Pastoral

The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target audience is typically an urban one. A pastoral is a work of this genre. A piece of music in the genre is usually referred to as a pastorale. The genre is also known as bucolic, from the Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος, meaning a cowherd.

Quotes

• Et in Arcadia ego.
• Even in Arcadia, there am I [i.e. Death]
  • Origin unknown; adopted by Poussin and Il Guercino

• Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2

• In time of yore when shepherds dwelt
    Upon the mountain rocks,
  And simple people never felt
    The pain of lovers’ mocks;
  But little birds would carry tales
    ’Twixt Susan and her sweeting,
  And all the dainty nightingales
    Did sing at lovers’ meeting:
  Then might you see what looks did pass
    Where shepherds did assemble,
  And where the life of true love was
    When hearts could not dissemble.
  Then yea and nay was thought an oath
    That was not to be doubted,
  And when it came to faith and troth
    We were not to be flouted.
  Then did they talk of curds and cream,
    Of butter, cheese and milk;
  There was no speech of sunny beam
    Nor of the golden silk.
  Then for a gift a row of pins,
    A purse, a pair of knives,
  Was all the way that love begins;
    And so the shepherd wives.
  But now we have so much ado,
    And are so sore aggrievèd,
  That when we go about to woo
    We cannot be believèd;
  Such choice of jewels, rings and chains,
    That may but favour move,
  And such intolerable pains
    Ere one can hit on love;
  That if I still shall bide this life
    ’Twixt love and deadly hate,
  I will go learn the country life
    Or leave the lover’s state.
  • Nicholas Breton, "Olden Love-making" or "Antique Courtship" (wr. before 1568)
  • W. S. Braithwaite, A Book of Elizabethan Verse (1906) prefaces this poem with the following comment: “There can be no harm in quoting here one little poem, a description of love-making in the happy days of pastoral simplicity, when girls did not look for costly presents (rings, chains, etc.) from their lovers, but were content with a row of pins or an empty purse,—the days when truth was on every shepherd’s tongue and maids had not learned to dissemble. Whether there was ever such a time, since our first parents were driven out of Paradise, we need not stop to enquire. The old poets loved to talk about it.”

• O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
  With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
  As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
  • John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (wr. 1819; pub. 1820)