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WAR PASTORALS
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By ‘pastoral’ I mean any poem that concerns the natural world or the human
footprint on that world, including the poem itself. I take the pastoral field
to encompass ‘anti-pastoral’. InPastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction,Jane
Haber argues that pastoral has always been a reflexive ‘mode that work[s] insistently
against itself, problematizing both its own definition and stable definitions within its
texts’. From the genre’s inception, ‘presence, continuity, and consolation have been
seen as related to—indeed as dependent on—absence, discontinuity and loss’.^1
In the ‘war pastorals’ considered here—from the First World War, the inter-war
years, and the Northern Irish conflict—self-awareness or intertextual awareness
often goes deep. Thus in ‘Bog Cotton’ (1979), Michael Longley speculatively aligns
an Irish plant with Isaac Rosenberg wearing a poppy ‘behind his ear’ and Keith
Douglas’s ‘thirstier desert flowers’.^2 This vista questions the remedial capacities
of poetry, as well as pastoral: bog cotton is ‘useless...though it might well bring
to mind|The plumpness of pillows, the staunching of wounds....As though to
make a hospital of the landscape’. Has modern war overwhelmed the traditional
resources of pastoral, figured by ‘making a hospital of the landscape’? Or have poets
been able to exploit and extend the pastoral repertoire? The issue is not confined
to pastoral’s elegiac aspect, but it seems relevant that, in Jahan Ramazani’s study
(^1) Jane Haber,Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 1. 2
Michael Longley, ‘Bog Cotton’, inCollected Poems(London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 136–7.