Reversions of Pastoral

Pastoral has some claims to be the genre of classical tradition and, after antiquity, the genre that most persistently tropes classical tradition itself as a genre. At one level, post-antique pastoral will always transcend the (already manoeuvrable) ancient limits of the genre, expanding into the magical rural space of ‘paganism’ at large, or unlocking allegories that render prelate or ruler – or poet – as a Davidian or Christ-like ‘good shepherd’. Yet the pastoral poem will always allow its transcultural conversations to revert once more to the first linguistic principles of a Virgilian Eclogue – at times literally, word by word. Different worlds of early modern ‘pastoral philology’ are sampled here in the Bucolicum carmen of Petrarch, in the Latin eclogues of Baptista Mantuan, and in the English Shepheardes Calender of Spenser. And all three poets are found to draw from the Virgil of the Fourth (‘messianic’) Eclogue some kind of interest in a pastorally inflected salvation, whether temporal, spiritual, or both at once. The chapter ends with three eclogues by Seamus Heaney, a poet of our own time with a deep understanding of the ‘staying power’ of pastoral.