edna longley
of modern elegy, his ‘narrative of generic dislocation [has] a subplot of generic
perpetuation’.^3
Asreflexive ‘war pastoral’, ‘Bog Cotton’ helps to perpetuate the genre of
‘eclogue’. In hisEcloguesVirgil obliquely comments on Roman affairs by creating a
stylized rustic landscape where ‘shepherds’ and ‘goatherds’ occupy themselves with
dialogues, love-songs, and singing contests. ‘Bog Cotton’ sets up a conversation
between poets, co-opts landscape for a meditation on war and poetry, and is
voiced at a certain distance from the natural scene and scenes of war. In heading
two sections of this essay ‘Interrupted Georgics’ and ‘Marginal Eclogues’, I try to
distinguish the broadly perspectival bias(and more radical reflexivity) of ‘eclogue’
from the broadly situational bias of ‘georgic’, as derived from Virgil’s switch of focus
to ploughshares and idiosyncratic discourse on agriculture. The ‘georgic’ section
centres on poems by First World War combatants: principally Edward Thomas, but
also Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden. The speakers of these poems are immersed
in natural or rural environments that implicate war, or war environments that
implicate nature or agriculture. Ultimately, as I indicate in Thomas’s case, there
is no clear line between eclogue and georgic (equally ‘artificial’ in Virgil’s hands):
modes that represent poles of the lyric poem itself. The final section, ‘A Pastoral
Peace?’, looks at poems of the Northern Irish ‘peace process’.
Not all pastoral poetry is anti-war. Not all war poetry is anti-pastoral. As regards
poetry of modern war, the first proposition may seem more self-evident. In First
World War verse, rural images knowingly serve pro-war propaganda; or they well
up, unexamined, from the literary-patriotic unconscious. Both impulses unite in
the calculated vagueness of Rupert Brooke’s appeal to ‘the autumnal earth’, ‘the
colours of the earth’, ‘that rich earth’.^4 Hence the anti-pastoral streak in protest
poetry, exemplified by Wilfred Owen’s satirical citation of Shelley’s ‘I shall be one
with nature, herb, and stone’ in ‘A Terre’.^5 But there might be less problematic
ways in which pastoral intersects with patriotism (Brooke simply elides them), just
as there might be ways in which ‘war poetry’ uses, rather than abuses, pastoral. Paul
Fussell says of ‘Arcadian Recourses’:
Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the
Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them. Pastoral reference, whether
to literature or to actual rural localities andobjects, is a way of invoking a code to hint by
antithesis at the indescribable; at the same time, it is a comfort in itself, like rum, a deep
dug-out, or a woolly vest. The Golden Age posited by Classical and Renaissance literary
pastoral now finds its counterpart in ideas of ‘home’ and ‘the summer of 1914’.^6
(^3) Jahan Ramazani,Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), 10.
(^4) Rupert Brooke, ‘Safety’, ‘The Dead’, ‘The Soldier’, inThe Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke,ed.
Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1960), 20, 22, 23.
(^5) Wilfred Owen, ‘A Terre’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments,i:The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy
(London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 179.
(^6) Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 325.