Man and Nature in Alexander Pope's Pastorals - … and Nature in Alexander... · Man and Nature in...

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Man and Nature in Alexander Pope's PastoralsAuthor(s): David S. DurantSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 11, No. 3, Restoration and EighteenthCentury (Summer, 1971), pp. 469-485Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449908 .

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Man and Nature in Alexander Pope's Pastorals DAVID S. DURANT

In his Pastorals, Alexander Pope evolves a theory of the relationship between nature and art which helps to explain his subsequent abandonment of that genre. He begins, in "Spring," with what seems the most convenient assumption for writing pastoral poetry: art simply reflects natural beauty. The three following eclogues gradually reverse this thesis. In "Summer" the poet adopts personification as a dominant trope. Now man is more than merely a piece of the all-important setting; landscape is significant as a projection of the speaker. In the third poem, "Autumn," metaphor replaces personification as the major techinique. Here the human use of nature is even more clearly dominant. By the final "Winter," nature is ab- solutely subservient to the poet, whose command brings it into being. Landscape of and for itself has been replaced by an interest in the human which makes scenery only incidental. Art does not exist to r eflect nature; nature is only a poetical device to depict man. The next logical step is to omit nature as a device, replacing the study of man through nature with the study of man through man. Pope has not simply written fine examples of the pastoral, but shaped his Pastorals to explain his future, non-pastoral, career.

THE MOST COMMON critical reaction to Alexander Pope's Pastorals has been one of patronizing ap- preciation. As the Twickenham editors point out, "criticism of the Pastorals has tended from the beginning to prize the craftsmanship revealed in their verse and to minimize the worth of their substance."1 A list of belittling comments could be made to include snatches from almost every critic who has treated the Pastorals. A convenient and fairly apt sum- mary of such an attitude is given in Bonamy Dobree's off- hand description of the effect of the work:

Artificial? Why, of course. What else should they be? They were precisely the same sort of thing as Dryden's shepherds and shepherdesses. On those terms we can like them. . . Serious and passionate? Why no; not with respect to the life supposedly represented, but with respect to the poetry, a thousand times yes.2

'E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, "Introduction: Pastorals," in The Poems of Alexander Pope, I: Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criti- cism (New Haven, 1961), p. 50. 'Alexander Pope, (New York, 1952), p. 23. For other comments on the Pastorals' lack of substance, see Geoffrey Tillotson, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton, 1938), p. 57; C. V. Deane,



470 MAN AND NATURE

Reuben Brower puts the same case more succinctly: "though the lines are pictorially vivid, they come close to sheer de- lightfulness of sound for its own sake. ... Pure sound very nearly holds the place of sense."3

That position is perfectly intelligible, if overstated. The Eclogues are finely written; they do involve a subject matter of less importance than that which Pope was later to treat. The paradox of a poetry of sound without sense, however, is debilitating as an assumption from which to begin a treatment of any poem. If we begin, instead, with Pope's description of them, we have some justification for investigating the Pastor- als as poetry of statement, even if it is statement about a world Pope usually did not treat. In the conclusion to his prose introduction to the poems, Pope describes them in terms of substance:

. . . they have as much variety of description, in respect of the several seasons, as Spencers; . . . in order to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments; not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age.4

This description emphasizes, as do the poems' titles, Pope's apparent interest in presenting and discriminating four different seasons. That presentation will include a number of relationships between man and nature: each poem is intended to represent a season, a time of day, and a site; as well as a human employment, age, and passion. Pope's description assumes, obviously, that there is some relationship between the various elements; between nature and man. Even before we enter the poems themselves, then, we have some justification

Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry (Oxford, 1935), p. 115; Ian Jack, Pope (New York, 1954), p. 10; and Giorgio Melchiori, "Pope in Arcady: The Theme of Et in Arcadia Ego in his Pastorals," English Miscellany, XIV (1963), 85. 'Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), p. 23. Brower goes on to treat the relationship of man and nature cogently; his comment indicates his esteem for the poem, not a dismissal of it as a foregone conclusion. 4Alexander Pope, "A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry," [published, Ton- son's Miscellanies, 1709] in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1963), pp. 122-123. All subsequent quotations and line references are from this edition of the Pastorals, pp. 123-138.



DAVID S. DURANT 471

for expecting them to present, or at least assume, a theory of art as some fusion of man and nature. It is this subject matter which has seemed important to a small group of critics who investigate the Pastorals as defining the relationships of nature and man.5 Thomas R. Edwards summarizes their ap- proach by maintaining that "the pastoral shepherd [is] an image of man stripped of all his 'civilized' concerns so that he may contemplate the relations between nature and his own capacity for primary emotion."0

Approached as statements of the relationship of nature and man in art, the Pastorals reveal a meaningful pattern-one that goes beyond even Pope's descriptive schema. "Summer" posits that man is only a part of a larger scene; that art is a reflection in words of that natural setting. That original premise is slowly reversed in the following poems. "Spring" alters "Summer's" statement of art as the reflection of nature: now nature appears to be a reflection of man. The speaker projects himself upon his setting, expressing his emotions in terms of personification. In "Autumn," "Spring's" implicit statement of the power of the speaker to control nature for his own purposes is made more explicit. The landscape seems almost incidental; the primary focus on the characters is expressed through a series of metaphors which explicitly define human emotions through natural imagery. In the final eclogue, this progression is capped: nature appears as a tool for the poet, one which is largely his own creation. Over- stated, the four poems move from an assumption that art exists to reflect nature to an assertion that nature exists to serve art.

"Spring" gives the initial statement of the relationship between man and nature. Its speakers assume that poetry is a reflection of nature. The first line of the poem mentions the pastoral landscape, the speaker, and his poetry: "First in these Fields I try the Sylvan Strains" (Sp. 1). The succeeding lines proceed to blur the distinctions between these three elements. In the second line, the poet describes himself as

6Besides Brower, see G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (London, 1954), p. 166; Richard F. Jones, "Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXIV (1925), 38-39; and Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy From Dryden to Blake (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), pp. 143-144. 'This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 18-19.



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part of his landscape; he is not even, apparently, singing, much less writing Pastorals. The blurring is more conspicuous in the next line: it is not wisdom or poetry which flows from the "Sacred Spring," but the Thames, a part of the landscape. The fusion of man, nature, and poetry is summed up in the paragraph's final lines. The "Rural Lay" is a completely natural process, one in which the element of human artistry is scarcely evident: "Let Vernal Airs thro' trembling Osiers play,/ And Albion's cliffs resound the Rural Lay" (Sp. 6-7). Poetry is so clearly a reflection of nature that any dis- tinction of the human from the scene is unnecessary.

This fusion of man and nature is increasingly obvious as the shepherds are introduced. Lines 18-22 present a portrait in which the shepherds are only subordinate pieces of the landscape. Their beauty is so natural that it is expressed in terms of the landscape: they are "Fresh as the Morn, and as the Season fair" (Sp. 20). by introducing his speakers as part of the landscape, Pope prepares us to accept their song as a reflection of nature.

Daphnis's first words make the artistic imitation of nature which his song embodies perfectly explicit. It is the very beauties of the scene around him which prompt him to sing:

Hear how the Birds, on ev'ry bloomy Spray, With joyous Musick wake the dawning Day! Why sit we mute, when early Linnets sing, When warbling Philomel salutes the Spring? Why sit we sad, when Phosphor shines so clear, And lavish Nature paints the Purple Year?

(Sp. 23-28) The natural beauties not only elicit his song, but provide its substance: his speech is composed of verbal images of nature. Moreover, he maintains that nature itself provides a sort of model for art, in its "joyous Musick," salute of Spring, and painting of "the Purple Year."

Like Daphnis, Strephon describes a world of beautiful nature in his first speech. His scene includes the human in- dustry of plowing, but the subordination of man to nature is so great that the scene lacks any explicit mention of the human plower. His addition to the dialogue is to suggest a contest for which he offers as prize a piece of natural artistry. The lamb and its "dancing shade" represent an icon of



DAVID S. DURANT 473

the reflection of nature by art. Strephon need not fabricate a worthy prize, he need only look out into nature, like the poet, to find adequate beauty. Daphnis's prize is more artificial than the lamb, yet it too displays the concept of art as imitation of nature. It not only has, as ornament, pictures of nature, but is a symbol of the poems in which it appears. The figures "rising from the work" are clearly parallel to the four eclogues; like them, they represent nature by the human. The figures, of and by themselves, are so unimportant as to go undescribed; they are mentioned because they represent nature.7

The shepherd's poetry, then, is one which is elicited by, mnade up of, and prized through nature. It is also, as Damon's speech asserts, structured on a natural process:

Then sing by turns, by turns the Muses sing, Now Hawthorns blossom, now the Daisies spring, Now Leaves the Trees, and Flow'rs adorn the Ground; Begin, the Vales shall ev'ry Note rebound.

(Sp. 41-44) The lines suggest that the very structure of incremental repetition of "Spring" is a reflection of natural processes. There is a sort of orchestration in nature, where daisies spring in imitation of hawthorn's blossoming, where flowers adorn in a more beautiful repetition of leaves. The shepherds will not only participate in this springtime process by the adorn- ment of their song; they will follow the same process of imitation. The sections which follow are based on this natural process: each of Strephon's songs is repeated and improved on by Daphnis. Pope's repetitive structure expresses both the growth of spring and the concept of art as imitation of nature which underlies that season's presentation.

The concept of art as decoration, in which the poet fulfills his function by reflecting the beauties of nature in words, unquestionably dominates all of "Spring." Yet even as the natural structure of incremental repetition is carried out in the shepherd's contest, the concept is undercut. While we know that the shepherds are only a part of the landscape, that their very competition reflects a natural process, we cannot help but feel the gradual movement away from a concentration upon nature to a more limited focus-on man.

'See Price, p. 144.



474 MAN AND NATURE

That shift in focus is most explicit in the shepherds' praise of their loves. Strephon begins this section by asserting that Delia's powers turn mourning nature into a transformed world of springing flowers, brightened skies, and singing birds. Daphnis claims more power for his love over nature: Sylvia does not simply transform nature; she transcends it: "If Sylvia smiles, new Glories gild the Shore,/ And vanquish'd Nature seems to charm no more" (Sp. 75-76). Strephon, in turn, asserts the superiority of human to natural beauty, maintaining that while nature's beauties depend upon time and place, his love's beauty is perpetual. Moreover, even the most beautiful parts of nature are tasteless without her pres- ence. Daphnis brings the assertion to a climax, maintaining the fusion of man and nature which had been stressed in the poem's opening lines in a new ordering of their relationship. Now nature is-at least in the shepherd's hyperbole-merely an element of a superior human:

Sylvia's like Autumn ripe, yet mild as May More bright than Noon, yet fresh as early Day, Ev'n Spring displeases, when she shines not here, But blest with her, 'tis Spring throughout the Year.

(Sp. 81-84)

Even in this first Eclogue, then, in which the theory of art as imitation of nature is most forcefully asserted, the progress of the song leads to an affirmation of the superiority of man to landscape. The shepherds' last speeches recapitulate the new position as they make natural objects riddles of human sig- nificance. They sing as objects in the landscape of a springtime beauty; their song is introduced as a reflection of the beauties of nature, in both structure and content; but they have come to a position in which nature seems significant only insofar as it may be unraveled for its human meaning. Their song thus introduces the following eclogues both in structure and in direction. The Pastorals are built upon incremental repetition, since each considers the same subject of the relationship of man and nature; each of the four poems advances the definition of that relationship towards the final assertion of nature as tool of art.

In "Summer," the second of the eclogues, Pope has emphasized the relationship between man and nature by an obvious reliance on a single trope-that of personification. There are, of course, personifications to be found in all the eclogues,



DAVID S. DURANT 475

but their number and frequency are notable in "Summer." Its speaker finds the same fusion of man and nature that had been portrayed in "Spring," but he expresses it by an act of poetic transformation. He, and his poem, see nature as an objectification of his emotions. The dominant trope suggests some progression from "Spring's" theory of art as reflection of nature: now nature is made a reflection of man.

"Summer" begins with a description of the setting which, as it merges the human and his surroundings, seems to pick up "Spring's" dominant mode. Yet even in the few lines which precede the swain's monologue, the poem has moved into personification: "Soft as he mourn'd, the Streams forgot to flow,/ The Flocks around a dumb Compassion shown" (Sum. 5- 6). The swain's first words pick up this mode; his solitude forces him to create an audience in his setting:

Ye shady Beeches, and ye cooling Streams, Defense from Phoebus', not from Cupid's Beams; To you I mourn; nor to the Deaf I sing, The woods shall answer, and their Echo ring.

(Sum. 13-16) Nature, here, is put on a par with the human; it is not only audience and answerer, but superior in part to his love: "The Hills and Rocks attend my doleful Lay,/ Why art thou prouder and more hard than they?" (Sum. 17-18)

The similarity of this mode to that of "Spring" is apparent: both assume fusion of man and nature. That fusion is stressed in the following lines, as the shepherd asserts the similarity between himself and his surroundings: "The bleat- ing Sheep with my Complaints agree,/ They parched with Heat, and I inflam'd by thee' (Sum. 19-20). The dominant process of personification is now epitomized in the image of the swain looking out into nature to find an image of himself: "As in the Crystal Spring I view my Face,/ Fresh rising Blushes paint the watry Glass" (Sum. 27-28). The pastoral art still involves a reflection of nature, but nature now is largely made up of the human characteristics thrown out upon it.

Having stressed the similarity of man and setting by throwing his own emotions out upon external nature, the speaker turns to a reversal which embodies a similar fusion. Now he wishes some superior force would transform him into a part of nature, as he has turned natural objects into nearly



476 MAN AND NATURE

human organisms: "O were I made by some transforming Pow'r,/ The Captive Bird that sings within thy Bow'r !" (Sum. 45-46) The wish, like the personifications, demonstrates the implicit faith in the similarity of man and nature which underlies the speaker's art.

The swain's emphasis on that similarity takes on a new form as he reasserts a community with his setting in the description of his audience-the "rural throng." Again he describes the human characteristics of his natural audience, this time in terms of classical personifications. Satyrs, Pan, Nymphs, descending gods, Venus, Adonis, and Diana are all called in as sympathetic forces; in so doing, the swain finds classical support for his less formalized personifications. The rural gods are fine symbols of the human characteristics the swain explicitly finds in nature; they are so apt that they bring to a climax the poem's initial assertion of the fusion of man and nature. Even as they are introduced, the speaker begins to move to a final assertion of the dominance of the human over the natural.

This final assertion, of course, is less contradictory to the poem's initial position than a similar assertion had been to "Spring's." The very use of personification assumes the speaker's power to rule nature, at least to the extent of expressing it in terms which make it functional-an expression of his own emotion. Even as we note the similarity of this conclusion to "Spring's," then, we are led to feel the dis- tance the poet has already brought us. The swain's assertion of human power is almost a paraphrase of Strephon and Daphnis. Like them, it is not for himself, but for his love that he claims power. Like their song, his begins with the assertion that his lady epitomizes all nature:

For you the Swains the fairest Flow'rs design, And in one Garland all their Beauties join; Accept the Wreath which You deserve alone, In whom all Beauties are compriz'd in One.

(Snum. 55-59) This subordination of the landscape to the human is ex-

pressed in "Summer's" characteristic trope of personification. The speaker does not simply find nature transformed to suit the mood of his love; he finds a nature personified to do her homage:

Where-e'er you walk, cool Gales shall fan the Glade, Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade,



DAVID S. DURANT 477

Where-e'er you tread, the blushing Flow'rs shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your Eyes.

(Sum. 73-76)

By expressing his love's power in terms of personification, of course, the swain reaffirms the closeness of his ties to nature: he can most easily represent his own subjection in the analagous subjection of nature. He continues that same mode of personification in the climax of his song, in which he suggests an almost miraculous power for his love:

But wou'd you sing, and rival Orpheus' Strain, The wondring Forests soon shou'd dance again, The moving Mountains hear the pow'rful Call, And headlong Streams hang list'ning in their Fall!

(Sum. 81-84)

In terms of "Summer's" representation of its season, the speaker's mode is particularly convenient. Because he chooses to express his emotions in terms of natural objects, he exposes his audience to a number of summer's natural features. More importantly, the very fusion of nature and emotion which he assumes allows the reader to find the season in the swain himself. Thus, we feel summer's stasis between spring's growth and autumn's decline in the relatively undramatic nature of the speaker's position. Just as "Spring" and "Autumn" utilize their several speakers to express motion in nature, so "Sum- mer" spells placidity by its speaker's solitude. Simply by reversing the speaker's assumption, we know that summer is hot because he is passionate; soft, as he is mourning; nearly static, as he professes to be silent; or sweet, as he is loving. In "Summer," the relative position of man and nature is nearly equal: nature exists to be transformed by the speaker into a representation of his own emotions; the speaker is himself functional in dramatizing the season.

This movement is carried farther in "Autumn." The control of nature implicit in "Summer's" personifications is strengthened and made more explicit by "Autumn's" characteristic reliance on simile and metaphor. Now nature is not only shaped to human requirements by personification, but wrought more firmly into use by comparison. If, in the first two eclogues, nature had seemed first dominant, then equal to man; now it is clearly subordinate. The speakers do not simply record nature's beauty, nor project themselves upon it, but



478 MAN AND NATURE

use it as a vehicle of the expression of their own situations and emotions.

The typical opening descriptions of the natural scene, in "Autumn," have shrunk to mere setting for the dominant characters. This opening focus on the human is continued in the prelude to Hylas's song where "Summer's" personifications are repeated as if to reassert the Pastoral's progress:

Now setting Phoebus shone serenely bright, And fleecy Clouds were streak'd with Purple Light: When tuneful Hylas with melodious Moan Taught Rocks to weep, and made the Mountains groan.

(Aut. 13-16)

Hylas's first speech, too, seems initially a continuation of the earlier mode of personification: "For her, the feather'd Quires neglect their Song;/ For her, the Lymes their pleas- ing Shades deny;/ For her, the Lillies hang their heads and dye" (Aut. 24-26). Now, however, personification does not speak for itself, but is made into a metaphor where nature is more obviously a tool of the speaker's purposes. The substance of the description expressed in personification is now re-expressed in more realistic terms before becoming meta- phorical:

Ye Flow'rs that droop, forsaken by the Spring, Ye Birds, that left by Summer, cease to sing, Ye Trees that fade when Autumn-Heats remove, Say, is not Absence Death to those who love?

(Aut. 27-30)

In "Summer," personification itself was the vehicle of meaning; in "Autumn," personification is worked into metaphor.

The shift from personification to metaphor is important because it introduces a new degree of control of speaker over environment. Hylas's next lines make that control clear, as he commands nature to conform to his dictates as setting for his absent love. The lines are very close to passages in both earlier eclogues, where the power of the loved one was made to extend over nature. The difference is primarily one of position: here the assertion does not come as climax, but as prelude. Moreover, the assertion is now less startling, not only because it is repetitious, but also because its context is a poem whose whole tenor is the control of nature for human ends. Here, too, it is not the love who controls nature directly,



DAVID S. DURANT 479

but the speaker who controls it for her, commanding various seasons to accompany her according to his emotion.

Hylas's third stanza combines the metaphor of his first with the assertion of power of his second. He does not merely look out upon his scene to reflect its beauties or to project himself upon it; rather, he envisions a nature corresponding to his own emotions which he then works into metaphor. His emotions are those which can be expressed in terms of autumn scenery, but the impetus to his song is hardly descriptive; that his metaphor describes autumn almost seems coin- cidence:

The Birds shall cease to tune their Ev'ning Song, The Winds to breathe, the saving Woods to move, And Streams to murmur, e'er I cease to love.

(Aut. 40-42) The lack of dominance of the immediate scene is made clearer in his next metaphor. Here the stuff of metaphor is not even autumnal:

Not bubling Fountains to the thirsty Swain, Not balmy Sleep to Lab'rers faint with Pain, Not Show'rs to Larks, or Sunshine to the Bee Are half so charming as thy Sight to me.

(Aut. 43-46) Nature now is only important to the speaker as it can

be shaped into a metaphoric statement of his emotion. The now familiar image of nature as reflector reappears in Hylas's song, as if to provide us a convenient gauge of the progress that has been made in the three eclogues. The sense of fusion between man and nature in art is continued here, for nature is capable of being shaped into the poet's expression: "Thro' Rocks and Caves the Name of Delia sounds,/ Delia, each Cave and echoing Rock rebounds" (Aut. 49-50). There is no hint here that nature is personified, nor that man exists to reflect nature in art. Rather, the speaker uses nature only to throw his voice back to him as the sounding board of metaphor.

In Hylas's concluding lines, the diminished force of nature is felt by its absence. With at least the dream of Delia's return, the speaker has no time to spare on nature; his attention, and that of the poem, shifts entirely to the human. Con- versely, as the human elements begin to supersede the natural in the poem's attention, the human becomes increasingly func-



480 MAN AND NATURE

tional in the description of nature. Now there is only the faintest characterization of the season through direct presentation of its scenes. It is the speaker's sense of loss whose expression gives the reader an analogue to the spirit of the season: autumn is personified in Hylas's emotion. Aegon's song, too, characterizes the season through his expression of his plight, but it is the very device of dual speakers which gives the eclogue its most peculiarly autumnal color. Now, instead of "Summer's" placidity in a single speaker, we have the movement of "Autumn's" two. Instead of "Spring's" incremental repetition and growth, we have a process of increased loss. Hylas sings of a departed love who returns in the poem; Aegon mourns an unfaithful love who will not return. The lament for the loss of summer is transformed, by the switch in speakers, to the deeper grief of the frenzy of approaching winter.

Unlike Hylas's opening personifications, Aegon's song begins with a straightforward presentation of his setting. The change reflects a new subtlety in the control of nature; the scene is only implicitly shaped to serve the speaker's emotion. It is only when we see that Aegon's descriptions of mountains, oxen, and smoke all are images of retreat that we realize that the scene is functional. Aegon's control of nature is more explicit in his second stanza. Now his control takes on tangible shape in the physical impression of human emotion on the setting: "Beneath yon Poplar oft we past the Day:/ Oft on the Rind I carv'd her Am'rous Vows',/ While she with Garlands hung the bending Boughs" (Aut. 66-68). This image is itself wrought into a new metaphor in the following lines: "The Garlands fade, the Vows are worn away;/ So dies her Love, and so my Hopes decay" (Aut. 69-70). These metaphors are followed by another one, as Aegon poses the negative comparison between the teeming season and his fruitless love. The poem has moved from its intial projection of human characteristics on nature to a more sophisticated method in which nature is shaped to serve the speaker's metaphoric purposes.

That increased control is capped in Aegon's song, as it had been in Hylas's, by a final movement away from nature. The rejection of nature which Hylas had accomplished in his concentration on his returned love is matched by Aegon's melodramatic rejection of nature and, at least in threat, of



DAVID S. DURANT 481

life itself. The rejection characterizes the season of autumn, of course, in its movement from life to death. It serves, as well, as an indication of the progress of the eclogue. Now art is not the reflection of nature. Nature is but functional-only a subservient element in the expression of human emotions and situations.

"Winter" completes the movement from art as reflection of nature to nature as tool of art. The metaphoric mode of "Autumn" is reiterated in "Winter's" first lines', thus con- tinuing the pattern of iterative growth of all the Pastorals. In the poem's first four lines, Lycidas praises Thyrsis's song in terms of natural comparisons. The substance of the metaphors presents the superiority of the human over the natural explicitly: Thyrsis's song is more mournful than murmuring springs, more smooth and sweet than rivers. The last four lines of the opening paragraph follow the pattern of the other eclogues in describing the setting. In this familiar pattern, however, Lycidas asserts a relationship between man and nature which almost directly contradicts the opening assumption in "Spring." There, it had been the natural beauties which had spurred the swains to emulation. Here, nature's primary characteristic is its silence; the artist must con- strain it to art, not reflect it:

Now sleeping Flocks on their soft Fleeces lye, The Moon, serene in Glory, mounts the Sky, While silent Birds forget their tuneful Lays, Oh sing of Daphne's Fate, and Daphne's Praise.

(Win. 5-8) That the imperative mode is to dominate man's relation-

ship with nature in "Winter" is emphasized in Thyrsis's first speech. He takes as his model a poet who has not only commanded a personified nature, but instructed the very Thames, which in "Spring" had taught the singers:

Here shall I try the sweet Alexis' Strain, That call'd the list'ning Dryads to the Plain? Thames heard the Numbers as he flowed along, And bade his Willows learn the moving Song.

(Win. 11-14) There is, in these lines, the clear suggestion that the very beauties which "Spring's" shepherds had imitated had been taught by a poet. Art does not follow nature; it instructs it. Thyrsis's suggestion that the poet was the ordering force



482 MAN AND NATURE

behind nature is reiterated by Lycidas, who suggests that the return of life itself, in spring, is somehow a product of the poet's song: "So may kind Rains their vital Moisture yield,/ And swell the future Harvest of the Field!/ Begin (Win.15-17). Lycidas continues by passing down Daphne's dying orders to adorn her grave with song; the command assumes the same poetical control of nature for human ends that "Winter" presents.

Thyrsis's answer picks up the imperative mode as he begins to build the decoration of Daphne's grave. His order implies his belief in his ability to mold nature; the substance of the command reveals that belief in explicit form. The sylvan gods are to adorn Daphne's grave with natural beauties. Their actions are not only a part of the poem, but an emblem of its process: Thyrsis is intent upon forging a funeral elegy from natural beauties. His order uses a device seen in "Au- tumn": the rural deities are to impress his commands on nature by inscribing lines of verse on the tomb. But that verse transcends even "Autumn's" assertion of control. Now the poet reverses what had seemed the strategy of the Pastorals. Instead of presenting human figures which will represent the season, Lycidas creates a season for sadness's sake. The in- scription is the first of Pope's uses of the biblical "Let there be light"; our knowledge of the source suggests its importance:

"Let Nature change, let Heav'n and Earth deplore, Fair Daphne's dead, and Love is now no more." 'Tis done, and Nature's various Charms decay. . . -

(Win. 27-29)

The forty lines following this caveat describe the wintry scene it has commanded. It is by far the longest descriptive passage in the Pastorals; it presents a scene completely free of human life. Had Pope begun his four eclogues with such a passage, his readers might have been justified in believing that nature was intended to speak for itself. Here, in its actual context, there is never the slightest doubt that nature speaks only under and for the artist. The wintry landscape is, explicitly, only the product of the poetic fiat. The insistent refrain of "Fair Dcaphne's dead . . ." stresses, in each stanza, that the description is important only as it functions to express that fact. It reminds us that the seven lines of description which precede each statement of the refrain are



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but another way of stating it: the season and its description are only the expresssion of a world in which Daphne is dead.

This final definition of the relationship between nature and man in art is, of course, retroactive. It is relevant to all that Pope has been doing throughout the Pastorals. While he has been characterizing the season by the dramatic action of each eclogue-subordinating the human to the natural- he has been, as well, characterizing his figures by their setting. If we return to Pope's description of the work, we will re- member that he wrote the Pastorals "not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each." Even the briefest recapitulation suggests the ap- propriate succession of the ages and passions of man, from "Spring's" youth, through "Summer's" early manhood and "Autumn's" old age, to "Winter's" death. To define each in Pope's precision would be to paraphrase the four poems. What is important here is that Pope has concluded his Pastorals with a theory which insists not upon the importance of nature, but upon its functional properties.

Thyrsis's song ends with the apotheosis of Daphne. The miracle serves both as a recapitulation of the descriptive passage which precedes it and as a transition to Pope's final definition of the art of pastorals. On the one hand, the transformation of Daphne to Goddess has already been implicitly achieved: it is for her that a season has been created. On the other, her transformation suggests that the command of nature for human ends serves some higher goal than mere praise of a lover or decoration of a maid's grave. It is the poet who creates the setting by which his speakers express their grief; it is the artistic product of that interaction of man and nature which is at stake, not emotion or nature. It is as a part of a poetic artifice that Daphne, as well as the whole cast of natural and human characters which make up the Pastorals, will survive on some eternal plane. As Daphne is transformed into goddess, the poet claims for the poems an equivalent and encompassing position. It is a traditional claim. For the Pastorals, it is no sudden intrusion of poetic self-puffing, but the conclusion to a carefully ordered progression moving from the primacy of nature to the primacy of art.

Yet we are left with the nagging suspicion that the claim is absurd, for all that it is a product of a chain of logical



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progression. Granted that Pope has forged a fine and lasting artifact out of the pastoral genre, we may still be tempted to wonder whether it was worth it. Pope apparently believed that it was not: his poetry did not continue to follow pastoral models. One obvious reason for his rejection of that genre lies in the perfection of the ones he had written at sixteen. An- other, and equally telling one, lies in the logic of the Pastorals themselves. This is more than to paraphrase their concluding farewell to the pastoral world. It is to follow out the logical progression of the poems' treatment of the relationship of man and nature in art.

In "Spring" the poem echoes its own beautiful setting; the poet's task is to reflect natural beauty. "Summer" shows a new reflection: the speaker looks into nature to find his own image. Nature is important because it is such a good expression of emotion. In "Autumn" the poet throws his voice into nature only to have it echo and expand his song; nature has become mere functionary. By the final eclogue, "In hollow Caves sweet Echo silent lies,/ Silent, or only to her Name replies" (Win. 41-42). Nature is finally but a human creation; a set of images which can be compelled to characterize an emotion or situation. The shepherd singers who seemed only a part of the landscape in "Spring" have become, in "Winter," the creators of their environment. Or, to put it in terms of Pope's use of the pastoral genre, the emphasis has shifted from nature to man; art is not bound to landscape.

The logical next step in the progression would be to avoid what is now only a somewhat cumbersome technique. Instead of creating a setting by which one describes some human emotion or action, it would be simpler to begin and end with man. Quite logically, Pope does so. In the later poems, natural setting continues to be of use, but with rare exceptions it is only incidental. Since art is not a simple reflection of external nature, the poet need not focus on landscape. These poems are not anti-pastorals: Pope knew too well that the genre does not necessitate a romantic love of nature. They are, however, skillful contradictions of a theory of art which would make pastorals a convenient mode.

The patronizing comments of later critics on the Pastorals's lack of substance, then, have not only overlooked that substance, but have, in so doing, missed Pope's assertion of their later discovery. Pope did not leave the pastoral genre by some



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happy chance. He created Pastorals which explain his later choice of new genres. Few critics would castigate The Rape of the Lock for Belinda's faults; we may be sure that Pope knew them better than we. The analogy is not perfect, but it is suggestive. Before we presume to castigate him for writing poems whose substance is only a world of flowers and trees, we must at least investigate Pope's attitude towards his subject matter. Before we dismiss the Pastorals for their lack of substance, we must inquire whether that was not Pope's point.

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