A History Of Wild Places

The word pastoral is used to describe works of art that romanticize rural life and landscapes. While pastoral poetry is the most well-known form of the genre, its conventions also appear in prose writing, visual art, and music. Pastoral poetry originated in Greek antiquity with poets like Theocritus and Hesiod. It became popular in the Italian and subsequent English Renaissance periods in the 15th and 16th centuries. Some of the key conventions of the genre are idealized natural landscapes, the presence of shepherds or cowherds, and a critique of urban life. Importantly, most writers of pastoral poetry were city dwellers without practical knowledge of rural life or work, so pastoral poems are often characterized by misconceptions and idealizations of rural life. The ignorance behind some of these depictions thus undercuts their critiques of modernity and urbanity.

The pastoral, anti-pastoral, and pastoral elegy are three distinct and important developments in the genre. One of the most famous pastoral poems is Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), in which the speaker, a shepherd, uses natural imagery to attempt to seduce a potential romantic partner. The poem opens with an entreaty that is repeated throughout the poem:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

(Marlowe, Christopher. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, W.W. Norton & Company, 1975, pp. 211-212).

Marlowe associates elements of landscape with pleasure, and he invites the recipient to come away with him throughout the poem. He suggests that they will be separated from society and sustained by love and the natural landscape.

The poem elicited a direct response—and a turn to an anti-pastoral tradition—with Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (1600). Raleigh includes direct references to the imagery and language of Marlowe’s poem but with a focus on the decay of nature, which represents the decay of youth and love and the message that a pastoral romance will end unpleasantly. The beauty of nature is marred in Raleigh’s poem by mentions of faded flowers, an encroaching winter, and sorrow. The anti-pastoral suggests a move toward realism and the correction of the original pastoral mode’s mythologized elements.

The pastoral elegy is another subgenre. It includes a similar focus on a romanticized rural setting and a shepherd or similar speaker but with the inclusion of grief and mourning a loved one. This parallels Travis Wren’s personal connection to Pastoral, as he lives there to avoid the grief he feels at the loss of his sister. Historically, the European Industrial Revolution in the 18th century marked the end of pastoral poetry’s epoch, but poets continued to write pastoral elegies. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1921) uses natural imagery to mourn the death of poet John Keats, drawing on elements of the pastoral tradition throughout. The natural imagery does not idealize a rural lifestyle but symbolizes the speaker’s grief. Shelley anthropomorphizes elements like the morning, ocean, and wind as taking part in the mourning process.

The community described in A History of Wild Places is called Pastoral. Ernshaw therefore makes a conscious allusion to the pastoral poetic tradition. The community of Pastoral is related to the pastoral tradition of poetry because it is an idealized representation of off-grid living and simple communion with nature. However, it is also related to anti-pastoral and pastoral elegy. Ernshaw represents the anti-pastoral by emphasizing the problems with the community—primarily, the separation from necessary medical care and Levi’s practice of brainwashing members of the community. Both literal and metaphorical deaths relate A History of Wild Places to pastoral elegy: The members of the community mourn the deaths of Ash and Turk, and Calla and Theo mourn the deaths of their old identities.