Pastoral 2

A few further comments:  I’m actually quite interested in the pastoral mode.  I think it can be used to explore the sorts of displacements that are inherent in contemporary life.  I’m posting a (kind of over-written, now that I think about it) poem I wrote earlier this year which to my mind functions at its core as a pastoral: it has, I think, that integral distancing which I think is arguably the  central method of pastoral, a division between the speaker’s vantage point and the natural phenomenon s/he’s ostensibly examining, where the poem’s ultimate focus is the vantage point.  This distancing is more eloquently demonstrated in the James Wright poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ (The Making of a Poem, p219) where the speaker identifies himself as separate from the landscape he observes, despairingly so, in the last line.

Certainly, where it is interesting, it is often for uses far more varied and often political than simply eulogising the natural world: it never was that simple a thing, even in its earliest Classical manifestations, which have a highly political, conservative bent as I understand it, as have later manifestations – Renaissance country house poems, for example, are pastorals which function to sustain the status quo.  Then there’s John Clare’s 19th century quite contrary use of the pastoral to bemoan the enclosure of the land, there’s the use it has been put to in a post-colonial context by poets like Derek Walcott and of course, in Irish twentieth century poetry: it’s more or less a default mode for Heaney, for example.  It is an efficient mode to use where questions of identity and place arise, of course, so it’s not surprising that Irish poets would have used it, even if they have often done so in quite an ‘anti-pastoral’ fashion (think Kavanagh’s ‘stony grey soil’). 

My own earlier effort:

What we know of the desert we learned from TV: elegy for the Saharan cheetah caught by a camera trap in the deserts of Termit, Niger, January 2011

Those wastes harbour part-ghosts, on night-japes both

serious and seldom, photographed once

or perhaps twice, staring baldly backwards. 

Here’s what the light caught: this flash-lit mirage. 

The desert stock flees. Till now there has been

only a Bedouin indication,

old drawings’ odd symmetries –  here at last,

the desert’s beast, its grey imperative

shadowed by scientists and for its

eco-audience, by the BBC.

A trade of cold nights, hot days we imagine,

the unrelenting grit.  We are prepared

for snakes curvate crossing the sands, we are

braced for tenebrous rattlings: scorpions,

insects.  But what the desert smells like and

whether it has bird song and what fabulous,

unexpected carnivores it flashes,

once, for the desk-bound and then not again, 

is fading, too lovely, kin to a curse.