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

has turned into a moral: carpe diem. All concerned are reminded to take
advantage of the brief span of life, to pay a ention to the requirements
of living flesh. Again, it is the shepherds, even without Latin, who
know how to produce moral meaning.
Tasso represents Silvia’s conversion – the accession of love – in
images of and as a result of bodily closeness. Crucial knowledge is
achieved by actual bodies, or at least is reported as such. The poet has
expressed the shepherd’s love as pain, in the courtly language of the
genre at this time; Silvia has been cruel, but now has come to pity him.
A woman’s pity seems to be the required ingredient that allows her to
express regret for her cruel ways – “crudeltate” – which she admits she
had considered a virtuous chastity (4.1.116). Dafne, her older compan-
ion, interprets Silvia’s tears of pity as tears of love. Pity, figured as her
wanting to bury Aminta with her own hands, calls our a ention to an-
other of the representationally hungry issues that the genre struggles
with, and that is the presence of death in the green world of spring-
time fertility and growth. The shepherds know that death and birth are
both parts of natural life, but the city folk, it seems, have to learn this.
Why are Silvia’s hands used only in connection with the death of the
beloved? Is this a happy conclusion? Charles Jernigan and Irene
Marchegiani Jones, co-editors of the dual-lingual edition, might well be
referring to most pastoral works when they say of Aminta: “the genre
and tone are difficult to pin down because they keep shifting and on
some occasions are tragic and comic, high and low at the same time.” 11
Texts with pastoral motifs are never pure expressions of happi-
ness or sadness – not Virgil’s Eclogues nor later pastoral elegies, such
as Milton’s “Lycidas” of 1637 or Shelley’s “Adonais” of 1821. In
Shakespeare’s late plays there are marriages in the end, but after years
of sorrow. In Arcadia, death is as reliable a plot component as sheep
and sexual frustration. What remains in all versions is the problem
of how to manage a life that sufficiently recognizes and satisfies the
body’s demands for happiness while acknowledging the impossibil-
ity of avoiding abstract meaning – some version of honor or grace,

11 Ibid., 157.

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