Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Poetry in the Pastoral Mode

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The earliest poetic work set within a pastoral frame appears to be Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 B.C.), an oral poem of approximately 800 lines that is “part farmer’s almanac and part didactic exploration of the nature of human labor.”[1]   The Idylls of Theocritus (written in the 3rd century B.C.), however, created the classic tropes we still recognize as the hallmarks of pastoral poetry. The Idylls were approximately thirty assorted lyric pieces set in verse dialogues and soliloquies that were “sung” by herdsmen, goatherds, and their female lovers. They were composed in epic Greek meter (dactylic hexameter), which lent a blend of simplicity and sophistication to the form, and they recounted various tales featuring, inter alia, mythological characters, a love-spell for a neglected lover, a boxing match, singing contests, and other stories about the lives of local personages. The natural landscape and country life were as much the engines of the subject matter as background scenery.

Two hundred years later, the great Roman poet, Virgil (70 B.C. – 19 B.C.), exploited the Greek pastoral archetypes in his Eclogues, whose main actors were, again, gentle shepherds living in a “symbolic [rural] landscape, a delicate blend of myth and reality.”[2]  Virgil followed this literary success with Georgics, a paean to farming modeled on Hesiod’s earlier work.  Virgil’s individual genius elevated the genre by ennobling its expression, ridding the poetry of pettiness, exaggeration and sentimentality, so as to make it serviceable to grander themes.[3] Because of this, Virgil’s pastorals became the cynosure for contemporary and future generations of poets.

We should note, however, that Virgil came from a landowning family and was well-educated, according to the most persuasive accounts. His transformation of the Greek pastorals was not the result of some proto-grassroots movement in Roman society but intended to entertain a civilized and sophisticated audience of city dwellers who yearned for more simpler times. Thus, following Virgil’s lead, The Epodes by Horace (65 B.C. – 8 B.C.) used pastoral images of the countryside as a dreamy getaway from city life. As we shall discover in this brief summary of the pastoral mode, the ideological opposition of country versus city life became a central theme of Western civilization and endures to the present day.

Eventually, with the Fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the pastoral form virtually disappeared until Petrarch (1304-1374), an Italian poet writing in Latin, revived the form and started a new-wave pastoral movement in Europe. Two centuries later in England, Edmund Spenser’s masterwork,  The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), arguably the highest artistic extension of the form, contained shepherd dialogues, elegies, and fables, as well as a discourse on poetry’s role in contemporary England. Following Spenser were Michael Drayton, William Browne, and Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote the pastoral poem, “Arcadia” and the “anti-pastoral” works, “The Twenty-Third Psalm” and “The Nightingale.” John Milton broadly used pastoral themes throughout his works, “L’Allegro” and its companion, “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” and, finally, Paradise Lost, where Eden was the living embodiment of the idyll. Further examples of the pastoral are seen in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the literature that attended the discovery and development of the early American colonies, which Leo Marx examines in The Machine in the Garden, one of the best modern commentaries on the form.

Marx finds that there are two distinct species of the pastoral, “one that is popular and sentimental, the other imaginative and complex.”[4]  In the popular pastoral, usually figured by the locus amoenus with its idyllic characterizations of rural life, the interdependence of man, animal and vegetation is the key to a happy and fulfilling existence. There are familiar references to the procession of the seasons (which, in turn, reflected the “seasons of life”) employed as an adaptive timeline for tales of a close-knit agricultural community that, among other things, tilled the land and harvested crops, cultivated livestock, hunted and fished, erected dwellings, barns and storehouses, celebrated life and love, mourned death and found escape from the ever-present reminder of their mortality in the worship of God.

On the other hand, we see an example of the complex pastoral in Virgil’s first eclogue, “The Dispossessed, ” where the shepherds, Tityrus and Meliboeus, discuss (in verse dialogues) the personal strife and community upheaval that ensues after the Roman government has dispossessed a number of small landowners in order to give the property to military veterans. Tityrus has retained his homestead because his suit was fostered by a benevolent sponsor, while Meliboeus is evicted and so must move away. Nevertheless, Virgil fashions a feel good ending by presenting the shepherds’ endearing fellowship as an alternative to the unsympathetic socio-political needs of government and society. In contrast to the sentimental pastoral, the complex form (which includes the “anti-pastoral” type) is not as sanguine about life, often opposing simple men against the embattled fronts represented by (1) the encroaching “civilized” world and (2) the unpredictable consequences of raw nature at its worst.

Of course, we tend to give more credence to these complex and anti-pastoral viewpoints: rural life was not sweeter, simpler, or less threatening than its metropolitan counterpart. Before the advent of mechanized farming and advanced medicine, the pasture and the farm were more realistically associated with brutally hard physical labor, primitive education, the lack of economic and cultural advantages, and the likelihood of disabling illness and early death. As a result, the pastoral genre is steeped in an overarching resignation to the inevitable, whether it be political, social, economic, or natural hardships, or the consequent domestic unrest to which the rural community regularly fell prey. These recognizable scenarios play out in twentieth-century poetry also, e.g., in Robert Frost’s anti-pastoral poems, “The Death of the Hired Man” and “Home Burial.” Though the farmer has taken the place of the Virgilian shepherd, the poems still employ dramatic dialogues to report the familiar events that the times have visited on the rural community.

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When we speak of the pastoral mode, it is important to understand that it is merely one of the genres that writers use to frame or suggest a particular kind of narrative. A genre has literary artifacts, familiar characters, plots and associated figuration, such as metaphors, tropes, symbols, and emblems. Aside from the pastoral, there are many other genres, e.g., the Arthurian Romances which recount tales of the adventurous life, courtly romance, and the virtuous quests of the Knights of the Round Table [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous author), and The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser], and picaresque fictions [in poetry, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, and in the novel, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes] which were part morality play and part sensationalist societal exposé.  In contemporary life, authors engage us with courtroom dramas, detective stories, science fiction, and modern romance to similarly leverage narratives using genres that embody given cultural, historical, and metaphorical frameworks.

The pastoral mode, however, because of its figurative associations with Eden, seems fundamental to a way of thinking of a prelapsarian “natural life” before Narcissistic vanity and perverse love tricked the first farmer-caretaker out of his land and birthright. Hence, the pastoral constitutes a primal sense of place that we feel instinctively, as William Butler Yeats said (in “Lake Isle of Innisfree“), “in the deep heart’s core.”

Yet long before Yeats’s time, poetry’s pastoral cloak, at least when worn by the shepherd or other rustic, was torn and tattered. Samuel Johnson took Milton out to the woodshed for putting on the shepherd’s guise in “Lycidas” which, despite its ingenious mastery of language and form, falls prey to cultural ennui for obvious reasons :

Nothing can less display knowledge or less exercise invention than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; and how one god asks another god what is become of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honor. [5]

Even Alexander Pope’s efforts to revive the Virgilian pastoral and adapt its characters and discourse to his own time and place (18th Century London) are generally considered failures for facial unsuitability.

Notwithstanding later efforts by Milton and Pope to revive the genre, the lineage of the archetypal Virgilian pastoral effectively dies out at the very end of the sixteenth century with Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), a lyrical poem written approximately twenty years after the publication of The Shepheardes Calendar.  Like many of Spenser’s imitators, Marlowe takes on the mantle of a humble shepherd in order to flatter and seduce his lady. Given this background, the poet and his readers may be assumed to have implicitly acknowledged that the poem was more in the way of sentimental kitsch art, operating within an old genre that was then primarily intended to serve as an advertising vehicle for the poet himself. [Before Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was recognized as the foremost playwright of his time and the first to make full use of blank verse (iambic pentameter) for his dramas, the most famous of which is The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus.] The ruse of the “Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is logistically ironic in a modernistic sense when we consider that Marlowe, one of the preeminent authors of his day, was born in Canterbury, schooled at Cambridge, by some accounts a spy and homosexual, and, clearly, a city dweller in Elizabethan London, not, by any degree, a rustic from the shepherding Lake District.  It may be safely assumed that the cognoscenti reading the poem knew this and were in on the ruse.

“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” observes the generic pastoral references to mountains, woods, rivers, flowers, and like motifs for the purpose of distantly evoking rural beauty, a nostalgic longing for the purity of the countryside, and the prospect of personal and spiritual freedom. Within the poem’s “argument” there is, of course, a transparent seduction, but here expects none but the most naive lady to succumb, which gives the poem a delightful playfulness. The poem has the textual attributes of a “song,” which would have been in keeping with its Virgilian model, and its “come live with me and be my love” refrain is the kind of ear worm that modern pop songs crave. Because of the poem’s character as ballad, it almost too easily settles into the guise of rustic naiveté, devoid of the kind of wit displayed by John Donne in his takeoff, “The Bait,” and hardly comparable to Marlowe’s other lyrical work, e.g., the magnificent “Hero and Leander.” The hackneyed pastoral posture was viewed, particularly among the elite literary personnel of Marlowe’s social milieu, as a clichéd construct that could be easily ridiculed, as Sir Walter Raleigh proved in his wry response to Marlowe, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.”  [Although Raleigh’s “response” was in the tradition of medieval pastourelle, which featured the peasant girl’s successful rebuttal of her suitor’s advances, the deliciousness of “The Nymph’s Reply” relies upon the twin ironies that neither author was truly invested in the pastoral guise and that Raleigh was not the subject of Marlowe’s original entreaty, thereby suggesting a form of cuckoldry by poetry.]

Since the Elizabethan era poets have had to adapt the Virgilian model in selective ways that give a sense of contemporaneity to the form, otherwise they faced Raleigh’s sort of playful mockery. So the idealized vision of the Romantic William Wordsworth’s “To a Highland Girl” and “The Solitary Reaper” is roundly parodied by Victorian Thomas Hardy’s “The Milkmaid.” The poets of the Romantic period (1770-1850), who were largely from the upper middle class, synthesized the pastoral landscape so that it was more a state of mind and pantheistic refuge, often based (as it was for Wordsworth) in a homogenized memory of childhood, rather than a living environment that the poet inhabited to discuss the comings and goings in a rural community. This synthetic form of pastoralism was adopted by poets in following eras, yet its continuing vitality depended upon the opposing forces associated with metropolitan society, whether explicitly or implicitly depicted. Thus, Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890) memorializes the place where he spent summers as a child in such a personal way that he can convincingly sell his vision of idyllic greenery and birdsong, especially when he grimly juxtaposes it to the “pavements grey” at the heart of the mechanized urban vision we are all familiar with.

If Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) embodied a unified theory of pastoral sensibility in the growing industrial America, the strain of twentieth century metropolitan life finally produced the personality crisis voiced by many modern and contemporary poets. In the intervening years there were clear signs of stress. In “Dover Beach” (1867), Matthew Arnold saw the political and social turmoil of the Victorian era as merely the next step in the downward spiral of Western Civilization, with its unabated history of war, religious decline, and moral relativity — an assault on the essential connections between human beings whose only recourse was the commitment of lovers to be “true” to one another.

Yet, with the cultural onslaught of modernity, any lasting “true” love in the classic sense became a fleeting ideal. T.S. Eliot’s portrayal of romantic frustration in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) is the personification of the dilemma Georg Simmel presciently envisioned in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), which began with this resounding sentence:

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.

The devolution of our chief literary exemplars of the essential man — from epic hero (Beowulf, Ulysses and Aeneas), to tragic hero (Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Shelley’s Prometheus), to the phoenix-like hero of Romanticism (Napoleon), to the disheartened figure of the retired Ulysses in Tennyson’s eponymous poem, and finally to Eliot’s aging post-Romantic lover (Prufrock) who dares not “disturb the universe” — generally corresponded to the transforming cultural and economic hierarchy that replaced soldiers and explorers with businessmen and scientists. As the industrial revolution drove the migration of labor from farm to factory, the lowly shepherd and farmhand of the traditional pastoral scene became the blue collar worker of the post-pastoral metropolis.

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Despite the naive premises of the popular form of pastoral, however stretched and strained, the genre remains remarkably durable, even if it is increasingly used as a touchstone more than a framework. In modern and contemporary poems we witness the popular pastoral portrait with its cracked varnish juxtaposed to modernism’s industrial high-tech, conflicted morality and garish breaches of decorum; when they are combined, we have a distinctive form of irony. Frank O’Hara’s confrontational lyric poem, “Song [Is it dirty]” (1964) plays the weathered pastoral sensibility off the sordid image of the city (e.g., such as depicted in William Blake’s “London”[1794]) and exposes them both as two-dimensional constructs befitting a primitive woodcut or simple morality play. The complexity of city life leads us to live according to a relative mix of values, to rub shoulders with folks who may be considered, in certain contexts, as morally relative and hence “bad” from a purist’s perspective, even though they may be “attractive” in other ways. Whether or not the poem serves a gay subtext, as Marjorie Perloff thought, is secondary to O’Hara’s clear references to the pastoral antithesis. O’Hara’s sarcasm is evident:

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

Here O’Hara shrewdly juxtaposes the familiar polar extremes: the dirt/soot of the city and the moss of nature. But soot is a product of the combustion of coal, which gives us heat and energy; and moss, although green, is not grass, but instead, a plant without conventional roots, stems and leaves and basically inedible (as distinct from lichens or algae). The reference to “no-moss mind” temps us to associate the old saw, “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” but otherwise suggests an anti-pastoral, metropolitan sensibility. O’Hara pointedly challenges the Blakean paradigm with his queries (“Is it dirty/does it look dirty . . . does it seem dirty”): i.e., by living in the city, does one necessarily exchange the moss of the artificial pastoral for the soot of the big bad city? Yes and no. Just as we “don’t refuse to breathe the air,” soot and all, we accommodate ourselves to life in the city. By analogy, the “bad” characters (like those in Blake’s “London”) that one is forced to live within the crush of the city represent a similar compromise of living standards. One of the notable aspects of modernism is its discourse on relative moral values as a variable lens through which to view life. Thus, a desirable complexity is achieved in the paradox: the “character” is not “less bad,” but nevertheless “improves constantly.” So that when we get to the final refrain, “that’s what you think of in the city,” the statement is more a corrective rebuke than a mere declaration, just as the reprise, “you don’t refuse to breathe do you.”  Anyone who has read “Meditations in an Emergency” knows O’Hara didn’t buy the morbid view of the city: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

The theme of this dialectic (nature vs. civilization) keeps reappearing in different forms, for example, in the subject of my last post, “Cascadilla Falls” (1987) by A.R. Ammons, where Eden’s perfection is translated through a Hobbesian vision of the mechanized universe, ever-moving with a relentless mathematical precision, that ultimately reduces us to just another cog in the machine. While Ammons’ poem questions our privileged status as cognitive beings in nature, the world seen through the eyes of Michael Dickman (in his wonderful “From the Canal“) — whose contemporary sensibility is steeped in the excesses of post-modern culture and an awareness of its consequent corruption of nature (where we have indeed disturbed our universe) — may easily be taken for a hallucinogenic vision of the contemporary pastoral scene: at once fiendishly contaminated and extravagantly adorned by human invention, but appraised with the spiritual awe of a Romantic like John Clare. I discuss Dickman’s poem at length here.

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We indeed live in a post-pastoral world, not in the sense that we are “passed it,” but that our naive views and expectations changed as most of us began to dwell and work in metropolitan areas.  We are innately aware that literary conventions are merely ways of framing a story or coloring a portrait, albeit very useful ones because they allow a poet (or other authors) to simplify the presentation of complex ideas using a familiar context that has recognizable associations.

This is certainly the case with John Ashbery’s “Some Trees” (1956), whose complex discourse is much less so when viewed through the convention of the pastoral mode. Here Ashbury employs synesthesia (where images become sounds and vice versa) to cross the great divide between the metropolitan model, the natural habitat of contemporary reticence, and the pastoral framework that fosters the uninhibited discourse of love, albeit one that is often accomplished more in images (gestures and looks) than words. This pastoral frame is, thus, the “still performance” with its nonverbal “speech” and archetypal images of “comeliness,” which provides a perfect figuration for the romantic prelude the poem represents. In this setting, the classic city-country dialectic takes place, for there is no other way to explain the breathless wonder of the poem’s narrator, except to assume that two (potential) lovers come from the city (represented in the poem by words, “the world”). This pastoral setting is one that is “as far . . . from the world as agreeing with it,” creating a dramatic tension: on one side of which is the romantic tableau (“a canvas”) of the pastoral garden — in which the bare winter trees try to tell us what we are, where the lovers might soon “touch, love, explain,” and the “silence” is “already filled with noises,” like the happy, satisfying music of a “chorus of smiles” — and on the other side is the cultivated “reticence” of “our days” in the metropolitan sensibility in which they dwell. In these circumstances, the implied “accents” of the pastoral are “their own defense” against the city’s wintry discourse which, in contrast, appears in a “puzzling light.” Although Ashbery’s approach to contemporary love developed a sophistication far beyond the naivety expressed in “Some Trees,” he continued to use pastoral memes as a backboard against which to bounce contemporary portraits of ourselves.

For contemporary poets the pastoral is, indeed, the ideal sounding board.  Thus, in one of Stephen Dunn’s newest poems, “Unnatural” (2016), we witness a poet using the pastoral mode to make the counter-intuitive argument for the artificial (or “unnatural”). I want to bring your attention to the last four lines of that poem:

the artifice in what’s called artificial,
the often concealed skill involved,
without which we’d have no accurate
view of ourselves, or of lilies in a pond.

In fact, our view of ourselves changed when we made the first wheel — and most would concede that each time a new invention arrives – whether in the sciences (medicine, transportation, physics, chemistry, cybernetics, etc.) or in the visual, musical or theatrical arts (in the form of photographs, motion pictures, radio, TV, or the internet media), we never see ourselves in the same way again. Our perceptions change and become enhanced by our creations, without which, as Dunn points out, “we’d have no accurate/view of ourselves.”

While one might argue with Dunn’s choice of the word “accurate” in this poem, none can refute the fact that the scientific discoveries of the last hundred years have given us increasing degrees of insight into an ever-evolving, ever-refining “view of ourselves” and the world around us. Further, when Dunn points to “the often concealed skill involved” in our creations, not only is he referring to the fact that our technology relies upon the gathered knowledge of hundreds of years, but how easily we overlook our assimilation of technology’s complexity and its effect on us as the present reality becomes the “new normal” (or the “new natural”).[6]

Dunn’s argument is not a new one. Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919) laid the groundwork for this view, where the wilderness is “slovenly” in light of the order-imposing elegance of the jar (the modern heir to Keats’ Grecian Urn), “grey and bare” as it is. Stevens’ poem, as Dunn’s, explores the opposite side of the pastoral equation.

We also observe this in “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934), in which Stevens gave us another way of thinking about the interplay between the art/artifice of the human mind and nature. “The Idea of Order at Key West” is an extremely beautiful poem, but a difficult read if you have no experience with Stevens’s work. A shorthand way into the poem is to recognize that the woman in the poem is a figuration of the human imagination and that her “song” is the way the mind translates the chaos of the world and gives it definable “order.” [Think, for example, how our primitive views of hurricanes and other extreme weather systems have changed so dramatically with the advent of weather satellites, advanced telemetry and meteorological science which help us to make fairly reliable forecasts about “acts of God” previously thought to be unpredictable. Through technological order we come to acquire a sense of adapting the forces of nature.]  The last stanzas of the poem refer to the after-effects of this process (“when the singing ended”) when, like the “slovenly wilderness” in “Anecdote of the Jar,” nature assumes a perception-altering order that had not been apparent to us beforehand. In this way, our minds organize reality through our fictions (our paradigms), which change as each new era of thinkers and artists comes along. Here, Stevens uses the sea shore, a counterpoint to the usual pastoral setting, and a Romantic form of discourse, but not in the traditional manner, though the poem does extol the raw beauty of nature and the instruction residing therein; rather he writes from a very modern viewpoint, describing, epistemologically, the way the mind perceives and imposes an “idea of order” on an otherwise chaotic world. If “Anecdote of the Jar” is the exterior view of this process, “The Idea of Order at Key West” is the interior one.

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Notably, modern and contemporary poetry emphasizes the translation of experience through the preeminence of images. We attribute this to Ezra Pound’s hallmark aesthetic, “imagism” and William Carlos William’s prescription, “not ideas but in things” (based on Emerson’s rule: “fasten words again to visible things”). By eschewing abstraction, the poet fashions an enduring vision of experience akin to the work of a visual artist. As an ancillary effect, the focus on concrete representation allows the reader to participate in the construction of the text in a way that is similar to our approach toward “reading” impressionistic, surrealistic and cubist works of visual art.

William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) is one of the most striking pieces of twentieth century poetry because of its iconic imagery. Here we see the pastoral mode at work with its classic barnyard images. Its introductory phrase (“so much depends/upon”) appears to invoke a primordial/Edenic viewpoint as if to say that these symbols of husbandry and nature form the basis of life. But there is more to this deceptively simple piece.  Although we may easily overlook the wheelbarrow when compared to the science and art of the early twentieth century (when the poem was written), this simple tool incorporates the principal engineering inventions of mankind, viz., the fulcrum and the wheel. In this way, the poem serves the function, much as the wheelbarrow itself, of an object trouvé, i.e., the found object that constitutes the artwork itself and simultaneously exemplifies the conceptualist aesthetic which invokes contextuality or a broader world of references, hence rendering its presence all the more significant.

It is to Williams’ credit that, beyond the indispensable observation, “So much depends/upon,” he does not interpose himself between these images and the reader, and thereby allows the reader to appreciate the unlimited import of the vision. Because of this we can imagine a variety of responses to the piece. A Marxist literary critic might view the poem as demonstrating how “so much depends upon” controlling the means of production. A neo-Romantic literary critic might view the poem as demonstrating the spirituality of nature. A post-modern literary critic with a deconstructionist bent might say this poem is a small “machine made of words” (the terms that Williams used to describe a poem) that, like a piece of software with open architecture, allows the user to think of it in multiple, even contradictory, ways that reflect the author’s complex attitudes toward its subject matter.

Yet, despite Williams’s dictate, “not ideas but in things,” it is important to note that the poem’s tonality is largely determined by the introductory words, “So much depends/upon,” absent which the poet’s delight and awe would be eviscerated to the point of nullifying the poem; those words provide a fundamental emotional framework (as Yeats does with “I hear it in the deep heart’s core”) to which all responses must bend like sails in the wind.

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The Japanese haiku was championed by Ezra Pound primarily as an example of the concise use of images. But the form may also be used to illustrate Pound’s taxonomy of “three kinds of poetry”: the poetry of visual representation  (phanopoeia), musicality or tonality (melopoeia), and the “dance of the intellect among the words” (logopoeia).

According to the classic definition, haikus are three-line poems respectively syllabicated 5 –7 –5; but many English authors employ a free verse approach. The form, with its inherently concise expression and imagistic technique, generally relies upon seasonal and other pastoral elements to provide a recognizable framework.

We can see how capacious the form can be in Matsuo Bashō’s famous end-of-life haiku (using Robert Hass’s translation):

deep autumn –
my neighbor, I wonder
how does he live?

“Deep autumn” draws us toward the coming winter and, symbolically, the end of life. For those at the point of imminent death, as Basho was at the time he wrote this piece, the instinct to review and perhaps reevaluate the life we lived overcomes us; one reaches for a sense of community with the world, in part to seek some reassurance of the essential goodness of life. In the process of this reflection, we compare and perhaps distinguish ourselves from our neighbors — and in the modern electronic world, a neighbor might be anyone. We ask: What was our neighbor’s life-like and was our experience comparable? Bashōs haiku is regarded as one of the greatest ever written; it not only brings on the reflection I’ve referred to, but we also register surprise in Basho’s question, as if the all-consuming experience of living his life had displaced all curiosity for others, and this shocks us with the recognition of how disconnected and isolated one can become. It is the saving grace of the pastoral that shows us the way toward communal experience.

One of the first and most famous English language haikus is Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This poem is regarded as an example of the “imagist” movement that Pound and T.E. Hulme advocated in the early twentieth century. Here, Pound employs the pastoral myth, encapsulating the seasons of life within this powerful ‘apparition,” a dream-like vision of human faces in a dark train station are imagined as petals that the rain has caused to fall onto the bough. There are many associations with these images, among which are:

-technology (metro station) v. raw nature (petals and bough)
-city  v. country
-human mortality v. the cycle of life (found in the petal’s paradoxical symbol of death and life’s reemergence at springtime: the fallen petal makes room for the fruit to grow)

Our feeling for the poem is enhanced by the fact that the early twentieth century metro was an underground railway system (or subway) which was reportedly lit at only 5 lux (not light enough to read a book by) compared to the 200 lux that riders enjoy today. In this way Pound invokes the mythic Hades (as well as those apposite works by Ovid, Virgil and Dante) and the classic figure of Persephone as the symbol of our seasonal cycles, using the ghostly faces of the riders, barely visible in the dark underground, and setting them off against the image of the fallen petals on a bough darkened by rain.

Conclusion

For effective reading of modern and contemporary poetry, we should not dwell on a given poem as if was intended to communicate a single meaning but reflect on the multiple ways the poem affects us, intellectually and emotionally. We want to avoid a purely instrumental or utilitarian way of thinking about language. Remember Ludwig Wittgenstein’s admonition: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of giving information.” In Williams’ formulation, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. . . . It isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes.” As we go forward, we will start to think of the poem as a number of systems, of rhythm, rhyme, image, form, and ideas, each of which forms a counterpoint to the others.

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[1] Poets.org website: “Poetic Form: Pastoral”

[2]  Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford Univ. P 1964), p. 5.  Although Marx gives primary credit to Theocritus for the birth of the form, scholars generally acknowledge Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BCE) as the earliest example of pastoral literature.  Thomas G. Rosenmeyer’s The Green Cabinet (Univ. of Cal. 1969) provides a thorough examination of the origins and uses of the pastoral lyric.

[3] James H. Hanford, “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton’s Lycidas,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXV (1910), 403-447.

[4] Marx at p. 19.

[5]Samuel Johnson, “Life of Milton” [excepted from Lives of the Poets (1779)].

[6] For an extended discussion of how technology has transmuted our pastoral sensibility, see my essay on “J.H. Prynne and Cybernetics in ‘Nibble Song’“.

[This essay has been revised and supplemented since its original posting.]

© 2016 Steven M. Critelli