17 March 2025 by Jian Zhi Qiu
Quote from Dear Su Yen pp.307-309
Dear Su Yen
You have seen that many poems about the countryside show it as being a happy carefree place where work is enjoyable, or perhaps where not much work seems to be done at all. This is a poet's view of countryside: poets usually, though not always, being people who did not have to do physical work for their living and who were free to appreciate the beauty of the countryside and sometimes fantasise about the lives of the poor people who lived and worked there. This idealisation of country life in art and poetry is known as the Pastoral Tradition in art and can be traced back through the Roman poet Virgil to the Greek Theocritus. It is quite possible that pastoral farming (that is, looking after grazing animals) in the warm Mediterranean climate was quite a pleasant life, but arable farming, cultivating the soil, in the colder wetter weather of Northern Europe was not. Some English poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would make a link with the Ancient World by giving classical names to their imaginary characters; for example here are just a few lines from one of our greatest poets, John Milton.
L'Allegro, by John Milton (1608-1674)
Hard by, a Cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
Are at there savoury dinner set
Of Hearbs and other Country Messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses;
And then in haste her Bowre she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the sheaves; ...
Milton is best known for his great poem Paradise Lost which describes how an over ambitious angel in heaven was expelled and became God's opponent, the Devil. Interestingly, Milton suggests that God needs the Devil as you said the lamb needs the tiger. Some of Milton's early poems, however, are considered as not being very good.
L'Allegro has good qualities, but the point here is what a rather elegant picture of country life the poem suggests with its classical characters, Phillis, Corydon, Thyrsis and Thestylis, and words such as, 'savoury,' "neat-handed' and 'bowre,' or bower. Nearly a hundred years later a country parson, or priest, George Crabbe described, as he says, "What forms the real picture of the poor, in a very different way. He starts by mocking the idealised image of country life presented by many other poets who imagined rural labourers writing poems and playing flutes while they watched their sheep.
