Anachronism in Lycidas

I. Lycidas as “Popular” Pastoral Manqué

Let us begin with an anachronistic analogy—a deeply imperfect one, as is usual with anachronistic analogies, but I hope revealingly imperfect in some respects. On a Mississippi Fred McDowell record I used to own he began the first cut by announcing that he only played “straight natural blues.” “I do not play no rock and roll,” he said. His implication, I think, was that rock and roll is an adulteration of the blues, more or less white and “middle class.” One could not play straight natural rock and roll: from the point of view of his preference, in other words, and at least relative to the blues, rock is an “inauthentic” form.

Now pastoral, if one had to liken it to one or the other, is more like blues, I think, than rock. The resemblance, I would argue, is less owing to an overlap in subject matter (to the frequency, for example, with which we find pastoral speakers “singing the blues”) than by virtue of the relatively pure imprint of a certain kind of “popularity” on pastoral form—by virtue, more specifically, of pastoral’s relation to the variegated tradition of popular mime. ¹ The relation is more or less aboriginal, but compromised—limited by being a relation, one might say (whereas much blues might simply be called a form of mime). As a decidedly literary genre, pastoral has never claimed authenticity for itself in the way blues does. Perhaps the primary commonplace about it is that from its beginnings it features an urban or courtly rendering of country life, and hence is always indirectly “about” a sophisticated point of view on a simpler, more “natural” culture. But even if it is adulterated from its beginnings, or rather just because it is, pastoral tends to be categorized as relatively authentic or inauthentic. Virgil is understood to be less authentic than Theocritus, and Renaissance pastoral in general less authentic than classical. One could call the criterion of authenticity into question, of course, or indeed dismiss the notion that pastoral poetry ever truly aims to mediate rural ways, popular experience. But one can be sure that it will return, for all one’s skepticism. When a cultural artifact or institution makes claims to some form of “popularity,” authenticity will always, at least potentially, be at issue.

In this essay I will maintain that Lycidas is a more authentic pastoral than it is usually understood to be; that many of its innovations upon pastoral form should be taken as paradoxical attempts to make it feel more “straight and natural”; that the poem wants to be popular, though it is so only in a highly mediated way. Since most readers’ recollection of the “university days” episode—the paragraph at the beginning of Lycidas’s elegy which Dr. Johnson seems to have had especially on his mind in his famous attack on the poem—will cast doubt upon this claim, I will begin by commenting on this passage in context.

  Together both, ere the high Lawns appear’d Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield, and both together heard What time the Grey-fly winds her sultry horn, Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the Star that rose, at Ev’ning, bright Toward Heav’n’s descent had slop’d his westering wheel. Meanwhile the Rural ditties were not mute, Temper’d to the Oaten Flute, Rough Satyrs danc’d, and Fauns with clov’n heel, From the glad sound would not be absent long, And old Damaetas lov’d to hear our song. ²

As is often the case when Johnson could find no charity for Milton, his remarks are at once incisive and instructively wrongheaded. Milton’s choice and practice of pastoral, he said, was “easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting.” ³ By “vulgar” Johnson did not mean to be implying, of course, that there was anything authentic about Lycidas’s representation of shepherds. Rather the contrary, for who would criticize Milton for gadding after popular idioms here? The crucial word in Johnson’s triad of slurs is “easy,” as...