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

their ideas about what is permissible as they entered. They are surely
assuming that she must agree to what he wants. The adventures Tasso
produces out of the conflict of desire and law over five acts include the
interference of a satyr, who also, of course, lusts after Silvia.
Having agreed to the risky plan, Aminta arrives at the spring to
discover the satyr already there. He has stripped and bound Silvia to
a tree so that he can force his vicious will upon her. Aminta frees Silvia,
taking an action more ethical than he had intended. Does she intuit
this, when without so much as a thank you, she runs away from him?
Subsequently, each of them finds or hears evidence that seems to tes-
tify to the other’s death. Having found her bloody scarf, and conclud-
ing in error that Silvia is dead, Aminta throws himself off a cliff.
Branches break his fall, however, so that he survives, injured. Silvia,
hearing of his leap, assumes the worst and seeks to find and bury him:
“yet still I know/ that my hand’s act, will be/ an act of love to him,/ for
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I am sure he loves/ me, as he, dying, showed.” But just in time, “a sad
‘alas’ escaped and shook his chest. But that ‘alas,’ which left his heart
so bi erly, was met within the soul of his dear Silvia, and gathered up
by her sweet lips, and there all suddenly all grieving was assuaged.” 9
Her sighs and tears revive him and change her: “she screamed and
beat her lovely breast, and fell upon his body lying there and brought
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them face to face and mouth to mouth.” Thus it seems that the mis-
understanding – the forced entry of the idea of death – breaks a barrier
and allows the lovers to be united in mutual desire, all based explicitly
on Silvia’s translation of sense data. His suicidal leap, and then the
sigh showing him to be alive are turned from bodily into emotional,
even moral knowledge: into a recognition of and then appreciation for
the suffering Aminta has undergone for love. The proximity of death

8 Jernigan and Jones, 157. “…pure/ so che gli sarà cara/ l’opra di questa
mano;/ che so certo ch’ei m’ama/ come mostrò morendo.”
9 Ibid., 173. “Un doloroso ohimè/ spinse dal pe o interno;/ ma quell’ohimè,
ch’amaro/ così dal cor partissi,/ s’incontrò ne lo spirto/ de la sua cara Silvia,
e fu raccolto/ da la soave bocca: e tu o quivi/ subito raddolcissi.”
10 Ibid., 171. “Gridando e percotendosi il bel pe o,/ lasciò cadersi in su ’l gia-
cente corpo:/ e giunse viso a viso e bocca a bocca.”

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