war pastorals Perhaps the most complex war pastorals work by antinomy rather than ‘anti-
thesis’—which merely reverses Brooke’s elision. The unstable generic boundaries
of both ‘pastoral’ and ‘war poetry’ prevent ‘war pastoral’ (or ‘battle-field’) from
being inevitably oxymoronic. Indeed, as Haber stresses, pastoral is a symbiotic
outcrop of the original war poetry: epic. The counterpoint between ‘bucolic’ and
‘heroic’ in Theocritus’sIdylls(which includes bucolic’s role as critique of the
heroic) dramatizes ‘the relationship that exists between a limited present and a
heroic past....The ‘‘bucolic’’ perspective in theIdyllsis repeatedly implicated
in its opposite.’^7 Similarly, Virgil’sEcloguesandGeorgicsbelong to, and criticize,
civil war: ‘Since there’ll be bards in plenty desiring to rehearse|Varus’ fame, and
celebrate the sorrowful theme of warfare [tristia...bella],|I shall take up a slim
reed-pipe and a rural subject’ (EcloguesVI).^8 One context for theEclogueswas the
transfer of farms to war veterans. While the ‘heroic’ may become the sorrowful or
pitiful, the violently destructive or painfully imperative, the symbiosis continues. It
is epitomized and thematized by poems such as Thomas Hardy’s ‘In Time of ‘‘The
Breaking of Nations’’ ’ (1915), Edward Thomas’s ‘As the team’s head brass’ (1916),
Henry Reed’s ‘Judging Distances’ (1943), and Paul Muldoon’s ‘Ireland’ (1980):
poems in which war impinges on a rural landscape with lovers. The effects range
from Hardy asserting the staying power of his ‘maid and her wight’ (‘War’s annals
will cloud into night|Ere their story die’)^9 to Muldoon regretting that love is less
likely to prevail than war:
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.^10As the title ‘Judging Distances’ suggests, the symbiosis between epic and pastoral
is a matter of background becoming foreground, or vice versa. In Hardy’s poem,
‘War’s annals’ finally enter the scene only to be occluded; in Muldoon’s ‘Ireland’,
the explosive prospect of ‘men hurrying back|Across two fields and a river’
displaces the alternative image of ‘lovers’ and fills the view. The main speaker of
‘Judging Distances’, like that of Reed’s better-known ‘Naming of Parts’, is a military
instructor. ‘Naming of Parts’ pivots on ironic dissonance between the language of
weaponry and the language of poetic pastoral: an eclogue-like contest in which the
latter proves equal to the battle:
(^7) Haber,Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction, 13–15.
(^8) Virgil,The Eclogues·The Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983),
25.
(^9) Thomas Hardy, ‘In Time of ‘‘The Breaking of Nations’’ ’, inThe Complete Poems,ed.James
Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 543. 10
PaulMuldoon,‘Ireland’,inPoems 1968–1998(London: Faber, 2001), 82–3.