Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode
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Transcript of Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 1
Luke Isaacson
Professor Makowiecka
WRT 201-046H
13 December 2013
Week 16
Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode
The form and subject matter of two pieces, The Passionate Shepherd To His Love by Christo-
pher Marlowe and The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh, contribute to the library
of Pastoral works. Pastoral works appear first in Roman times, resurfacing in the Elizabethan era, and
continue in the Modern Age. Elizabethan writers picture untamed forests in Europe and tell the stories of
shepherds with a Classic idyll in mind. Classical and Early Modern Period pastoralists each possess a dif-
ferent sociolect. Antecedents to the Modern Poem exist in Elizabethan poetic traditions. Raleighs bor-
rowing and transformation of Marlowes The Passionate Shepherd to His Love in The Nymphs Reply
To the Shepherd is a work in which select ideas from Robert Frosts After Apple-Picking and Stop-
ping By Woods On A Snowy Evening originate.
Consider the imagery of greener pastures and stories of life in an ideal age first recorded in
OvidsMetamorphoses (Kline). Recall, in After Apple-Picking, the speaker describes the smell of the
apple harvest in late summer - early fall, Essence of winter sleep is on the night (Frost 1229). In the
Modern Age, Robert Frost voices the darkest thoughts of humanity. Nature, its most revealing mirror
shows the mood of each speaker in the poem. The Nymph evokes images of the Winter season in her let-
ter to the shepherd. The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd occurs in the same beautiful Spring setting
(Raleigh 942) as The Passionate Shepherd To His Love (Marlowe 943). The mood of the speaker does
not dictate the setting or season of the poem. This place is no longer paradise when season changes and
winter comes.
The passage of Spring into Winter comes with aesthetic transformation and the discovery of mor-
tality. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights
my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love (Raleigh 942). The description of life and love
defined by negation appears in a shepherd hopes of eternal spring. Frank Lentricchia relates in Robert
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 2
Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, In the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the
road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of
cosmic negation in action" (Landscapes 31).
Poussin, Nicolas.Les Bergers d'Arcadie (Et in Arcadia ego).c. 1637-1638. Oil on Canvas. Louvre, Paris
A holistic view ofLes Bergers dArcadie, provides the topic of idyll. However, the story of the
painting is a comment on shepherds not basking in the joy of spring, but gathered around a tomb.
In short, the painting is a paradigmatic work not only in the tradition of pastoral elegy, baroque
Classicism, and the history of ideas, but also for our estimate of Poussin's own stature as an artist of un-
surpassed powers in the history of French Painting in particular, and of European painting as a
whole (Steefel, Jr. 99). Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, illustrates a reverse-image of pas-
toral tradition.
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 3
A dead, wintery New Hampshire wood, can elicit thoughts of life. The creative response in the
face of death, art's dutyindeed, the raison dtreof Art -- is to recall the living element. (Steefel,Jr.
101).* The mood of the speaker in Frosts passage through the wood, is set apart from the tone of a quiet
winter night. -- it is but a medium to Being and Nothingness.
Frosts speaker meditates on limit-experience, in a moment which brings him to the face
of death. Travel down the very darkest path which might keep him there, turns his horse down the road to
the village. The remnants of Classical ideology held that personal experience was part of some divine or
species-wide collective experience. Renaissance thinkers sought to re explore experience and its objects
as a consequence of each other: either experience makes those objects possible, or those objects make
experience possible (Robinson 1).The mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot
think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the
famous mindbody problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theolo-
gies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the
physical world (Robinson 2.3) of Marlowe.
The shepherds home in the pastures is not a groundless choice. The European writers of the Ear-
ly Modern Period had drawn from the influence from the Anglo-Saxons and the remnants of the Later
Roman Empire (Robinson 2.2). In fiction, characters craft accurate judgements about the strengths of
their memories of fact and monitor their own uncertainty (Pronin 7); by placing introspection at the end of
an axis polar to others, moral lessons within are discounted (Pronin 11). The comment or rheme on the
topic of a beings inability to make an accurate assumption for what tomorrow will bring, is explicitly, the
magnitude which tiredness bears on tomorrow. A morning finishing the apple sorting in Frosts After
Apple-Picking relates to the implicit incentive of the shepherd to copulate with his beloved (1229). Con-
ceptual realism coupled with introspection (unconscious dishonesty), presents a misleading account of the
future (Pronin 9).
From Alexander Lourencos Poetry analysis: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, by
William Raleigh, is the following thought:
Sir Walter Raleigh (15541618) relays consolation regarding the nymph's harsh rejection of the
shepherd's romantic advances in the spirit of "time heals all wounds," by citing in the second stanza
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 4
(among several examples) that eventually with the passage of time Philomel would become "dumb" to her
own pain and that her attention would be drawn away from the pain by the events of life to come. (1)
Keith J. Holyoak writes of Frost (though of The Road Not Taken),
This poem can only be understood if the reader has knowledge of the life-is-a-journey
metaphor. That knowledge includes understanding of other grounds between the tenor (life) and vehicle
(journey) that are not as transparent in this poem. If Frost cannot provide a philosophical account suit-
able to everyone a postulate that is nothing but an argument to support Frosts telosor purpose is arbi-
trary (The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning).
Titian.Nymph and Shepherd.c. 1570-1575. Oil on Canvas. Vienna, Austria
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 5
The understanding of relationships between poet and speaker gained from closely examining con-
temporary and future poets like Christopher Marlowe and Robert Frost, reveals a unique characterization
based in the pastoral tradition.
Marlowes publication occurs at the end of an era in which the madrigals inspired by the Italian
sonnet had flourished. The musicality of The Passionate Shepherd To His Love is found in its second
stanza and. Because two rhyming couplets form each stanza, the scansion of each verse possesses the
same rhythm. The speaker in Marlowes seminal text in this poem is writing to his beloved. The identity
of this woman is not fully explained within. The spring scenery is a symbol of this shepherds love and the
sights and sounds of the pasture are also a source of his pleasure. The implicit incentive of the shepherd to
copulate with his beloved. The structure of the poem can be viewed as the text of a letter from the shep-
herd to his beloved. Marlowes writing possesses a lyrical quality similar to a ballad or a lay.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
The use of a trochee at the end of line 10, does not break the meter of the poem; rather, the
change from Roses to Posies is subject to the mood of the topic and the tone in the speakers com-
ment, There will I make thee a bed of roses And a thousand fragrant posies. Here, Marlowe determines
the prosody of his speaker through objects.
North of Bostonis the title of the collection in which Frosts After Apple-Picking first
was published in 1915. Frost keeps his speakers past undetailed to afford an exploration of epistemology
through description. The subject of his own poem and his description of tiredness reflects both the labor
done and its affect on the time left in the span of his life.The details of the poems sleep-time setting is
easily mistaken for the visual descriptions of a harvest scene. The importance dreams bear on interior
monologue is a reflection of select symbols in the tone of the speaker. The state or feeling, often pleasant,
of tiredness or inertia bears the same name as an oppressive stillness in the air: languor.
Frosts New Hampshire exists in the same geographic location as North of Boston and
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening The reverse-pastoral image as Randall Jarrell wrote of Frost
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in Poetry and the Age, "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry. Grotesque simplifications, distor-
tions, falsifications--coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them
[extended metaphors], and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his
work." Frost wrote this poem in a few moments with a self-described ease after riding his horse in the
winter and experiencing a type of hallucination. In a critical moment within the poem, the speakers feel-
ing and experience break himself from his own isolation and allows consideration for the horse. The pos-
tulate that the horse can feel loneliness in the wood is hypothetical of a social experience. The cogent in-
terpretations seemed limited --Pastoral texts from the corpus of Frosts oeuvre, like Frost, himself in his
early career, were criticized by Modern Poets as being too traditional (Dimitrov)-- however it is in Frosts
account of a man in languish, that we consider the strengths memories bear on symbolic meaning.
Unknown Artist.Hudson, New York.20th century. Oil on Wood. Authors Personal Collection
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Library Research Paper Isaacson 7Works Cited
Da Vinci, Leonardo.Mona Lisa. 1503-1506. Oil on wood. Louvre, Paris.
Frost, Robert. "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening." 1923.Life And Death. By Richard Abcarian,
Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th ed. Boston / New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. 1240.
Print. Literature: The Human Experience.
Frost, Robert. "After Apple-Picking" 1914.Life And Death.By Richard Abcarian,
Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th ed. Boston / New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. 1229.
Print. Literature: The Human Experience.
Holyoak, Keith J.; Morrison, Robert G. (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Cambridge
University Press.
Jarrell, Randall.Poetry And The Age.NY: Knopf, 1953. Print.
Kline, A. S., trans.A complete English translation and Mythological index.N.p.: A.S. Kline, n.d.
Print. The Ovid Collection - University of Virginia Library
Lentricchia, Frank.Robert Frost: Modern Poetics And The Landscapes of Self.Durham: Duke
University, 1975. Print.
Lourenco, Alexander. "Poetry Analysis the Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd by William Raleigh." Poets And Poetry
(2008): n. pag.Helium - Where Knowledge Rules.Helium, Inc., 21 Feb. 2008. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.
Marlowe, Christopher. "The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd." 1600. Love And Hate.By Richard Abcarian,
Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th ed. Boston / New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. 943.
Print. Literature: The Human Experience.
Pronin, Emily, Ph.D. "The Introspection Illusion." Chapter.Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, Volume 41. Ed. Mark P. Zanna. By Emily Pronin et al. Author's Personal Copy ed.
Vol. 41. Burlington: Reed Elsevier, 2009. 1-67. Print. Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology.
Raleigh,Walter. "The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd." 1600.Love And Hate. By Richard Abcarian,
Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th ed. Boston / New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. 942.
Print. Literature: The Human Experience.
"Robert Frost."Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More: From The Academy Of American Poets.Ed. Alex
Dimitrov. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.
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prmPID/192>.
Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta
(ed.), URL = .
Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "A Neglected Shadow in Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego." The Art Bulletin 3rd
ser. 57.1 (1975): 99-101. JSTOR. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. .
Titian.Nymph and Shepherd.c. 1570-1575. Oil on Canvas. Vienna, Austria
Unknown Artist.Hudson, New York.20th century. Oil on Wood. Authors Personal Collection
*(see Pliny the Elder, nat. Hist. XXXV 5, 15)