Green and pleasant places

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 8

Green and pleasant places

The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse. Edited by John Barrell and John Bull. 539 pp. Index. Allen Lane. N.Z. price $10.35.

The latest Penguin anthology offers rather more and less than its title might suggest. Its editors have a determinedly historical thesis to propound, and their collection of English pastoral verse is a selective one, accompanied by a detailed commentary.

Following the pastoral through its various forms from its sixteenth century importation from Italy to what they see as its end in the nineteenth century, they are concerned to argue and to illustrate the perpetual tension of the form between the mythical and the naturalistic; its intrinsic ambivalence as an urban interpretation of rural manners; its constant appeal to imaginary perfections; its continuing function as a kind of museum of ideals against which the consciences of various ages can be measured.

This is a fascinating exercise, though limited by its confinement to poetry; the pastoral ideal became increasingly the province of the novel from "Tom Jones” through to Hardy and the argument of the editors is therefore limited in the latter sections of the anthology. However, Barrell and Bull have performed their job well and have carefully displayed the changing strains and responses which the form allowed the poetic imagination, from Spenser’s efforts to contrive rustic speech to John Clare’s beautiful obsessive nostalgia for the pre-enclosure meadows and woods. Although many of the crucial poems are well-known (“Lycidas,” “The Garden,” Gray’s “Elegy,” “The Deserted Village”) the editors hate obviously read widely and print some interesting obscurities: Matthew’ Green’s “The Spleen” (1737) includes this cosy bourgeois dream: Two hundred pounds, half-yearly paid Annuity securely made, A farm some 20 miles from town, Small, tight, salubrious, and my own.