Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode

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Library Research Paper Isaacson 1

Luke Isaacson

Professor Makowiecka

WRT 201-046H

13 December 2013

Week 16

Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode

The form and subject matter of two pieces, The Passionate Shepherd To His Love by Christo-

pher Marlowe and The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh, contribute to the library

of Pastoral works. Pastoral works appear first in Roman times, resurfacing in the Elizabethan era, and

continue in the Modern Age. Elizabethan writers picture untamed forests in Europe and tell the stories of

shepherds with a Classic idyll in mind. Classical and Early Modern Period pastoralists each possess a dif-

ferent sociolect. Antecedents to the Modern Poem exist in Elizabethan poetic traditions. Raleighs bor-

rowing and transformation of Marlowes The Passionate Shepherd to His Love in The Nymphs Reply

To the Shepherd is a work in which select ideas from Robert Frosts After Apple-Picking and Stop-

ping By Woods On A Snowy Evening originate.

Consider the imagery of greener pastures and stories of life in an ideal age first recorded in

OvidsMetamorphoses (Kline). Recall, in After Apple-Picking, the speaker describes the smell of the

apple harvest in late summer - early fall, Essence of winter sleep is on the night (Frost 1229). In the

Modern Age, Robert Frost voices the darkest thoughts of humanity. Nature, its most revealing mirror

shows the mood of each speaker in the poem. The Nymph evokes images of the Winter season in her let-

ter to the shepherd. The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd occurs in the same beautiful Spring setting

(Raleigh 942) as The Passionate Shepherd To His Love (Marlowe 943). The mood of the speaker does

not dictate the setting or season of the poem. This place is no longer paradise when season changes and

winter comes.

The passage of Spring into Winter comes with aesthetic transformation and the discovery of mor-

tality. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights

my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love (Raleigh 942). The description of life and love

defined by negation appears in a shepherd hopes of eternal spring. Frank Lentricchia relates in Robert


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Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, In the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the

road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of

cosmic negation in action" (Landscapes 31).

Poussin, Nicolas.Les Bergers d'Arcadie (Et in Arcadia ego).c. 1637-1638. Oil on Canvas. Louvre, Paris

A holistic view ofLes Bergers dArcadie, provides the topic of idyll. However, the story of the

painting is a comment on shepherds not basking in the joy of spring, but gathered around a tomb.

In short, the painting is a paradigmatic work not only in the tradition of pastoral elegy, baroque

Classicism, and the history of ideas, but also for our estimate of Poussin's own stature as an artist of un-

surpassed powers in the history of French Painting in particular, and of European painting as a

whole (Steefel, Jr. 99). Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, illustrates a reverse-image of pas-

toral tradition.


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A dead, wintery New Hampshire wood, can elicit thoughts of life. The creative response in the

face of death, art's dutyindeed, the raison dtreof Art -- is to recall the living element. (Steefel,Jr.

101).* The mood of the speaker in Frosts passage through the wood, is set apart from the tone of a quiet

winter night. -- it is but a medium to Being and Nothingness.

Frosts speaker meditates on limit-experience, in a moment which brings him to the face

of death. Travel down the very darkest path which might keep him there, turns his horse down the road to

the village. The remnants of Classical ideology held that personal experience was part of some divine or

species-wide collective experience. Renaissance thinkers sought to re explore experience and its objects

as a consequence of each other: either experience makes those objects possible, or those objects make

experience possible (Robinson 1).The mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot

think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the

famous mindbody problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theolo-

gies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the

physical world (Robinson 2.3) of Marlowe.

The shepherds home in the pastures is not a groundless choice. The European writers of the Ear-

ly Modern Period had drawn from the influence from the Anglo-Saxons and the remnants of the Later

Roman Empire (Robinson 2.2). In fiction, characters craft accurate judgements about the strengths of

their memories of fact and monitor their own uncertainty (Pronin 7); by placing introspection at the end of

an axis polar to others, moral lessons within are discounted (Pronin 11). The comment or rheme on the

topic of a beings inability to make an accurate assumption for what tomorrow will bring, is explicitly, the

magnitude which tiredness bears on tomorrow. A morning finishing the apple sorting in Frosts After

Apple-Picking relates to the implicit incentive of the shepherd to copulate with his beloved (1229). Con-

ceptual realism coupled with introspection (unconscious dishonesty), presents a misleading account of the

future (Pronin 9).

From Alexander Lourencos Poetry analysis: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, by

William Raleigh, is the following thought:

Sir Walter Raleigh (15541618) relays consolation regarding the nymph's harsh rejection of the

shepherd's romantic advances in the spirit of "time heals all wounds," by citing in the second stanza


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(among several examples) that eventually with the passage of time Philomel would become "dumb" to her

own pain and that her attention would be drawn away from the pain by the events of life to come. (1)

Keith J. Holyoak writes of Frost (though of The Road Not Taken),

This poem can only be understood if the reader has knowledge of the life-is-a-journey

metaphor. That knowledge includes understanding of other grounds between the tenor (life) and vehicle

(journey) that are not as transparent in this poem. If Frost cannot provide a philosophical account suit-

able to everyone a postulate that is nothing but an argument to support Frosts telosor purpose is arbi-

trary (The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning).

Titian.Nymph and Shepherd.c. 1570-1575. Oil on Canvas. Vienna, Austria


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The understanding of relationships between poet and speaker gained from closely examining con-

temporary and future poets like Christopher Marlowe and Robert Frost, reveals a unique characterization

based in the pastoral tradition.

Marlowes publication occurs at the end of an era in which the madrigals inspired by the Italian

sonnet had flourished. The musicality of The Passionate Shepherd To His Love is found in its second

stanza and. Because two rhyming couplets form each stanza, the scansion of each verse possesses the

same rhythm. The speaker in Marlowes seminal text in this poem is writing to his beloved. The identity

of this woman is not fully explained within. The spring scenery is a symbol of this shepherds love and the

sights and sounds of the pasture are also a source of his pleasure. The implicit incentive of the shepherd to

copulate with his beloved. The structure of the poem can be viewed as the text of a letter from the shep-

herd to his beloved. Marlowes writing possesses a lyrical quality similar to a ballad or a lay.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

The use of a trochee at the end of line 10, does not break the meter of the poem; rather, the

change from Roses to Posies is subject to the mood of the topic and the tone in the speakers com-

ment, There will I make thee a bed of roses And a thousand fragrant posies. Here, Marlowe determines

the prosody of his speaker through objects.

North of Bostonis the title of the collection in which Frosts After Apple-Picking first

was published in 1915. Frost keeps his speakers past undetailed to afford an exploration of epistemology

through description. The subject of his own poem and his description of tiredness reflects both the labor

done and its affect on the time left in the span of his life.The details of the poems sleep-time setting is

easily mistaken for the visual descriptions of a harvest scene. The importance dreams bear on interior

monologue is a reflection of select symbols in the tone of the speaker. The state or feeling, often pleasant,

of tiredness or inertia bears the same name as an oppressive stillness in the air: languor.

Frosts New Hampshire exists in the same geographic location as North of Boston and

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening The reverse-pastoral image as Randall Jarrell wrote of Frost


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in Poetry and the Age, "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry. Grotesque simplifications, distor-

tions, falsifications--coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them

[extended metaphors], and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his

work." Frost wrote this poem in a few moments with a self-described ease after riding his horse in the

winter and experiencing a type of hallucination. In a critical moment within the poem, the speakers feel-

ing and experience break himself from his own isolation and allows consideration for the horse. The pos-

tulate that the horse can feel loneliness in the wood is hypothetical of a social experience. The cogent in-

terpretations seemed limited --Pastoral texts from the corpus of Frosts oeuvre, like Frost, himself in his

early career, were criticized by Modern Poets as being too traditional (Dimitrov)-- however it is in Frosts

account of a man in languish, that we consider the strengths memories bear on symbolic meaning.

Unknown Artist.Hudson, New York.20th century. Oil on Wood. Authors Personal Collection


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Library Research Paper Isaacson 7Works Cited

Da Vinci, Leonardo.Mona Lisa. 1503-1506. Oil on wood. Louvre, Paris.

Frost, Robert. "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening." 1923.Life And Death. By Richard Abcarian,

Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th ed. Boston / New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. 1240.

Print. Literature: The Human Experience.

Frost, Robert. "After Apple-Picking" 1914.Life And Death.By Richard Abcarian,



Holyoak, Keith J.; Morrison, Robert G. (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Cambridge

University Press.

Jarrell, Randall.Poetry And The Age.NY: Knopf, 1953. Print.

Kline, A. S., trans.A complete English translation and Mythological index.N.p.: A.S. Kline, n.d.

Print. The Ovid Collection - University of Virginia Library

Lentricchia, Frank.Robert Frost: Modern Poetics And The Landscapes of Self.Durham: Duke

University, 1975. Print.

Lourenco, Alexander. "Poetry Analysis the Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd by William Raleigh." Poets And Poetry

(2008): n. pag.Helium - Where Knowledge Rules.Helium, Inc., 21 Feb. 2008. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Marlowe, Christopher. "The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd." 1600. Love And Hate.By Richard Abcarian,



Pronin, Emily, Ph.D. "The Introspection Illusion." Chapter.Advances in Experimental Social

Psychology, Volume 41. Ed. Mark P. Zanna. By Emily Pronin et al. Author's Personal Copy ed.

Vol. 41. Burlington: Reed Elsevier, 2009. 1-67. Print. Advances in Experimental Social

Psychology.

Raleigh,Walter. "The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd." 1600.Love And Hate. By Richard Abcarian,



"Robert Frost."Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More: From The Academy Of American Poets.Ed. Alex

Dimitrov. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.


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prmPID/192>.

Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta

(ed.), URL = .

Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "A Neglected Shadow in Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego." The Art Bulletin 3rd

ser. 57.1 (1975): 99-101. JSTOR. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. .

Titian.Nymph and Shepherd.c. 1570-1575. Oil on Canvas. Vienna, Austria

Unknown Artist.Hudson, New York.20th century. Oil on Wood. Authors Personal Collection

*(see Pliny the Elder, nat. Hist. XXXV 5, 15)

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Anti-Realism and The Pastoral Mode