used the device of alluding to contemporary problems--agrarian,
political, and personal--in the rustic society he portrayed. His Eclogues
exerted a powerful effect on poets of the Renaissance, including Dante,
Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio in Italy; Pierre de Ronsard in France; and
Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain. These were further influenced by medieval
Christian commentators on Virgil and by the pastoral scenes of the Old and
New Testaments (Cain and Abel, David, the Bethlehem shepherds, and the
figure of Christ the good shepherd). During the 16th and 17th centuries,
too, pastoral romance novels (by Jacopo Sannazzaro, Jorge de Montemayor,
Miguel de Cervantes, and Honoré d'Urfé) appeared, as did in the 15th and
16th centuries the pastoral drama (by Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini).
In English poetry there had been some examples of pastoral literature in the
earlier 16th century, but the appearance in 1579 of Edmund Spenser's
Shepheardes Calender, which imitated not only classical models but also the
Renaissance poets of France and Italy, brought about a vogue for the
pastoral. Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, Christopher
Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion, William Browne, William Drummond, and
Phineas Fletcher all wrote pastoral poetry. (This vogue was subjected to
some satirical comment in William Shakespeare's As You Like It--itself a
pastoral play.) The first English novels, by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge,
were written in the pastoral mode. Apart from Shakespeare, playwrights who
attempted pastoral drama included John Lyly, George Peele, John Fletcher,
Ben Jonson, John Day, and James Shirley.
The climax of this phase of the pastoral tradition was reached in the unique
blend of freshness and learned imitation achieved by the poetry of Herrick
and of Andrew Marvell. Later 17th-century work, apart from that of Milton,
was more pedantic. The 18th-century revival of the pastoral mode is chiefly
remarkable for its place in a larger quarrel between those Neoclassical
critics who preferred "ancient" poetry and those others who supported the
"modern." This dispute raged in France, where the "ancient" sympathy was
represented in the pastoral convention by René Rapin, whose shepherds were
figures of uncomplicated virtue in a simple scene. The "modern" pastoral,
deriving from Bernard de Fontenelle, dwelled on the innocence of the
contemporary rustic (though not on his miseries). In England the controversy
was reflected in a quarrel between Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips,
though the liveliest pastorals of the period were by John Gay, whose mode
was burlesque (and whose Beggar's Opera is ironically subtitled "A Newgate
Pastoral"--Newgate being one of London's prisons).
A growing reaction against the artificialities of the genre, combined with
new attitudes to the natural man and the natural scene, resulted in a
sometimes bitter injection of reality into the rustic scenes of such poets
and novelists as Robert Burns, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, John
Clare, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Sand, Émile Zola, B.M. Bjørnson,
and Knut Hamsun. Only the pastoral elegy survived, through Shelley and
Matthew Arnold.
In the time since Wordsworth, poets have sometimes revived the pastoral
mode, though usually for some special purpose of their own--often ironic, as
in the eclogues of Louis MacNeice, or obscure, as when W.H. Auden called his
long poem The Age of Anxiety "a baroque eclogue."
-- EB
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