The Pastoral Elegies of Harpur and Bryant
The Early Modern Background
Spenser: “November” (1579)
Thenot
But if sad winter’s wrath, and season chill,
Accord not with thy Muse’s merriment,
To sadder times thou mayst attune thy quill,
And sing of sorrow and death’s dreariment;
For dead is Dido, dead, alas! and drent […]
Spenser: “November” (1579)
Whence is it, that the flowret of the field doth fade,
And lieth buried long in Winter’s bale;
Yet, soon as Spring his mantle hath display’d,
It flow’reth fresh, as it should never fail?
But thing on earth that is of most avail,
As virtue’s branch and beauty’s bud,
Reliven not for any good.
O heavy herse!
The branch once dead, the bud eke needs must quail; O careful verse!
Spenser: “November” (1579)
Unwise and wretched men, to weet what’s good or ill,
We deem of death as doom of ill desert;
But knew we, fools, what it us brings until,
Die would we daily, once it to expert!
No danger there the shepheard can assert;
air fields and pleasant lays there bene;
The fields aye fresh, the grass aye green.
O happy herse!
Make haste, ye shepheards, thither to revert.
O joyful verse!
Milton: “Lycidas” (1637)
Phoebus replied, and touch’d my trembling ears;
“Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.”
Milton: “Lycidas” (1637)
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
The Romantic Disintegration
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, XLIV
Press’d by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,
While the loud equinox its power combines,
The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
The wild blast, rising from the Western cave,
Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed;
Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, XLIV
With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore
Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doom’d—by life’s long storm opprest,
To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.
Hemans: “A Spirit’s Return” (1830)
Come while the gorgeous mysteries of the sky
Fused in the crimson sea of sunset lie;
Come to the woods, where all strange wandering sound
Is mingled into harmony profound; (ll. 7-9)
A gift hath sever’d me from human ties,
A power is gone from all earth’s melodies,
Which never may return: their chords are broken,
The music of another land hath spoken— (ll. 231-234)
Colonial Disintegration
William Strutt, Bushrangers on the St Kilda Rd (1887)
Disintegration as Unsettlement
Australian pastoral is haunted by a similar sense of violation, caused by an upheaval of no lesser magnitude—that of the displacement of an indigenous population by the settlers of a colonizing power. Here, too, it is the figure of the dispossessed whose presence unsettles the affirmations of the pastoral. (Indyk 1993, 838)
Integration as Invasion
From Philip Freneau’s Indian death songs through John Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha, early American poetry often also takes the form of proleptic elegy. (Brantlinger 2017, 59)
The metaphor of the savage as futureless child is related to discourse about economic development, based on the assumption that societies, like individuals, grow up or mature. (Brantlinger 2017, 66)
Bryant: “Earth” (1834)
What then shall cleanse thy bosom, gentle Earth,
From all its painful memories of guilt?
The whelming flood, or the renewing fire,
Or the slow change of time?—that so, at last,
The horrid tale of perjury and strife,
Murder and spoil, which men call history,
May seem a fable, like the inventions told
By poets of the gods of Greece.
Bryant: “Earth” (1834)
O thou,
Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep,
Among the sources of thy glorious streams,
My native Land of Groves! a newer page
In the great record of the world is thine;
Shall it be fairer? Fear, and friendly Hope,
And Envy, watch the issue, while the lines,
By which thou shalt be judged, are written down.
Harpur, “The Glen of the Whiteman’s Grave” (1846)
I figured them both old and grey,
And bent with mourning many a day—
Mourning hopelessly for One
Their age had cherished; and in whom,
Even through the sacred tie of Son,
They had dreamt again of their own young bloom:—
But they dreamt not, as they blest him then
Of this lonely Mound in this gloomy Glen […] (CHCA, h153a)
Harpur, “The Glen of the Whiteman’s Grave” (1846)
Even the Black, having ventured nigh,
Dares but to halt ’mid the fatal wild
So long as to show to his trembling child
The Whiteman’s Grave!—then he hurries by. (CHCA, h153a)
Harpur, “The Glen of the Whiteman’s Grave” (1846)
I sat me by the Grave—and wept!
Wept, until settling up the Glen,
The night forbad me more delay;
And bettered was my spirit when
I sped at length away. (CHCA, h153a)