No less burn heavy poppies, slumber-drowned.The repetition of the verb, the shaping of the sentence, the unusual rhythm of the last line which goes with the drowsy poppies, all
work together to impose a formal unity and beauty.
He also varies the work with great skill. The passages on actual rustic work alternate with all kinds of more obviously 'poetical'
passages-on the zones of I the globe, on storms, on winter in the Scythian snows, on the glories of Italy. Some of them are both
lengthy and highly ambitious in style, the poet trying his wings for his future epic. The most spectacular come at crucial points in
the structure of the whole. Book 1 opens with an elaborate invocation of the gods, including a startlingly fulsome address to
Octavian. Book 3 opens with a long passage on the epic which Virgil will write in the future. By designed contrast, the second and
fourth books have very short introductions, and each has a long poetic excursus at the end. Book 2 closes with an emotional
passage extolling the life of the farmer ('O all too happy, if they knew their luck!'), contrasting rustic innocence with the vicious
luxury of the city, and extolling the lot of the poet who (like Virgil) knows the rustic gods. Book 4 ends with the epyllion of
Aristaeus, to which we shall return. Other set pieces are darker in tone. At the end of Book I, an account of the weather signs
which the farmer needs to know runs into an emotional treatment of the fearsome portents which marked the divine anger at the
assassination of Julius Caesar, the guilt of Rome which is punished by civil war, and a fervent prayer for the survival and success
of Octavian, the only hope of the world. Book 3 closes with a grisly account of the ravages of plague among cattle, arising from
some apparently simple instructions for preserving the health of one's animals. The four books thus end with alternating passages
of gloom and hope, a structure which has often been compared to that of a great work of music.
It would be wrong, though, to think of the Georgics as consisting of unpoetical instruction, enlivened by purple patches of poetry.
Virgil has shot through the instructions with all sorts of devices of variety. The tone is constantly changing, from mock-solemnity
and humour to pathos and indignation. Vivid pictures-of clouds, snakes, birds, horses-are enlivened by echoes of military
language, or Ennius, or Hellenistic verse. The poet constantly looks at events from the standpoint of the animals he describes. An
example in Book 3: Virgil follows his sources in advising that bulls and stallions should be kept from dissipating their energies by
sexual indulgence:
The female saps their vigour as they gaze;
The bulls look on her and forget to graze,
So sweet are her enticements: in her sight
The haughty rivals for her favour fight.(3.215-18)
The passage goes on to develop the battle of the bulls, the chagrin of the loser 'in distant exile, groaning for the shame of defeat
and the loss of his love', his practising, and his eventual thunderous return.
In the fourth book the bees are handled in much the same way. Varro's work shows that bee-keeping was only one branch of
specialized farming, listing it along with the raising of chickens, pigeons, peacocks, dormice, hares, deer, edible snails, and fancy
fish. Virgil ignores all but the bees: for they are an image of human life, orderly and public-spirited. They are treated with a
mixture of sympathy, admiration, and irony. The book ends with a great surprise, the epyllion of Aristaeus. The poet tells that, if
one's bees die, a new swarm will be forthcoming from the correct treatment of the corpse of an ox. This fantastic procedure was
discovered by the legendary hero Aristaeus, whose bees all died to punish him (as he discovers) for causing the death of Orpheus'
wife Eurydice. The story of Orpheus' descent to the Underworld to fetch her back, his fatal turning to look at her, his second and
final loss, and his death, is told in Virgil's most magical verse. It seems to have been Virgil who first said that Orpheus failed to
revive his wife. Why he ended the Georgics with this tale, narrated at a length of nearly 250 verses, is not easy to say. A possible
reason is that he wanted to give another side of the vision of the virtuous, patriotic bees, 'little Romans' ('paruos Quifites') as he
calls them: these impersonal creatures, sexless and free from passion, who kill themselves with work and gladly die for the
community, can be brought back from death: 'the race is immortal', as the poet says. But something is irreparably lost: the beautiful
Eurydice and her lover, the musician Orpheus. Irreplaceable individuals, passionate and creative, they are the prey of death. Such
an interpretation would be in line with an important strand in the Aeneid, with its bitter awareness of the conflict between fate's
impersonal purposes and the passions of the human heart.