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122-509: Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. ( / ˌ æ d oʊ ˈ n eɪ . ɪ s / ) is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas , was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats's death (seven weeks earlier). It

244-420: A pastoral romance , The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia . Born at Penshurst Place , Kent , of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford . He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley . His mother was the eldest daughter of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland , and the sister of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester . His sister, Mary ,

366-409: A terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay the role of futuristic technologies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Simak wrote stories about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity. Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests,

488-606: A 'golden age' when people lived together in harmony with nature. This Golden Age shows that even before the Alexandrian age , ancient Greeks had sentiments of an ideal pastoral life that they had already lost. This is the first example of literature that has pastoral sentiments and may have begun the pastoral tradition. Ovid's Metamorphoses is much like the Works and Days with the description of ages (golden, silver, bronze, iron, and human) but with more ages to discuss and less emphasis on

610-517: A charnel," and after a series of stanzas (39–49) in which he celebrates the richer and fuller life that Adonais must now be experiencing, the poet becomes mindful that he is in Rome, itself a city rife with visible records of loss and decay. Moreover, he is in the Protestant cemetery there, where Shelley's three-year-old son is buried as well; and yet, as if mocking all despair, a "light of laughing flowers along

732-470: A dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled! Actor Vincent Price read Adonais on a Caedmon Records recording which was released, originally in 1956, as an LP record and a cassette recording, Caedmon CPN 1059 and TC 1059. The recording was re-released in 1996. The English rock band The Cure has recorded

854-668: A feature of grand opera , most particularly in Meyerbeer's operas: often composers would develop a pastoral-themed "oasis", usually in the centre of their work. Notable examples include the shepherd's "alte Weise" from Wagner 's Tristan und Isolde , or the pastoral ballet occupying the middle of Tchaikovsky 's The Queen of Spades . The 20th-century continued to bring new pastoral interpretations, particularly in ballet, such as Ravel's Daphis and Chloe , Nijinsky's use of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , and Stravinsky 's Le sacre du printemps and Les Noces . The Pastorale

976-753: A group of three books of the canonical New Testament : the First Epistle to Timothy (1 Timothy) the Second Epistle to Timothy (2 Timothy), and the Epistle to Titus . They are presented as letters from Paul the Apostle to Timothy and to Titus . They are generally discussed as a group (sometimes with the addition of the Epistle to Philemon ) and are given the title "pastoral" because they are addressed to individuals with pastoral oversight of churches and discuss issues of Christian living, doctrine and leadership . In

1098-540: A guise for political discourse, which other forms had previously neglected. The Pastoral, he writes, has a didactic duty to “contain and enforme morall discipline for the amendment of mans behaviour”. Friedrich Schiller linked the Pastoral to childhood and a childlike simplicity. For Schiller, we perceive in nature an “image of our infancy irrevocably past”. Sir William Empson spoke of the ideal of Pastoral as being embedded in varying degrees of ambivalence, and yet, for all

1220-745: A language delicately archaic. In form Sidney usually adopts the Petrarchan octave (ABBAABBA), with variations in the sestet that include the English final couplet. His artistic contacts were more peaceful and significant for his lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote Astrophel and Stella (1591) and the first draft of The Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy . Somewhat earlier, he had met Edmund Spenser , who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him. Other literary contacts included membership, along with his friends and fellow poets Fulke Greville , Edward Dyer , Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey , of

1342-563: A life of melancholy and solitude. Milton's, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629) blends Christian and pastoral imagery. Milton is perhaps best known for his epic Paradise Lost , one of the few Pastoral epics ever written. A notable part of Paradise Lost is book IV where he chronicles Satan's trespass into paradise. Milton's iconic descriptions of the garden are shadowed by the fact that we see it from Satan's perspective and are thus led to commiserate with him. Milton elegantly works through

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1464-497: A long life upon the miscreant who took his hero's life, in stanza 38 the poet bursts open the gates of consolation that are required of the pastoral elegy: "Nor let us weep that our delight is fled/ Far from these carrion kites." In stanza 39, he uses the imagery of worms as symbolic of death: "And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay." In stanzas 45 and 46, Shelley laments that—like Thomas Chatterton, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lucan—Keats died young and did not live to develop as

1586-544: A marginal figure in the politics of his time, he was memorialised as the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser 's Astrophel , one of the greatest English Renaissance elegies. An early biography of Sidney was written by his devoted friend and schoolfellow, Fulke Greville . While Sidney was traditionally depicted as a staunch and unwavering Protestant , recent biographers such as Katherine Duncan-Jones have suggested that his religious loyalties were more ambiguous. He

1708-581: A model. It was published by Charles Ollier in July 1821 (see 1821 in poetry ) with a preface in which Shelley made the mistaken assertion that Keats had died from a rupture of the lung induced by rage at the unfairly harsh reviews of his verse in the Quarterly Review and other journals. He also thanked Joseph Severn for caring for Keats in Rome. This praise increased literary interest in Severn's works. Shelley

1830-488: A pastoral view demonstrates how prestigious Penshurst was, to be worthy in the company with gods. "A Country Life", another 17th-century work by Katherine Philips , was also a country house poem. Philips focuses on the joys of the countryside and looks upon the lifestyle that accompanies it as being "the first and happiest life, when man enjoyed himself." She writes about maintaining this lifestyle by living detached from material things, and by not over-concerning herself with

1952-619: A poet . Keats transcends human life and has been unified with the immortal: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night;/Envy and calumny and hate and pain,/ ... Can touch him not and torture not again.... He is made one with Nature." Keats is as one with Nature, the Power, the One, and the one Spirit. Adonais "is not dead, he doth not sleep, he hath awaken'd from the dream of life." "Who mourns for Adonais?" he asks in stanza 47. Shelley turns his grief from Adonais to "we" who must live on and "decay/ Like corpses in

2074-467: A presentation of Adam and Eve ’s pastorally idyllic, eternally fertile living conditions and focuses upon their stewardship of the garden. He gives much focus to the fruit bearing trees and Adam and Eve's care of them, sculpting an image of pastoral harmony. However, Milton in turn continually comes back to Satan , constructing him as a character the audience can easily identify with and perhaps even like. Milton creates Satan as character meant to destabilize

2196-482: A sense of nostalgia for their country way of living. His next argument focuses on the artificiality of poetry, drawing upon fellow theorist, Puttenham. Kermode elaborates on this and says, "the cultivated, in their artificial way, reflect upon and describe, for their own ends, the natural life". Kermode wants us to understand that the recreation or reproduction of the natural is in itself artificial. Kermode elaborates on this in terms of imitation, describing it as "one of

2318-667: A song entitled "Adonais" based on the Shelley elegy as a B-side single and on the collection Join the Dots: B-Sides and Rarities, 1978–2001 (2004). "Adonais" was originally the B-side to " The 13th ", released in 1996. The title of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode " Who Mourns for Adonais? " (1967) is an allusion to the Shelley elegy, Stanza 47, line 415. A 2013 fan-produced sequel, " Pilgrim of Eternity ", continued

2440-709: A specifically ‘Irish pastoral'". In 2014, The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature had a chapter on the urban pastoral subgenre. Charles Siebert's Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral describes a man who splits his time between a gritty Brooklyn apartment, where the night is filled with the sounds of pigeons, starlings, and youth gangs shouting, and driving to rural Quebec to squat in an abandoned, tumbledown cabin in rural Quebec. Theocritus's Idylls include strophic songs and musical laments, and, as in Homer , his shepherds often play

2562-411: A tool for writers to discuss a controversial topic without repercussions. Raymond Williams argues that the foundation of the pastoral lies in the idea that the city is a highly urban, industrialized center that has removed us from the peaceful life we once had in the countryside. However, he states that this is really a "myth functioning as a memory" that literature has created in its representations of

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2684-570: A united Protestant effort against the Catholic Church and Spain. In the winter of 1575-76 he fought in Ireland while his father was Lord Deputy there. In the early 1580s, he argued fruitlessly for an assault on Spain itself. Promoted General of Horse in 1583, his enthusiasm for the Protestant struggle was given free rein when he was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands in 1585. Whilst in

2806-478: Is "Colin Clout"). Spenser's example was imitated by such poets as Michael Drayton ( Idea, The Shepherd's Garland ) and William Browne ( Britannia's Pastorals ). During this period of England's history, many authors explored "anti-pastoral" themes. Two examples of this, Sir Philip Sidney 's "The Twenty-Third Psalm" and "The Nightingale", focus on the world in a very anti-pastoral view. In “The Twenty-Third Psalm,” Nature

2928-474: Is "made one with Nature." His being has been withdrawn into the one Spirit which is responsible for all beauty. In eternity, other poets, among them Thomas Chatterton , Sir Philip Sidney , and the Roman poet Lucan , come to greet him (sts. XXXVIII–XLVI). Let anyone who still mourns Keats send his "spirit's light" beyond space and be filled with hope, or let him go to Rome where Keats is buried. Let him "Seek shelter in

3050-431: Is a form of Italian folk song still played in the regions of Southern Italy where the zampogna continues to thrive. They generally sound like a slowed down version of a tarantella , as they encompass many of the same melodic phrases. The pastorale on the zampogna can be played by a solo zampogna player, or in some regions can be accompanied by the piffero (also commonly called a ciaramella , 'pipita', or bifora ), which

3172-524: Is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton 's Lycidas . Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is modelled on ancient works, such as Achilleis (a poem about Achilles ), an epic poem by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Statius , and refers to the untimely death of the Greek Adonis , a god of fertility. Some critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil 's tenth Eclogue , in praise of Cornelius Gallus , as

3294-561: Is a primitive key-less double reed oboe type instrument. Idealised pastoral landscapes appear in Hellenistic and Roman wall paintings. Interest in the pastoral as a subject for art revived in Renaissance Italy, partly inspired by the descriptions of pictures Jacopo Sannazaro included in his Arcadia . The Pastoral Concert in the Louvre attributed to Giorgione or Titian is perhaps

3416-536: Is also possible that Keats resented Hunt's transferred allegiance. Despite this, the two poets exchanged letters after Shelley and his wife moved to Italy. When Keats fell ill, the Shelleys invited him to stay with them in Pisa , but Keats only made it as far as Rome, accompanied by the painter Severn. Shelley's concern for Keats's health remained undimmed, until he learned months after the fact that Keats had died in Rome, prompting

3538-413: Is awakened by the grief of Misery and the poet. The lament is invoked: "He will awake no more, oh, never more!" Urania pleads in vain for Adonais to awake and to arise. In Stanzas 30 through 34, a series of human mourners appears. The "Pilgrim of Eternity" is Lord Byron, George Gordon, who had met and was a friend of Shelley's but who had never met Keats. The Irish poet Thomas Moore then appears who laments

3660-535: Is entirely homosexual . Pastoral literature continued after Hesiod with the poetry of the Hellenistic Greek Theocritus , several of whose Idylls are set in the countryside (probably reflecting the landscape of the island of Cos where the poet lived) and involve dialogues between herdsmen. Theocritus may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in the Doric dialect but

3782-501: Is left in the background, leaving the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure . This makes them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spend their time chasing pretty girls – or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty boys as well. The eroticism of Virgil 's second eclogue , Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis"),

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3904-405: Is of six 'books' only, though Spenser intended to write twelve. He wrote the poem primarily to honor Queen Elizabeth . William Cowper addressed the artificiality of the fast-paced city life in his poems Retirement (1782) and The Winter Nosegay (1782). Pastoral nevertheless survived as a mood rather than a genre, as can be seen from such works as Matthew Arnold 's Thyrsis (1867), a lament on

4026-453: Is often contrasted with the negative aspects of noisy, dirty, fast-paced cities. Some works take a Luddite tone, criticizing mechanization and industrialization and showing the ills of urbanization and over-reliance on advanced technologies. In 1994, British literature professor Terry Gifford proposed the concept of a "post-pastoral" subgenre. By appending the prefix "post-", Gifford does not intend this to refer to “after” but rather to

4148-524: Is portrayed as something we need to be protected from, and in “The Nightingale,” the woe of Philomela is compared to the speaker's own pain. Sidney also wrote Arcadia , which is filled with pastoral descriptions of the landscape. " The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd " (1600) by Sir Walter Raleigh also comments on the anti-pastoral as the nymph responds realistically to the idealizing shepherd of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by embracing and explaining

4270-527: Is the Edenic Pastoral, which alludes to the perfect relationship between God, man, and nature in the Garden of Eden . It typically includes biblical symbols and imagery. In 1645 John Milton wrote L'Allegro , which translates as the happy person. It is a celebration of Mirth personified, who is the child of love and revelry. It was originally composed to be a companion poem to, Il Penseroso , which celebrates

4392-410: Is the anonymous (now known to be John Wilson Croker , not the editor, William Gifford ) and highly critical reviewer of Keats's Endymion (1818), who, in Shelley's opinion, traumatised John Keats, worsening his condition. The worst punishment that Shelley can contrive is that such a scoundrel should live: "Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!/ Live!" Faced with the contradiction that he would wish

4514-421: Is to Urania, the goddess of astronomy, and to the goddess Venus , who is also known as Venus Urania. The over-riding theme is one of despair. Mourners are implored to "weep for Adonais—he is dead!" In Stanza 9 the "flocks" of the deceased appear, representing his dreams and inspirations. In Stanza 13, the personifications of the thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and skills of the deceased appear. In Stanza 22, Urania

4636-522: The Eclogues (c. 1515) of Alexander Barclay , which were heavily influenced by Mantuan. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser ’s The Shepheardes Calender , first published in 1579. Spenser's work consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, and is written in dialect. It contains elegies , fables and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear under various pseudonyms (Spenser himself

4758-408: The Garden of Eden . An example of the use of the genre is the short poem by the 15th-century Scottish makar Robert Henryson Robene and Makyne which also contains the conflicted emotions often present in the genre. A more tranquil mood is set by Christopher Marlowe 's well known lines from his 1588 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love : Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all

4880-587: The Hebrew word רעה ( roʿeh ), which is used as a noun as in "shepherd", and as a verb as in "to tend a flock." It occurs 173 times in 144 Old Testament verses and relates to the literal feeding of sheep, as in Genesis 29:7. In Jeremiah 23:4, both meanings are used ( ro'im is used for "shepherds" and yir'um for "shall feed them"), "And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith

5002-460: The syrinx , or pan flute, which is considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times. The pastoral genre was a significant influence in the development of opera . After settings of pastoral poetry in the pastourelle genre by the troubadours , Italian poets and composers became increasingly drawn to

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5124-463: The "firmament" of eternal stars which are the immortal spirits of great poets. And in stanza 52, as "The One" is to the "many" and "heaven's light" is to "Earth's shadows" and the "white radiance of Eternity" is to multicolored Life, so "The glory" of the World Soul is to aspects of Rome that represent death but symbolise eternity. By means of these parallels, the Rome section becomes fully integrated into

5246-456: The "post-pastoral" concept, as well as two other variants: "gay pastoral", the seemingly contradictory "urban pastoral" and "radical pastoral". Gifford lists further examples of pastoral variants, which he calls "prefix-pastoral[s]": " postmodern pastoral,...hard pastoral, soft pastoral, Buell’s revolutionary lesbian feminist pastoral, black pastoral, ghetto pastoral, frontier pastoral, militarized pastoral, domestic pastoral and, most recently,

5368-622: The (possibly fictitious) " Areopagus ", a humanist endeavour to classicise English verse. Sidney played a brilliant part in the military/literary/courtly life common to the young nobles of the time. Both his family heritage and his personal experience (he was in Walsingham's house in Paris during the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre ), confirmed him as a keenly militant Protestant. In the 1570s, he persuaded John Casimir to consider proposals for

5490-560: The 14th century onwards, first in Latin (examples include works by Petrarch , Pontano and Mantuan ) then in the Italian vernacular ( Sannazaro , Boiardo ). The fashion for pastoral spread throughout Renaissance Europe. Leading French pastoral poets include Marot , a poet of the French court, and Pierre de Ronsard , once called the "prince of poets" in his day. The first pastorals in English were

5612-444: The 1580s, Astrophel and Stella . Her father, Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex , was said to have planned to marry his daughter to Sidney, but Walter died in 1576 and this did not occur. In England, Sidney occupied himself with politics and art. He defended his father's administration of Ireland in a lengthy document. More seriously, he quarrelled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford , probably because of Sidney's opposition to

5734-451: The 16-year-old daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham . In the same year, he made a visit to Oxford University with Giordano Bruno , the polymath known for his cosmological theories, who subsequently dedicated two books to Sidney. In 1585 the couple had one daughter, Elizabeth, who later married Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland , in March 1599 and died without issue in 1612. Like the best of

5856-498: The 17th century came the Country house poem . Included in this genre is Emilia Lanier 's The Description of Cooke-ham in 1611, in which a woman is described in terms of her relationship to her estate and how it mourns for her when she leaves it. In 1616, Ben Jonson wrote To Penshurst, a poem in which he addresses the estate owned by the Sidney family and tells of its beauty. The basis of

5978-420: The City . This acknowledgment of Herrick's work is appropriate, as both Williams and Herrick accentuate the importance of labor in the pastoral lifestyle. The pastoral elegy is a subgenre that uses pastoral elements to lament a death or loss. The most famous pastoral elegy in English is John Milton 's " Lycidas " (1637), written on the death of Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge University. Milton used

6100-551: The Elizabethans, Sidney was successful in more than one branch of literature, but none of his work was published during his lifetime. However, it circulated in manuscript. His finest achievement was a sequence of 108 love sonnets. These owe much to Petrarch and Pierre de Ronsard in tone and style, and place Sidney as the greatest Elizabethan sonneteer after Shakespeare . Written to his mistress, Lady Penelope Rich, though dedicated to his wife, they reveal true lyric emotion couched in

6222-495: The French marriage of Elizabeth to the much younger Alençon, which de Vere championed. In the aftermath of this episode, Sidney challenged de Vere to a duel, which Elizabeth forbade. He then wrote a lengthy letter to the Queen detailing the foolishness of the French marriage. Characteristically, Elizabeth bristled at his presumption, and Sidney prudently retired from court. During a 1577 diplomatic visit to Prague , Sidney secretly visited

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6344-556: The Jewish world at the time of the origins of Christianity in the first century CE. A pastoral letter , often called simply a pastoral, is an open letter addressed by a bishop to the clergy or laity of a diocese or to both, containing general admonition, instruction or consolation, or directions for behavior in particular circumstances. In most episcopal church bodies, clerics are often required to read out pastoral letters of superior bishops to their congregations. The pastoral epistles are

6466-583: The LORD." ( KJV ). A pastoral economic system had great cultural significance for the Jewish people from earliest recorded times: Abraham herded flocks. Throughout the biblical accounts of the Children of Israel , a pastoral lifestyle in the harsh hinterland of the Levant related to the ideal of a society obedient to Yahweh , in contrast to the corruption and idolatry encountered in the "fleshpots of Egypt" (Exodus 16:3), in

6588-580: The Netherlands, he consistently urged boldness on his superior, his uncle the Earl of Leicester . He carried out a successful raid on Spanish forces near Axel in July 1586. Later that year, he joined Sir John Norris in the Battle of Zutphen , fighting for the Protestant cause against the Spanish. During the battle, he was shot in the thigh and died of gangrene 26 days later, at the age of 31. One account says this death

6710-494: The Protestant cemetery there but also because the section offers an alternative way of understanding themes already expressed in the poem. Beginning with a statement of alternativeness ("Or go to Rome"), the section provides an alternative way for the continuing mourner to imagine Adonais as part of the World Soul and so cease mourning. To imagine this by means of the conceptual exercise prescribed in stanza 47 may be too difficult for

6832-428: The adjective 'pastoral' refers to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside among shepherds , cowherds and other farm workers that are often romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner. The pastoral life is usually characterized as being closer to the golden age than the rest of human life. The setting is a locus amoenus , or a beautiful place in nature, sometimes connected with images of

6954-634: The age of 18, he travelled to France as part of the embassy to negotiate a marriage between Elizabeth I and the Duc D'Alençon . He spent the next several years in mainland Europe, moving through Germany, Italy, Poland , the Kingdom of Hungary and Austria . On these travels, he met a number of prominent European intellectuals and politicians. Returning to England in 1575, Sidney met Penelope Devereux (who would later marry Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick ). Although much younger, she inspired his famous sonnet sequence of

7076-468: The allusion, by using the title given to Byron in the poem. Pastoral The genre is also known as bucolic , from the Greek βουκολικόν , from βουκόλος , meaning a cowherd . Pastoral is a mode of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on

7198-405: The apparent dichotomies, and contradicting elements found within it, he felt there was a unified harmony within it. He refers to the pastoral process as 'putting the complex into the simple.' Empson argues that "... good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral", and uses Soviet Russia's propaganda about the working class as evidence. Empson also emphasizes the importance of the double plot as

7320-451: The audience’s understanding of themselves and the world around them. Through this mode, Milton is able to create a working dialogue between the text and his audience about the ‘truths’ they hold for themselves. Italian writers invented a new genre, the pastoral romance, which mixed pastoral poems with a fictional narrative in prose. Although there was no classical precedent for the form, it drew some inspiration from ancient Greek novels set in

7442-703: The centrepiece of the Old Salopians Memorial at Shrewsbury School to alumni who died serving in World War I (unveiled 1924). Philip Sidney appears as a young man in Elizabeth Goudge's third novel, Towers in the Mist (Duckworth, 1937), visiting Oxford around the time Queen Elizabeth also visited Oxford. (Goudge admitted to slightly advancing the time of Sidney's arrival in Oxford, for the sake of her larger story.) In

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7564-451: The composition of Adonais . Shelley said of Keats, after inviting him to stay with him in Pisa after the latter fell ill: "I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure." Shelley regarded Adonais as the "least imperfect" of his works. In a 5 June 1821 letter to John and Maria Gisborne , Shelley wrote about

7686-616: The contrast between urban and rural lifestyles and political allegory most notably in Eclogues 1 and 4 respectively. In doing so, Virgil presents a more idealized portrayal of the lives of shepherds while still employing the traditional pastoral conventions of Theocritus. He was the first to set his poems in Arcadia, an idealized location to which much later pastoral literature will refer. Horace 's Epodes , ii Country Joys has "the dreaming man" Alfius, who dreams of escaping his busy urban life for

7808-736: The countryside, such as Daphnis and Chloe . The most influential Italian example of the form was Sannazzaro 's Arcadia (1504). The vogue for the pastoral romance spread throughout Europe producing such notable works as Bernardim Ribeiro "Menina e Moça" (1554) in Portuguese, Montemayor 's Diana (1559) in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney 's Arcadia (1590) in England, and Honoré d'Urfé 's Astrée (1607–27) in France. Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age Pastoral drama also emerged in Renaissance Italy. Again, there

7930-510: The courage to face not extinction but "that Light whose smile kindles the Universe." The poem concludes by imagining Adonais to be a part of "the white radiance of Eternity." At the end of the elegy, "like a star," the soul of the dead poet "Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." The section on Rome (stanzas 48–52) is significant in the poem not only because Keats and Shelley's son are buried in

8052-419: The cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community. While fertile agrarian environments on Earth or Earth-like planets are common settings, some works may be set in ocean or desert planets or habitable moons. The rural dwellers, such as farmers and small-townspeople, are depicted sympathetically, albeit with the tendency to portray them as conservative and suspicious of change. The simple, peaceful rural life

8174-450: The death of Keats: Byron , Thomas Moore , Shelley, and Leigh Hunt (sts. XXX–XXXV). The anonymous Quarterly Review critic is blamed for Keats's death and chastised (sts. XXXVI–XXXVII). The poet urges the mourners not to weep any longer. Keats has become a portion of the eternal and is free from the attacks of reviewers. He is not dead; it is the living who are dead. He has gone where "envy and calumny and hate and pain" cannot reach him. He

8296-457: The death of his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough . Robert Burns can be read as a Pastoral poet for his nostalgic portrayals of rural Scotland and simple farm life in To A Mouse and The Cotter's Saturday Night . Burns explicitly addresses the Pastoral form in his Poem on Pastoral Poetry . In this he champions his fellow Scot Allan Ramsey as the best Pastoral poet since Theocritus . Another subgenre

8418-446: The dream of life 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. — We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like

8540-622: The exiled Jesuit priest Edmund Campion . Sidney had returned to court by the middle of 1581. In the latter year he was elected to fill vacant seats in the Parliament of England for both Ludlow and Shrewsbury , choosing to sit for the latter, and in 1584 was MP for Kent . That same year Penelope Devereux was married, apparently against her will, to Lord Rich. Sidney was knighted in 1583. An early arrangement to marry Anne Cecil , daughter of Sir William Cecil and eventual wife of de Vere, had fallen through in 1571. In 1583, he married Frances ,

8662-409: The famous pastoral epic The Faerie Queene , in which he employs the pastoral mode to accentuate the charm, lushness, and splendor of the poem's (super)natural world. Spenser alludes to the pastoral continuously throughout the work and also uses it to create allegory in his poem, with the characters as well as with the environment, both of which are meant to have symbolic meaning in the real world. It

8784-615: The form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. Also included is Thomas Gray 's, "Elegy In a Country Churchyard" (1750). The formal English pastoral continued to flourish during the 18th century, eventually dying out at the end. One notable example of an 18th-century work is Alexander Pope 's Pastorals (1709). In this work Pope imitates Edmund Spenser 's Shepheardes Calendar , while utilizing classical names and allusions aligning him with Virgil . In 1717, Pope's Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

8906-556: The form of Pastourelle. This is the first time that the pastoral really deals with the subject of love. Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) was an English poet, courtier , scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age . His works include a sonnet sequence , Astrophel and Stella , a treatise , The Defence of Poesy (also known as The Defence of Poesie or An Apology for Poetrie ) and

9028-426: The fundamental laws of literary history" because it "gives literary history a meaning in terms of itself, and provides the channels of literary tradition". Kermode goes on to explain about the works of Virgil and Theocritus as progenitors of the pastoral. Later poets would draw on these earlier forms of pastoral, elaborating on them to fit their own social context. As the pastoral was becoming more modern, it shifted into

9150-475: The gods and their punishments. In this artificially constructed world, nature acts as the main punisher. Another example of this perfect relationship between man and nature is evident in the encounter of a shepherd and a goatherd who meet in the pastures in Theocritus ' poem Idylls 1 . Traditionally, pastoral refers to the lives of herdsmen in a romanticized, exaggerated, but representative way. In literature ,

9272-423: The grass is spread." Nature does not abhor death and decay, he sees; it is humans, who fear and hate in the midst of life, who do. "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" he asks in stanza 51. It is life's worldly cares—that obscuring and distracting "dome of many-coloured glass"—not Death that is the enemy and the source of human despair. "Follow where all is fled," he urges, and he goads his own heart into having

9394-516: The idealization of urban material pleasures to win over his love rather than resorting to the simplified pleasures of pastoral ideology. This can be seen in the listed items: "lined slippers", "purest gold", "silver dishes", and "ivory table" (lines 13, 15, 16, 21, 23). The speaker takes on a voyeuristic point of view with his love, and they are not directly interacting with the other true shepherds and nature. Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek names like Corydon or Philomela, reflecting

9516-431: The imagery used) the dominance of eternity, the mourner can doubly conceive of Keats as part of eternity—as absorbed into it and diffused throughout it—and thus conceive of him as part of the World Soul, among whose aspects is eternity as well as omnipresence. In addition, the description of Keats's spirit as part of "Eternal" Rome shows parallels with the earlier description, in stanzas 44–46, of his spirit becoming part of

9638-479: The lush Canaanite lowlands "flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8), or in Babylon , the "great city" of Israelite exile. David , a righteous shepherd-boy associated with the arid hill-country, contrasts with Goliath and Saul , representatives of luxurious urban élites. Thus New Testament imagery of shepherds and their sheep builds on established cultural and economic distinctions familiar, directly or indirectly, to

9760-424: The metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic . This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus . The Roman poet Virgil adapted pastoral into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues . Virgil introduces two very important uses of pastoral,

9882-466: The most famous painting in this style. Later, French artists were also attracted to the pastoral, notably Claude , Poussin (e.g., Et in Arcadia ego ) and Watteau (in his Fêtes galantes ). The Fête champêtre , with scenes of country people dancing was a popular subject in Flemish painting. Thomas Cole has a series of paintings titled The Course of Empire , and the second of these paintings (shown on

10004-558: The most famous story about Sir Philip, intended to illustrate his noble and gallant character. Sidney's body was returned to London and interred in Old St Paul's Cathedral on 16 February 1587. The grave and monument were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. A modern monument in the crypt lists his among the important graves lost. Already during his own lifetime, but even more after his death, he had become for many English people

10126-466: The most important tropes of which he cites as religion (embodied by Pan); friendship; allegory;and poetic and musical calling. He concedes though that such a categorization is open to much misinterpretation. As well, Poggioli focused on the idea that Pastoral was a nostalgic and childish way of seeing the world. In The Oaten Flue , he claims that the shepherd was looked up to was because they were “an ideal kind of leisure class." Frank Kermode discusses

10248-410: The mourner, who may not be able to imagine omnipresence—presence at the same time throughout the whole of space as well as at each individual point in space—but who would be able to imagine eternality—presence in the same place throughout the whole of time or of history. This latter concept is embodied in the idea of Rome as the "Eternal" city. Since both Rome and the particular cemetery symbolise (through

10370-427: The origin of the pastoral genre. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia , a rural region of Greece , mythological home of the god Pan , which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores is held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and

10492-427: The past four hundred years, a range of writers have worked on theorizing the nature of pastoral. These include Friedrich Schiller , George Puttenham , William Empson , Frank Kermode , Raymond Williams , Renato Poggioli , Annabel Patterson, Paul Alpers, and Ken Hiltner. George Puttenham was one of the first Pastoral theorists. He did not see the form as merely a recording of a prior rustic way of life but

10614-417: The past. As a result, when society evolves and looks back to these representations, it considers its own present as the decline of the simple life of the past. He then discusses how the city's relationship with the country affected the economic and social aspects of the countryside. As the economy became a bigger part of society, many country newcomers quickly realized the potential and monetary value that lay in

10736-445: The pastoral in which authors recognize and discuss life in the country and in particular the life of a shepherd. This is summed up by Leo Marx with the phrase "No shepherd, no pastoral." The second type of the pastoral is literature that "describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban". The third type of pastoral depicts the country life with derogative classifications. Hesiod 's Works and Days presents

10858-471: The pastoral within the historical context of the English Renaissance. His first condition of pastoral poetry is that it is an urban product. Kermode establishes that the pastoral is derived as an opposition between two modes of living, in the country and in the city. London was becoming a modern metropolis before the eyes of its citizens. The result of this large-scale urban sprawl left the people with

10980-539: The pastoral". He gives examples of post-pastoral works, including Cormac McCarthy ’s The Road (2006), Margaret Atwood ’s The Year of the Flood (2009) and Maggie Gee ’s The Ice People (1999), and he points out that these works "raise questions of ethics, sustenance and sustainability that might exemplify [Leo] Marx’s vision of the pastoral needing to find new forms in the face of new conditions". Gifford states that British eco-critics such as Greg Garrard have used

11102-421: The pastoral. Musical settings of pastoral poetry became increasingly common in first polyphonic and then monodic madrigals : these later led to the cantata and the serenata , in which pastoral themes remained on a consistent basis. Partial musical settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini 's Il pastor fido were highly popular: the texts of over 500 madrigals were taken from this one play alone. Tasso 's Aminta

11224-472: The peaceful country. But as "the dreaming man" indicates, this is just a dream for Alfius. He is too consumed in his career as a usurer to leave it behind for the country. Later Silver Latin poets who wrote pastoral poetry, modeled principally upon Virgil's Eclogues, include Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus and the author(s) of the Einsiedeln Eclogues . Italian poets revived the pastoral from

11346-512: The play who embraces and appreciates both the real and idealized life and manages to make the two ideas coexist. Therefore, Shakespeare explores city and country life as being appreciated through the coexistence of the two. Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature. Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including

11468-418: The play, Shakespeare employs various characters to illustrate pastoralism . His protagonists Rosalind and Orlando metaphorically depict the importance of the coexistence of realism and idealism, or urban and rural life. While Orlando is absorbed in the ideal, Rosalind serves as a mediator, bringing Orlando back down to reality and embracing the simplicity of pastoral love. She is the only character throughout

11590-418: The pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. There will we sit upon the rocks And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" exhibits the concept of Gifford's second definition of 'pastoral'. The speaker of the poem, who is the titled shepherd, draws on

11712-486: The poem is a harmonious and joyous elation of the memories that Jonson had at the manor. It is beautifully written with iambic pentameter, a style that Jonson eloquently uses to describe the culture of Penshurst. It includes Pan and Bacchus as notable company of the manor. Pan, Greek god of the Pastoral world, half man and half goat, was connected with both hunting and shepherds; Bacchus was the god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. This reference to Pan and Bacchus in

11834-576: The poem. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones read a part of Adonais at the Brian Jones memorial concert at London's Hyde Park on 5 July 1969. Jones, founder and guitarist of the Stones, had drowned 3 July 1969 in his swimming pool. Before an audience estimated at 250,000 to 300,000, Jagger read the following verses from Adonais : Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep He hath awakened from

11956-427: The recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. Thus, pastoral as a mode occurs in many types of literature (poetry, drama, etc.) as well as genres (most notably the pastoral elegy). Terry Gifford, a prominent literary theorist, defines pastoral in three ways in his critical book Pastoral . The first way emphasizes the historical literary perspective of

12078-673: The right) depicts the perfect pastoral setting. Pastoral imagery and symbolism feature heavily in Christianity and the Bible. Jesus calls himself the "Good Shepherd" in John 10:11 , contrasting his role as the Lamb of God . Many Christian denominations use the title " Pastor ", a word rooted in the Biblical metaphor of shepherding. ( Pastor in Latin means "shepherd"). The Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) uses

12200-428: The sadness and loss that time causes. Shelley himself and Leigh Hunt are also part of the "procession of mourners". In Stanzas 31 through 34 the mourner is described as "one frail Form" who has "fled astray", "his branded and ensanguined brow" a brow "like Cain's or Christ's". The sense of despair and hopelessness continues. In Stanza 37 the poet muses over a just punishment for the "nameless worm" and "noteless blot" who

12322-624: The same time, Italian and German composers developed a genre of vocal and instrumental pastorals, distinguished by certain stylistic features, associated with Christmas Eve. The pastoral, and parodies of the pastoral, continued to play an important role in musical history throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. John Gay may have satirized the pastoral in The Beggar's Opera , but also wrote an entirely sincere libretto for Handel 's Acis and Galatea . Rousseau 's Le Devin du village draws on pastoral roots, and Metastasio 's libretto Il re pastore

12444-422: The sense of “reaching beyond” the contraints of the pastoral genre, but while continuing the core conceptual elements that have defined the pastoral tradition. Gifford states that the post-pastoral is "best used to describe works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide whilst being aware of the problematics involved", noting that it is "more about connection than the disconnections essential to

12566-439: The shadow of the tomb. / What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" He is with the unchanging Spirit, Intellectual Beauty, or Love in heaven. By comparison with the clear light of eternity, life is a stain (sts. XLVII–LII). The poet tells himself he should now depart from life, which has nothing left to offer. The One, which is Light, Beauty, Benediction, and Love, now shines on him. He feels carried "darkly, fearfully, afar" to where

12688-400: The soul of Keats glows like a star, in the dwelling where those who will live forever are (sts. LIII–LV). Adonais begins with the announcement of his death and the mourning that followed: "I weep for Adonais—he is dead!" In Stanzas 2 through 35 a series of mourners lament the death of Adonais. The mother of Adonais, Urania, is invoked to arise to conduct the ceremony at his bier. The allusion

12810-528: The true course of nature and its incompatibility with the love that the Shepherd yearns for with the nymph. Terry Gifford defined the anti-pastoral in his 2012 essay "Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies" as an often explicit correction of pastoral, emphasizing "realism" over romance, highlighting problematic elements (showing tensions, disorder and inequalities), challenging literary constructs as false distortions and demythologizing mythical locations such as Arcadia and Shangri-La . In

12932-419: The untouched land. Furthermore, this new system encouraged a social stratification in the countryside. With the implementation of paper money came a hierarchy in the working system, as well as the "inheritance of titles and making of family names". Poggioli was concerned with how death reconciled itself with the pastoral, and thus came up with a loose categorization of death in the pastoral as 'funeral elegy',

13054-461: The very epitome of a Castiglione courtier: learned and politic, but at the same time generous, brave, and impulsive. The funeral procession was one of the most elaborate ever staged, so much so that his father-in-law, Francis Walsingham , almost went bankrupt. As Sidney was a brother of the Worshipful Company of Grocers , the procession included 120 of his company brethren. Never more than

13176-405: The woods, the river, his Pupil Mary, and the future. Marvell used nature as a thread to weave together a poem centered around man. We once again see nature fully providing for man. Marvell also continuously compares nature to art and seems to point out that art can never accomplish on purpose what nature can achieve accidentally or spontaneously. Robert Herrick 's The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home

13298-645: The work: "It is a highly wrought piece of art , perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written." The poet weeps for John Keats, who is dead and who will be long mourned. He calls on Urania to mourn for Keats who died in Rome (sts. I–VII). The poet summons the subject matter of Keats's poetry to weep for him. It comes and mourns at his bidding (sts. VIII–XV). Nature, celebrated by Keats in his poetry, mourns him. Spring, which brings nature to new life, cannot restore him (sts. XVI–XXI). Urania rises, goes to Keats's death chamber and laments that she cannot join him in death (sts. XXII–XXIX). Fellow poets mourn

13420-418: The world around her. Andrew Marvell 's " Upon Appleton House " was written when Marvell was working as a tutor for Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary, in 1651. The poem is very rich with metaphors that relate to religion, politics and history. Similar to Jonson's "To Penshurst", Marvell's poem is describing a pastoral estate. It moves through the house itself, its history, the gardens, the meadows and other grounds,

13542-497: Was a writer, translator and literary patron, and married Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke . Sidney dedicated his longest work, the Arcadia , to her. After her brother's death, Mary reworked the Arcadia , which became known as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia . His brother, Robert Sidney was a statesman and patron of the arts, and was created Earl of Leicester in 1618. In 1572, at

13664-503: Was also a favourite. As opera developed, the dramatic pastoral came to the fore with such works as Jacopo Peri 's Dafne and, most notably, Monteverdi 's L'Orfeo . Pastoral opera remained popular throughout the 17th-century, and not just in Italy, as is shown by the French genre of pastorale héroïque , Englishman Henry Lawes 's music for Milton's Comus (not to mention John Blow 's Venus and Adonis ), and Spanish zarzuela . At

13786-465: Was also written in the 17th century. In this pastoral work, he paints the reader a colorful picture of the benefits reaped from hard work. This is an atypical interpretation of the pastoral, given that there is a celebration of labor involved as opposed to central figures living in leisure and nature just taking its course independently. This poem was mentioned in Raymond Williams ', The Country and

13908-418: Was avoidable and heroic. Sidney noticed that one of his men was not fully armoured. He took off his thigh armour on the grounds that it would be wrong to be better armored than his men. As he lay dying, Sidney composed a song to be sung by his deathbed. According to the story, while lying wounded he gave his water to another wounded soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine". This became possibly

14030-497: Was derived from Thomas Lodge 's pastoral romance Rosalynde ) and The Winter's Tale , of which Act 4 Scene 4 is a lengthy pastoral digression. The forest in As You Like It can be seen as a place of pastoral idealization, where life is simpler and purer, and its inhabitants live more closely to each other, nature and God than their urban counterparts. However, Shakespeare plays with the bounds of pastoral idealization. Throughout

14152-549: Was introduced to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816 by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt , who was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley. Shelley's initial admiration of Keats was ambiguous: his reception to Keats' Endymion was largely unfavourable, while he found his later work, Hyperion , to be the highest example of contemporary poetry. Keats found some of Shelley's advice patronising (the suggestion, for example, that Keats should not publish his early work). It

14274-759: Was known to be friendly and sympathetic towards individual Catholics. A memorial, erected in 1986 at the location in Zutphen where he was mortally wounded by the Spanish, can be found at the entrance of a footpath (" 't Gallee") located in front of the petrol station at the Warnsveldseweg 170. In Arnhem , in front of the house in the Bakkerstraat 68, an inscription on the ground reads: "IN THIS HOUSE DIED ON THE 17 OCTOBER 1586 * SIR PHILIP SIDNEY * ENGLISH POET, DIPLOMAT AND SOLDIER, FROM HIS WOUNDS SUFFERED AT THE BATTLE OF ZUTPHEN. HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR OUR FREEDOM". The inscription

14396-692: Was little Classical precedent, with the possible exception of Greek satyr plays . Poliziano 's Orfeo (1480) shows the beginnings of the new form, but it reached its zenith in the late 16th century with Tasso 's Aminta (1573), Isabella Andreini 's Mirtilla (1588), and Guarini 's Il pastor fido (1590). John Lyly 's Endimion (1579) brought the Italian-style pastoral play to England. John Fletcher 's The Faithful Shepherdess , Ben Jonson 's The Sad Shepherd and Sidney's The Lady of May are later examples. Some of Shakespeare 's plays contain pastoral elements, most notably As You Like It (whose plot

14518-496: Was published as a preface to Pastorals. In this work Pope sets standards for pastoral literature and critiques many popular poets, one of whom is Spenser, along with his contemporary opponent Ambrose Philips . During this time period Ambrose Philips, who is often overlooked because of Pope, modeled his poetry after the native English form of Pastoral, employing it as a medium to express the true nature and longing of Man. He strove to write in this fashion to conform to what he thought

14640-402: Was set over 30 times, most famously by Mozart . Rameau was an outstanding exponent of French pastoral opera. Beethoven also wrote his famous Pastoral Symphony , avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favour of relatively slow rhythms. More concerned with psychology than description, he labelled the work "more the expression of feeling than [realistic] painting". The pastoral also appeared as

14762-469: Was the original intent of Pastoral literature. As such, he centered his themes around the simplistic life of the Shepherd, and, personified the relationship that humans once had with nature. John Gay , who came a little later was criticized for his poem's artificiality by Doctor Johnson and attacked for their lack of realism by George Crabbe , who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village. In 1590, Edmund Spenser also composed

14884-725: Was unveiled on 17 October 2011, exactly 425 years after his death, in the presence of Philip Sidney, 2nd Viscount De L'Isle , a descendant of the brother of Philip Sidney. The city of Sidney, Ohio , in the United States and a street in Zutphen , Netherlands, have been named after Sir Philip. A statue of him can be found in the park at the Coehoornsingel where, in the harsh winter of 1795, English and Hanoverian soldiers were buried who had died while retreating from advancing French troops. Another statue of Sidney, by Arthur George Walker , forms

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