Last class of term

For the final class of the term, I want to focus our discussion of contemporary environmentalist through one question.  Contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has said: 'Nature is not natural and can never be naturalised.'  I want to see if we can work out what he means.

At first, I concede, it looks like a simply contradictory thing to say; but Harman means something particular, and (I think) important by it.  We will talk about it in class, but by way of preparation you might want to do a bit of preliminary reading.  Here is Harman's Wikipedia page; you might enjoy browsing his blog.

You might also find it interesting to take a look at the work of Timothy Morton, another philosopherwhose own blog takes that Harman quotation as its strapline.  Morton specialises in environmental philosophy, and his first book was called Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard UP 2007).  I'd like you to do two things.

(1) Follow the link, there, to Morton's monograph on Google Books; they don't post the whole thing (and I wouldn't expect you to read the whole thing anyway); but spend half an hour browsing it, seeing if you can get a sense of what Morton's larger thesis is.

(2) Read this review of Morton's book by Vince Carducci. Again, the idea is to see if you can get a sense of what Morton is arguing, so you can see whether you agree with him or not.

Raymond Williams, 'Nature' (from KEYWORDS, 1983)

Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language. It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning: (i) the essential quantity and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings. Yet it is evident that within (ii) and (iii), though the area of reference is broadly clear, precise mmeanings are variable and at times even opposed. The historical development of the word through these three senses is important, but it is also significant that all three senses, and the main variations and alternatives within the two most difficult of them, are still active and widespread in contemporary usage.

Nature comes from fw naturc, oF and natura, L, from a root in the past participle of nasci, L - to be born (from which also derive nation, native, innate, etc.). Its earliest sense, as in oF and L, was (i), the essential character and quality of something. Nature is thus one of several important words, including culture, which began as descriptions of a quality or process, immediately defined by a specific reference, but later became independent nouns. The relevant L phrase for the developed meanings is natura rerum - the nature of things, which already in some L uses was shortened to natura - the constitution of the world. In English sense (i) is from C13, sense (ii) from C14, sense (iii) from C17, though there was an essential continuity and in senses (ii) and (iii) considerable overlap from C16. It is usually not difficult to distinguish (i) from (ii) and (iii); indeed it is often habitual and in effect not noticed in reading.

In a state of rude nature there is no such thing as a people . . . The idea
of a people ... is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast.

Here, in Burke, there is a problem about the first use of nature, but no problem - indeed it hardly seems the same word - about the second (sense (i)) use. Nevertheless, the connection and distinction between senses (i), (ii) and (iii) have sometimes to be made very conscious. The common phrase human nature for example, which is often crucial in important kinds of argument, can contain, without clearly demonstrating it, any of the three main senses and indeed the main variations and alternatives. There is a relatively neutral use in sense (i): that it is an essential quality and characteristic of human beings to do something (though the something that is specified may of course be controversial). But in many uses the descriptive (and hence verifiable or falsifiable) character of sense (i) is less prominent than the very different kind of statement which depends on sense (ii), the directing inherent force, or one of the variants of sense (iii), a fixed property of the material world, in this case ‘natural man’. What has also to be noticed in the relation between sense (i) and senses (ii) and (iii) is, more generally, that sense (i), by definition, is a specific singular - the nature of something, whereas senses (ii) and (iii), in almost all their uses, are abstract singulars - the nature of all things having
become singular nature or Nature. The abstract singular is of course now conventional, but it has a precise history. Sense (ii) developed from sense (i), and became abstract, because what was being sought was a single universal ‘essential quality or character’. This is structurally and historically cognate with the emergence of God from a god or the gods.

Abstract Nature, the essential inherent force, was thus formed by the assumption of a single prime cause, even when it was counierposed, in controversy, to the more explicitly abstract singular cause or force God.
This has its effect as far as sense (iii), when reference to the whole material world, and therefore to a multiplicity of things and creatures, can carry an assumption of something common to all of them: either (a) the bare fact of their existence, which is neutral, or, at least as commonly, (b) the generalization of a common quality which is drawn upon for statements of the type, usually explicitly sense (iii), ‘Nature shows us
that . . .’ This reduction of a multiplicity to a singularity, by the structure and history of the critical word, is then, curiously, compatible either with the assertion of a common quality, which the singular sense suits, or with the general or specific demonstration of differences, including the implicit or explicit denial of a common effective quality, which the singular form yet often manages to contain.

Any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought. (For an important outline, see Lovejoy.) But it is possible to indicate some of the critical uses and changes. There is, first, the very early and surprisingly persistent personification of singular Nature: Nature the goddess, ‘nature herself. This singular personification is critically different from what are now called ‘nature gods’ or ‘nature spirits’: mythical personifications of particular natural forces. ‘Nature herself is at one extreme a literal goddess, a universal directing power, and at another extreme (very difficult to distinguish from some non-religious singular uses) an amorphous but still all-powerful creative and shaping force. The associated ‘Mother Nature’ is at this end of the religious and mythical spectrum. There is then great complexity when this kind of singular religious or mythical abstraction has to coexist, as it were, with another singular all-powerful force, namely a monotheistic God. It was orthodox in medieval European beUef to use both singular absolutes but to define God as primary and Nature as his minister or deputy. But there was a recurrent tendency to see Nature in another way, as an absolute monarch.

It is obviously difficult to separate this from the goddess or the minister, but the concept was especially used to express a sense of fatalism rather than of providence. The emphasis was on the power of natural forces, and on the apparently arbitrary or capricious occasional exercise of these powers, with inevitable, often destructive effects on men.

As might be expected, in matters of such fundamental difficulty, the concept of nature was usually in practice much wider and more various than any of the specific definitions. There was then a practice of shifting use, as in Shakespeare’s Lear:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s ...

. . . one daughter
Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain have brought her to.
That nature, which contemns its origin.
Cannot be border’d certain in itself. . .

. . . All shaking thunder
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ungrateful man . . .

. . . Hear, nature hear; dear goddess, hear . . .

In these examples there is a range of meanings: from nature as the primitive condition before human society; through the sense of an original innocence from which there has been a fall and a curse, requiring edemption; through the special sense of a quality of birth, as in the rootword; through again a sense of the forms and moulds of nature which can yet, paradoxically, be destroyed by the natural force of thunder; to that simple and persistent form of the goddess, Nature herself. This complexity of meaning is possible in a dramatic rather than an expository mode. What can be seen as an uncertainly was also a tension: nature was at once innocent, unprovided, sure, unsure, fruitful, destructive, a pure force and tainted and cursed. The real complexity of natural processes has been rendered by a complexity within the singular term.

There was then, especially from eC17, a critical argument about the observation and understanding of nature. It could seem wrong to inquire into the workings of an absolute monarch, or of a minister of God. But a formula was arrived at: to understand the creation was to praise the reator, seeing absolute power through contingent works. In practice the formula became lip-service and was then forgotten. Paralleling political changes, nature was altered from an absolute to a constitutional monarch, with a new kind of emphasis on natural laws. Nature, in C18 and C19, was often in effect personified as a constitutional lawyer. The laws came from somewhere, and this was variously but often indifferently defined; most practical attention was given to interpreting and classifying the laws, making predictions from precedents, discovering or reviving forgotten statutes, and above all shaping new laws from new cases: nature not as an inherent and shaping force but as an accumulation and classification of cases.

This was the decisive emergence of sense (iii): nature as the material world. But the emphasis on discoverable laws --

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light! (Pope)

-- led to a common identification of Nature with Reason: the object of observation with the mode of observation. This provided a basis for a significant variation, in which Nature was contrasted with what had been made of man, or what man had made of himself. A ‘state of nature’ could be contrasted - sometimes pessimistically but more often optimistically and  even programmatically - with an existing state of society. The ‘state of nature’, and the newly personified idea of Nature, then played critical roles in arguments about, first, an obsolete or corrupt society, needing redemption and renewal, and, second, an ‘ artificial’ or ‘mechanical’ society, which learning from Nature must cure. Broadly, these two phases were the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. The senses can readily be distinguished, but there was often a good deal of overlapping.

The emphasis on law gave a philosophical basis for conceiving an ideal society. The emphasis on an inherent original power - a new version of the much older idea - gave a basis for actual regeneration, or, where regeneration seemed impossible or was too long delayed, an alternative source for belief in the goodness of life and of humanity, as counterweight or as solace against a harsh ‘world’.

Each of these conceptions of Nature was significantly static: a set of laws - the constitution of the world, or an inherent, universal, primary but also recurrent force - evident in the ‘beauties of nature’ and in the ‘hearts of men’, teaching a singular goodness. Each of these concepts, but especially the latter, has retained currency. Indeed one of the most powerful uses of nature, since 1C18, has been in this selective sense of
goodness and innocence. Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. The use is especially current in contrasts between town and country: nature is what
man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago - a hedgerow or a desert - it will usually be included as natural. Nature-lover and nature poetry date from this phase.

But there was one further powerful personification yet to come: nature as the goddess, the minister, the monarch, the lawyer or the source of original innocence was joined by nature the selective breeder: natural selection, and the ‘ruthless’ competition apparently inherent in it, were made the basis for seeing nature as both hisiorical and active. Nature still indeed had laws, but they were the laws of survival and extinction:
species rose and flourished, decayed and died. The extraordinary accumulation of knowledge about actual evolutionary processes, and about the highly variable relations between organisms and their environments
including other organisms, was again, astonishingly, generalized to a singular name. Nature was doing this and this to species. There was then an expansion of variable forms of the newly scientific generalization: ‘Nature teaches . . .’, ‘Nature shows us that . . .’ In the actual record what was taught or shown ranged from inherent and inevitable bitter competition to inherent mutuality or co-operation. Numerous natural examples could be selected to support any of these versions: aggression, property, parasitism, symbiosis, co-operation have all been demonstrated, justified and projected into social ideas by selective statements of this form, normally cast as dependent on a singular Nature even while the facts of variation and variability were bemg
collected and used.

The complexity of the word is hardly surprising, given the fundamental importance of the processes to which it refers. But since nature is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of
human thought - often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet with powerful effect on the character of the argument - it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.

Raymond Williams, 'Culture' (from KEYWORDS, 1983)

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.

The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth.

Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter -- ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L -- ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eCl7 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eCl6 the tending of natural growth was extended to process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture and profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding (1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 and is not common before mCl9. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected. Here the metaphorical sense ('natural heat) still appears to be present, and civility is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C15 England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense: 'it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can bestow. Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture.

It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German.

In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized or 'cultivated; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization or culture -- the historical self-development of humanity -- was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote:
 

Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature.

It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture. It was later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material development. Politically, as so often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material and 'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.)

On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemms Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit -- 'General Cultural History of Mankind (1843-52)-- which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used 'Ancient Society, with a culmination in Civilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced.

The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressive culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and eC2O.

Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or 'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American anthropology is in effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture isprimarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between 'material and 'symbolic production, which in some recent argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development, in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of sense and reference indicate both difference of intellectual position and some blurring or overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.

It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19 distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization. The noun in this sense has effectively disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. Hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It gathered force in lC19 and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti-German association) has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and distinctions between 'high art (culture) and popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility. 

Theocritus Idyll II. The Serenade

In this idyll the poet assumes the role of a young goatherd desperately attempting to seduce his mistress Amaryllis through his serenade. The poem is essentially divided into three parts, the first starting with five dedicatory lines to his friend Tityrus although there is no dialogue throughout. However, like idyll II, it carries whispers of a dialogue-form by means of a 'mute' character that is constantly addressed; either Tityrus or Amaryllis. 


The second part of the poem regards courting Amaryllis, each offering gifts to show his love. His desperation and torment are shown to progressively increase as the poem moves forward and his gifts become more generous (apples, garland, goat) in vain hopes of winning her love through materialistic offerings. After each gift followed by rejection and the failure of the song, there is a pause directed by elipsis, before the renewal of the despairing cry. 


The poem ends with a love song of four stanzas, bearing the scars of rejection, finally ending in a emotional call to commit suicide for his unrequited love, and a melodramatic claim that Amaryllis should seek some pleasure from his death, or sacrifice. 


Farihah Ferdous

Theocritus Idyll V.

This idyll presents the highly fraught conversation of two shepherds; a goatherd named Comatas, and a young shepherd named Lacon.

Upon sight of one another, the two shepherds begin accusing the other of the petty theft of Lacon’s pipe and Comatas’s skin-coat.  The bitterly enriched dialogue is evident as Comatas blames Lacon’s ‘foul envious hands’ [12] and eyes for his current nakedness. This feuding dialogue leads to a contest of song, presented by each character in alternate couplets, and largely on the theme of love. This attempt at resolution demonstrates the importance of song and music as a Pastoral convention, relying upon it to prove oneself, in addition to resolving disputes with one another.

Following the initial accusations of theft, the two character’s appear to boast and advertise their spot of land near the river Crathis, evident as Lacon encourages Comatas that ‘[he]’ll sing better sitting under the wild olive and this coppice [as] there’s cool water falling yonder, and grass and a greenbed’ [31-32]. Lacon continues to provoke Comatas, encouraging him to ‘hither, come thou hither, and thou shalt sing thy country-song for the last time’ [44]. After disputing the location for the ‘match o’ country-song’ [60], the two characters disagree once again as they attempt to select an appropriate judge. As the song contest commences, the two shepherds continue to compete against one another, boasting in the love that has been bestowed upon them by ‘The Muses’ [80] and Apollo. The importance of nature’s role in pastoral love is demonstrated as Lacon describes a damsel’s interest and attraction to his solitary kid, as opposed to him as the ‘damsel sees and the damsel says ‘Poor lad, dost milk alone?’’ [85]. Similarly, Comatas describes the attractiveness of Clearist flinging apples, presenting images of a pastoral setting and rural life, not of conventional romance.

Morson halts the singing contest as he concludes that Comatas has won and encourages him to reward this decision with ‘a well-laden platter’ [139]. The images of love and the pastoral presented throughout the singing contest are juxtaposed rather suddenly with extreme violence as Comatas recalls the Melanthius [145]; the goatherd mutilated by Odysseus and Telemachus, whilst also threatening to ‘break every bone’ [144] in the goat’s body he has been awarded with. Such violence, however, demonstrates the circular continuity of life and the natural world, through death, sacrifice and re-birth.

Hollie Redman

Virgil's Eclogue 9

The opening of this eclogue highlights the tension amongst the townsmen regarding recent changes within their community. Lycidas and Moeris coincidentally come across each other and the current affairs of their town are discussed, which draws the reader’s attention towards how unsatisfied the public is. Moeris states how the new owner of the land claims ‘”This is mine; begone, old tenants!”’ [3] suggestive of the unsettling atmosphere this unknown stranger is creating for the people. To further accentuate this disconcerting situation, Moeris implies how ‘neither your Moeris here nor Menalcas himself would be alive’ [14] had the ravens not warned him to stop his disagreement with the stranger. However, the identity of this ‘stranger’ [2] remains undisclosed which invites different interpretations from the readers regarding who it may be.


A very significant aspect of this eclogue is that it revolves around the idea of how much poetry/ songs mean to Lycidas and Moeris, which also indicates the importance it holds in pastoral traditions. Lycidas passionately questions ‘Who would sing the nymphs?’ [18] wondering out loud how different their lives will be considering the changes and lack of music in their lives. In an attempt to embrace poetry and its magic, Lycidas and Moeris start to reminisce and sing out loud their verses and poems from their childhood and past. Lycidas remembers hearing Moeris sing ‘Daphnis, why are you gazing at the old constellations rising?’ [46].


Critics such as Fiona Cox discuss the loss, guilt and cultural amnesia present in the ninth eclogue. Moeris and Lycidas seem to have a consistent fear of losing their memory of songs, as Moeris distinctly claims how ‘time robs us of all, even of memory’ [51]. He acknowledges the consequences of time, yet feels a sense of loss for what it does to his memory. In his essay titled 'Shadows are falling: Virgil, Radnóti and Dylan, and the aesthetics of pastoral melancholy', Richard F. Thomas explores how the concept of time, memory and place can be constructed as key melancholic elements in Virgil’s Eclogues. This similar line of argument reiterates Cox’s discussion regarding how both shepherds are living in fear of losing what is dearest to them – poetry.


A very befitting ending is given to this particular eclogue as Lycidas suggests ‘Moeris, let us sing’ [59] as ‘it makes the road less irksome’ [61] which conveniently portrays the sweet effect music brings, thus once again highlighting its power.

Virgil's Eclogue X

This eclogue is about the death of Gallus and is clearly supposed to be an imitation of Theocritus’ first idyll about the death of Daphnis. There are some similarities between the two poems; for example Gallus, like Daphnis, seems to be dying because of love and like Theocritus’ idyll it is unclear whether he is supposed to be dying as a result of heartbreak, suicide or some sort of physical ailment/wound caused by this love. As in Theocritus’ idyll, gods are mentioned and one tries to convince Gallus that death is unnecessary. In the idyll it is Priapus that says ‘why pine, poor Daphnis’ but in virgil’s eclogue Apollo says ‘Gallus, art mad?”. At first glance it appears that Priapus is more sympathetic than Apollo but when one remembers that Priapus is the god of male arousal his words seem more like a taunt whereas Apollo is simply being blunt. Virgil’s use of the god Apollo is significant because, although he is most commonly thought of as the god of the sun, in some myths he is also the god of healing. This image of Apollo as not only the god of the sun but as the god of healing put together with Pan, Nymphs and Gallus saying later in the poem ‘they will grow/ and you, my love, grow with them’ makes me think of growth and renewal but Gallus’ use of the words doom and love in the same line makes it seem as if love itself is what is killing him and if he had not fallen in love he would live.

Posted by Chantell