Shepherd poetry

Shepherd poetry

Shepherd poetry is denoted by several synonymous terms: bucolic or pastoral, from the Greek and Latin words for the shepherd, bucolic, ic, and pastor, respectively. Pastoral comes from Latin pāstōrālis, again derived from Greek pāstor = shepherd. The word appears again in the Christian designation pastor , who is the one who shepherds the congregation and is thus also synonymous with the elder or priest . The fact that shepherd poems are also called eclogues, which means “selected poems”, has its background in the fact that Vergil’s shepherd poems went by this name. Similarly, Theocritus’ poems were called idylls, from Greek eidyllion, “small picture”, that is, genre pictures. With the latter, the original meaning was a small poem and not a poem about idyllic life, although in modern times the latter meaning has come into force.

Pastoral in literature denotes a reference to the country and villages, and its aspects of life among shepherds and sheep and other forms of farm work that have been romanticized. Here the shepherds become poets and singers. A typical mood is given by the English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe in some famous lines from “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”:

Come live with me and be my Love,

 And we will try all the pleasures those hills and valleys, dales and fields,

 And all the craggy mountains yield.

 There we will sit on the rocks and see the shepherds feed their flocks,

 By shallow rivers, to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals.

Pastoral shepherds and shepherdesses usually have Greek names such as Corydon or Philomela, a reflection of the genre’s origins. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful, evocative landscapes, the literary term being “locus amoenus”, Latin for “beautiful place”, such as Arkadia, a landscape in Greece, in the middle of the Peloponnese, which is the home of the god Pan. The poets described Arkadia as a form of paradise. The purpose of sheep and other national activities is that it is undemanding and left in the background. Indulging the shepherdesses and shepherdesses and their suitors is a state of perfect pastime. It makes them available to shape a persistent erotic fantasy. The shepherds spend their time chasing beautiful girls, and sometimes, as in the Greek and Roman versions, beautiful boys too. The erotica in Vergil’s second eclogue, “Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin” (“The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for the beautiful Alexis”) is obviously not heterosexual.

Common topics within shepherd poetry are love and seduction, the value of poetry, death, and grief, and the misery of the city in contrast to the “purity” of the country. A poetic theme in shepherd poetry is eclogue (dialogue between two shepherds), for example between a shepherd and a shepherdess whom he loves or tries to seduce; a “singing contest” to determine which shepherd is the best poet; or a sophisticated dispute between two shepherds about a woman, their flock, or concurrent event, a dirge for a dead friend ( elegy ), or praise of a dignitary.

Important was the pastoral dirge that expressed the loss of a lost friend and how often the muse was invoked, the expression of the poet’s grief, praise of the dead, the curse of death, and finally the poet’s recognition of the inevitability of death. The pastoral dirges or elegies were still practiced in the 19th century by romantic and Victorian poets, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais ( 1821 ) which was written at the death of John Keats.

Already in antiquity, the genre was cultivated, then called bucolic poetry, from the Greek βουκóλος meaning shepherd, which reflects the Greek origins of pastoral poetry. Poetry began with the poetry of the Hellenistic Theokritos (Theokritos), a Greek-writing poet from Syracuse (Syracuse) in the 2nd century BC., and he wrote about the landscape on the east coast of Sicily for the urban population of Alexandria.

Several of his Idylls are set in the countryside, perhaps to also reflect the landscape on the island of Kos in the Aegean where he also lived. The content of the poems was about the dialogues of the shepherds. Pastoral is often defined as romantic as opposed to realistic, but Theocritus’ poetry was heartfelt and concrete, and not characterized by the artificial superficiality that later pastoral poetry has been characterized by. The shepherds are real shepherds and the language is sometimes juicy, and presumably, Theocritus may have been inspired and drawn material from authentic folk traditions among the Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in a Doric dialect, but the verse meter he chose was dactylic hexameterassociated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, the epic. This mixture of simplicity and sophistication would come to play a significant role in later pastoral poetry.