I own a copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms,
entitled The Making of a Poem, to which I sometimes refer. In the third
section, it devotes a chapter to the elegy, the pastoral and the ode, each with an overview and a great range of examples. I was flicking
through to find a poem that would spark a prompt and came across a beautiful poem
in the pastoral section.
The pastoral became popular in the sixteenth century. “On
the surface, it appeared to be about an ornamental and sometimes fictional view
of the rural and bucolic life. But huge questions lurked below that clear
surface. In the pastoral mode poets could experiment with these questions.Was
man made for nature or nature for man? Was the natural world to enter the poem
as a realistic object or as a fictive projection of inner feelings?”
The pastoral poem developed from “shepherdesses and tidy
rural constructs… both an escape and an idea” through the unrest of the
Industrial Revolution into the “wounded pastoral”, which became a place to “mourn
for and celebrate rural life”. In the
twentieth century, it lamented urban intrusion, celebrated urban hubris, speculated
the future and developed into eco-poetry.
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| Image found on Goodreads |
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46431/let-evening-come
What I love about this poem is that, on the surface, it is
indeed a pastoral poem with imagery taken from a typical rural scene: the light
in the barn, the cricket, the fox and the woman getting ready to knit, all moving
towards evening and then night, gently and quietly. But when you discover that
the poem alludes to the creeping cancer that took the life of the poet’s friend,
and find out also that the poet was bipolar, it takes on new meanings.
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| Image found on Shutterstock |
This weekend, I would like you to write a new pastoral poem
about evening, the shift from late afternoon through twilight to the black shed
of night, following the format of Jane Kenyon’s poem, but no more than six
tercets.
N.B. All quotations in this prompt come from The Making
of a Poem.
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