Pastoral Protestants

Andrew Carpenter has contributed more than perhaps any other scholar to the recovery and reconstruction of eighteenth-century Irish poetry. His seminal collection Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998) assembled a heterogeneous array of verse from all classes of Irish society, giving space to “the voices of the marginalized and the poor” (2)—overlooked and anonymous scribblers as well as denizens of Ireland’s eighteenth-century underworld. That collection has shaped much subsequent literary research. In its introduction, Carpenter stated that his editorial policy excluded “polite verse . . . in which gently cultured (and mostly moneyed) Anglo-Irish poets write in pastoral or Augustan style of the Phyllises in their groves” (4–5). Somewhat surprisingly, the handsome anthology The Irish Poet and the Natural World, edited by Carpenter and Lucy Collins, is replete with precisely such pastoral productions. As the introduction acknowledges, the predominant perspective is thus “that of educated Protestants” (2) who often, but not always, emulate neoclassical traditions. Yet the editors’ intelligent selection proves that Phyllis in her grove is more interesting than previously thought. This volume does a superb job of tracking the significant shifts and variations—formal, thematic, linguistic, and political—in Irish nature poetry over the course of two hundred and fifty turbulent years. Its introduction provides a succinct and illuminating overview of the historical, literary, and political context of these verses, no mean feat given the complex and contested nature of Irish, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-British, Ulster, and other such hyphenated and hybrid identities.

The volume’s editorial apparatus is user-friendly. Poems are ordered by year of circulation, allowing a historical narrative to emerge from miscellaneity; biographical and contextual headnotes are provided for each selection; local references and literary allusions are glossed throughout. A general index would also have been helpful in identifying specific references, but this is a minor quibble. Despite the superabundance of political verse in early seventeenth- century Ireland, the editors have assembled fascinating examples of verse that deal with the natural life of the island, including, for instance, an anonymous planter’s lament for land lost in the 1641 Rebellion. His georgic catalog of a living and of living things lost reveals his Christian stewardship, but also provides the righteous rationale for appropriating Irish land in obedience to God’s demand to bring forth goodness from the earth. Though English writers praised Ireland’s natural fecundity and productive potential, they also disparaged the coarse, rebellious, and savage natives. Anglo-Irish courtly verse is transmogrified not only by sociopolitical uncertainty, but also by the disconcerting vitality of Irish nature. Such attitudes have an exemplar in Edmund Spenser, whose “Mutabilitie Cantos” are included here. Despite his anti-Irish sentiment, Spenser wrote poetry that bears Ireland’s imprint: natural abundance is shadowed by a threat of unruly lawlessness, as verdant wildness veers toward savage inhospitability. Some early works show the influence of the Gaelic tradition of dinnseanchas, the naming of places, by describing literal Irish locations and including native mythological traditions associated with particular locales.

While The Irish Poet and the Natural World does not match the exhilarating range of English, Hiberno-English, and macaronic verse of Carpenter’s previous collection, it does display a pleasing variety. William Temple’s beautifully ornate verse on the death of a lady’s pet bird thus rubs shoulders with pornographer Richard Head’s “A Great Sea-Storm Describ’d,” where “The fear of drowning, made us wish / Our selves transpeciated into Fish”(117). The chronological structure helps us attend to moments when natural disasters, such as the great frost of 1739–41 documented by David Dickson in Arctic Ireland (1997) and explored by Collins in a recent article, cause a reassessment of man’s relationship to the natural world. William Dunkin’s “The Frosty Winters of Ireland” and Laurence Whyte’s “Famine: A Poem” both treat this natural crisis, but in entirely different registers and with very different poetic ends. [End Page 163...