1. Pastorals

His structural plan was relatively complex. The year’s round is set alongside life from youth to age and day from morning to night. Keeping to four poems also allowed him to align each with one of the traditional four elements of, in order of appearance, air, fire, earth, and water—not too ostentatiously, but quietly. All this adds to the contrivance of the poems but also keeps readers on their toes in order to appreciate a satisfying arrangement of intersecting patterns. Further, as conventions become such because they do, after all, contain more than just seeds of truths underlying lived experience, so these poetic beginnings promise potential developments and, crucially, hint at a future where technical virtuosity can be relied on to run like a current through every line, every couplet, every paragraph.

‘Spring’, lines 69–76

We begin with a singing-contest:

Strephon

All nature mourns, the skies relent in showers,

Hushed are the birds, and closed the drooping flowers;

If Delia smile, the flowers begin to spring,

The skies to brighten, and the birds to sing.

Daphnis

All nature laughs, the groves are fresh and fair,

The sun’s mild lustre warms the vital air;

If Sylvia smiles, new glories gild the shore,

And vanquished nature seems to charm no more.

At the core of the structure lies a contest between human forces, not just the singers but also those of whom they sing. Strephon’s lines are about how Delia, inspiring nature thus, becomes its equal: his complex phonic patterning of chiming short and long vowel sounds weaves together Delia, flowers and birds in the sky, aligning human and natural worlds and the environment they share: ‘If … smile … begin … spring … skies … brighten … sing’. Daphnis’s response is to demonstrate how Sylvia not merely inspires nature (already quite a claim), but actually outshines her, and so a line that looks as if it is simply following the chiming vowels (‘If/Sylvia/smiles/gild’) contains at its core a promise of something more: ‘new glories’. It then gives way to its rhyming partner in which nature confesses defeat (or, at any rate, ‘seems’ to: perhaps it would be too disrespectful to be excessively triumphalist?) and the language enters new phonic territory.

O woeful day! O day of woe, quoth he,

And woeful I who live the day to see.

‘Summer’, lines 73–84

It is summer time, and the loving is easy. In the heat of the noon-day—fire is the season’s element—the shepherd Alexis sings of his unrequited love: ‘The bleating sheep with my complaints agree, / They parched with heat, and I inflamed by thee’ (lines 19–20). His paean to his beloved attains an ecstatic height in its penultimate paragraph, where Alexis calls on her to bless the scene with her presence as night falls:

Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,

Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:

Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,

And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

Oh! how I long with you to pass my days,

Invoke the Muses, and resound your praise!

Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,

And winds shall waft it to the powers above.

But would you sing, and rival Orpheus’ strain,

The wondering forests soon should dance again,

The moving mountains hear the powerful call,

And headlong streams hang listening in their fall.

Structurally, the four lines place in a ‘frame’ a taut but varied network of syntactic variations. The frame, as that metaphor proposes, is set up at the beginning and rounded off at the end, but it is also reiterated within the overall picture. It consists of a sequence of subordinate clauses of place:

‘Where’er you walk … where you sit … Where’er you tread … where you turn your eyes. ’

Within this structure, the main clauses carry the principal meaning:

‘cool gales shall fan the glade’, ‘Trees … shall crowd into a shade’, ‘the blushing flowers shall rise’, ‘And all things flourish. ’

These main clauses describe the effect the poet’s beloved will have on the natural environment she will inhabit. The tense is future: ‘shall’ is explicit in the first three clauses and implicit in the fourth. They amount to a splendid, heart-felt (even if, from another point of view, we could say hyperbolic) compliment to the beloved from the poet or, rather, the speaker. The speaker, though, is called Alexis, a name both of pastoral lineage and also close to Pope’s own. There is a sophisticated game going on here.

Each of the four lines is metrically divided so as to contain both one of the subordinate and one of the main clauses. The proportions, location and grammatical form of subordinate and main clauses are varied.

Line 1 is divided by the cæsura at its comma into four and six syllables. The preposition in the subordinate clause is ‘where’er’, an elision of ‘wherever’ that comes from the stable of ‘poetic’ vocabulary. The subordinate clause is intransitive. The main clause, which occupies six syllables, is transitive.

Line 2 immediately varies the pattern. A subordinate clause inserted between the subject and predicate of the main clause appropriately pauses the line where the beloved is invited to sit. The subordinate clause’s preposition is simpler, more prosaic (‘where’), and it is intransitive. The predicate of the main clause has an indirect object—‘into a shade’—rather than a direct object as line 1’s does. The first two lines, of course, form a couplet, and so are brought together in harmony by the rhyme, which resolves in a satisfying manner the rhythmic variations of the two lines.

Line 3 repeats the opening formula of line 1. The main clause, which, as in line 1, occupies the longer half of the four/six syllable division, differs by containing an intransitive verb, ‘rise’. This makes it the only line of the three to end on a verb rather than a noun, which raises the reader’s anticipation of a resolution to come.

Line 4 differs from all the others by being divided equally into two five-syllable halves. This Pope effects by ending the main clause with a descending rhythm: ‘flóurish’. The absence of any punctuation within the line does actually invite the reader to glide over the change from main to subordinate clause, giving this line a special lyrical smoothness. The subordinate clause is, for the only time, placed after the main clause and—again for the only time—is transitive in form: ‘where you turn your eyes’. So, the couplet and the four lines as a whole conclude on a noun. The couplet begins and ends with balanced relative clauses (‘Where’er you tread’, ‘where you turn your eyes’), with balanced main clauses (‘the blushing flowers shall rise’, ‘all things flourish’) nestling in between. The word-order resembles a comforting, harmonious embrace. The entire four lines also begin and end with relative clauses: ‘Where’er you walk’ ‘where you turn your eyes’. The effect is doubly comforting and harmonious.

Pope also ornamentally expands on mere praise in his individual and collective selection of vocabulary. ‘Gales’ in the sense of ‘gentle breezes’ is—like ‘where’er’ in the frame sections—conventionally ‘poetic’ diction. The following pastoral in his sequence, ‘Autumn’, reiterates this by including the word in its refrain of ‘Go, gentle gales’. These cooling breezes play off against the ‘blushing flowers’ of the third line, which, in their varied colouring and in their embarrassment, ‘rise’ to that incomplete, anticipatory ending to the third line. Within the first line itself, ‘gales’ glides euphonically into ‘glade’, which becomes the rhyme-word satisfied by ‘shade’. Shade is the result of the action of the ‘trees’ that open the second line (and which are given unique stress by the special, most complex, metrical structure of that line).

The whole twelve lines are arranged in order to rise steadily—to be wafted—from graceful and gracious compliment to mythic near-apotheosis. The first quartet declares that, were the beloved present, all nature would in sympathy respond to her. Her beauty would animate Nature to address itself to her comfort. Her power is rendered through the repetition of ‘you’ at the beginning and end: ‘Where’er you walk’, ‘where you turn your eyes’. Nature yields willingly to her control. The second quartet, fused into a whole by that ‘your praise’ repetition, asserts that Alexis’s verses would be matched by Nature’s own. Alexis and Nature are at one in their elevation of ‘her praise’ to ‘the powers above’. In the third quartet, both Nature and Alexis are outdone. Your own song, it declares, would elevate you to the power of Orpheus, the mythical archetype of the ultimate power of music. Orpheus, granted a lyre by the god Apollo himself and taught by the Muses, was able to charm all animals, trees, and rocks so that they followed the sound of his lyre. All nature would be animated and charmed by the beloved’s song. Nature would dance to her tune, hear her voice, and suspend all movement to attend her in absolute stasis. She is the apogee of all lyricism. It does not get better than that.

‘Autumn’, lines 23–30

Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs along!

For her, the feathered choirs neglect their song;

For her, the limes their pleasing shades deny;

For her, the lilies hang their heads and die.

Ye flowers that droop, forsaken by the spring,

Ye birds that, left by summer, cease to sing,

Ye trees that fade when autumn-heats remove,

Say, is not absence death to those who love?

‘Winter’, lines 45–52

No grateful dews descend from evening skies,

Nor morning odours from the flowers arise;

No rich perfumes refresh the fruitful field,

Nor fragrant herbs their native incense yield.

The balmy zephyrs, silent since her death,

Lament the ceasing of a sweeter breath.

The industrious bees neglect their golden store;

Fair Daphne’s dead, and sweetness is no more!

These eight lines resound with negatives. ‘No grateful dews …Nor morning …No rich …Nor fragrant’ open the first four lines in a pattern alternating the same blunt adjective and conjunction; then the remaining four lines enclose ‘ceasing’ and ‘neglect’ within the forthright repetition of ‘death’, ‘dead’ before the final plangency of ‘no more’. The lines thus uncompromisingly depict a natural world in which all movement and vitality have been suspended. This is what the state of winter means—and the human world is included within Nature: we are not comfortably imaged by natural processes, but are Nature.

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