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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

From the early Greek pastorals through their Italian Renaissance
flowering, in Shakespeare’s late romances, and again in nineteenth-cen-
tury romanticism, imaginative works have found the constellation of fea-
tures of the pastoral tradition to be apt evocations of the ephemeral pleas-
ure of a sunny day, and an escape from the complexity of civil life. The
genre is structured by a cognitive toggle between sense imagery and ab-
stract ideas; this formal dialectic is analogous to a crucial aspect of brain
function. It seems to be hard for creatures with minds like ours to resist
the bubbling up of an abstraction – a general concept or even a moral
lesson – from almost any sense encounter. Current neurological descrip-
tions suggest that the distinction between abstract and concrete is not
mapped in the physiology of our brains. According to Gallese and
4
Lakoff, “it is mapped within our sensory-motor system.” The traditional
and heavily-weighted distinction between things and ideas, between
bodies and spirit, between abstractions and stuff, is a “meta”-physical
distinction, inherited within the western tradition of philosophical argu-
ment. The claim of this paper is that the pastoral genre is reused, is re-
sorted to repeatedly, by artists who use it to re-think and to re-represent
the relationship between bodies and minds in a way they hope can over-
come the unhappy opposition we have inherited within our culture.
The stock-in-trade of artists and poets are visual images, by
which they lead their audiences to the pleasures of the green world.
But they don’t leave them there to enjoy its promised otium. Sooner
or later they resort to negotium, using unpleasant, even ugly, imagery
to stage a struggle between gratification of the senses and law. They
offer Higher Moral Thought “about man’s nature and situation,” in
the words of Paul Alpers. Artists who choose this genre, he says, take
audiences away from cities only to burden their literary shepherds
with the work of instructing the exiles: “the herdsman’s simplicity
is a source of moral authority, and one feels in him a strength in hu-
5
mility.” The genre thus recruits the ease with which mammal brains

4 Vi orio Gallese & George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts. The Role of the
Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology
22, no. 3/4 (2005): 456.
5
Alpers, Paul, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 50.

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