‘A Flowery Band’: Pastoral, Polemic and Translation

  • Jennifer Wallace
Chapter

Abstract

In his ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ (1709), Alexander Pope argues that the pastoral genre was originally derived from the lazy lifestyle of shepherds in warm climates: “Tis natural to imagine, that the leisure of those early shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity.’1 Keats describes the typical landscape in which those shepherds might be supposed to have lived:

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make ‘Gainst the hot season.2

Both writers consciously create a stereotypical locus amoenus, which crucially depends upon simple qualities and pleasures. Shepherds ‘sing’, rivers are ‘clear’ and the world is ‘green’. The enjoyment of the landscape is intensified by its contrast with the supposed complication of everyday life.

Keywords

Living World Political Programme Greek Text Green World Greek Literature 
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Jennifer Wallace 1997

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jennifer Wallace
    • 1
  1. 1.Peterhouse, CambridgeUK

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