Why are rivers a traditional part of the pastoral idiom?

    In the conference version of my paper on the great Eastern rivers in English lyric, I wrote from the assumption that rivers had always been “a staple of pastoral poetry.” This is true, but the reasons for it are complex and appear to offer a path to understanding the way that pastoralism, primitivism, and biblical history merged in seventeenth-century English poetry.  The simplest explanation is that since pastoral poetry has an agricultural setting, rivers, as sources of irrigation would naturally play an important part. But this straightforward explanation is eclipsed by the pressures of culture and literary history. 
    Pastoral poetry arose in the classical world, and is first represented in the Idylls of Theocritus. His poems are lighthearted and bucolic, but they are at least partly mythological: the nymph Daphnis, legendary creator of pastoral poetry, is a central topic. Rivers, fountains, and springs had always served as important loci for the place-bound polytheism of the Hellenic world, which is why so many of the stories passed down involve such watery locales. For Theocritus, though, and for his many imitators over the centuries, springs and rivers serve partly as décor and partly as allusion to the sounds of poetry.   The shepherd Thyrsis exclaims, at the beginning of the first Idyll

Sweet is the music of yon whispering pine
Beside the spring; and, goatherd, sweetly thou pipest.

The goatherd replies,

Sweeter, O Shepherd, is a song of thine
Than the loud murmur of yon waterfall
That plushes down the crag.(1)

Out of this tradition was born the idea that pastoral poetry takes place within the sound of flowing water, and the shepherd/poet is always near a river.  The most famous of the Idylls, #5, begins, “Once upon a time three friends went forth from the city together, / Eucritus, I, and Amyntas, down to the river of Hales.”

Paralleling the classical tradition is a biblical one. In Genesis we are told:

And out of Eden went a river to water the garden, and from thence it was divided, and became into four heads.

The name of one is Pishon; the same compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where is gold.

And the gold of that land is good; there is Bdellium, and the Onyx stone.

And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same compasseth the whole land of Cush.

The name also of the third river is Hiddekel; this goeth toward the Eastside of Asshur.
And the fourth river is Perath. (2:10-14)

The notes in the Geneva Bible are thick in this passage, informing the reader of the location of Havilah, the possible identification of “bdelium,” and the fact that Hiddekel and Perath are the Tigris and Euphrates. Perhaps because it connects a legendary place with a known geography, this passage played an important part in subsequent representations of paradise, and rivers became firmly associated with the idea of an edenic world, the Judeo-Christian parallel to the classical Golden World.  Combined, these threads help explain the prevalence of rivers in primitivist and pastoral settings.

I’ll need to go back to Wyman Herendeen’s book, From landscape to literature: the river and the myth of geography, to see how much of this he has already covered. 

(1) Theocritus. The Idylls of Theocritus. Trans. James Henry Hallard. Rivingtons, 1901.

“Despisèd straight”: Shakespeare's observation of semantic memory bias

Here's my abstract for the Shakespeare Association of America conference this spring (2014) in St. Louis.

“Despisèd straight”: Shakespeare's observation of semantic memory bias


Abstract

The large number of early modern works devoted to memorization suggest how important memory was to the early moderns, but they also foreground the epistemology of memory (its adequacy or faithfulness) at the expense of more psychological concerns.  In particular, because such texts were primarily concerned with verbal or visual memory, they tended to obscure the key role of emotion except as catalytic or fixative (remembering using images that conjure up strong emotions). To some extent modern scholarship has tended to replicate the early modern focus. Those working on Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, have tended to concentrate on the poems to the Young Man, in which memory is explicitly invoked, and on the adequacy or inadequacy of memory as represented by certain metaphorical models. Few focus on the process of recollection itself, and fewer still on the ways that emotions such as erotic desire shape remembrance.  Drawing on early modern theories of the passions, on Aristotle, and on modern psychological studies, I argue that the Sonnets move from an obsession with the adequacy of memory as a record of individuals and emotions toward a recognition that memory is a process utterly contingent upon the passions of the mind.

“Thou by the Indian Ganges’ Side”: The Eastern river in Early English Lyric

 

Here's the abstract for my seminar paper for this year's SAA in Toronto:

“Thou by the Indian Ganges’ Side”: The Eastern river in Early English Lyric

Considerable critical attention has been devoted over the years to the subject of domestic rivers in early modern English culture.(1) River banks have always been a staple pastoral locale, but by the seventeenth-century, English rivers became the basis of a small genre of panegyric poetry and the structural basis for chorographical works, most famously Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. In his recent essay “Fluvial Nation,” Andrew McrAae argues that rivers were a uniquely English subject and that their appearance in poetry reflects an attempt to incorporate the concept of mobility within the discourse of nationalism.(2)  Much less attention has been devoted to the presence of foreign rivers in English poetry, although the great eastern rivers, the Nile, the Indus, and especially the Ganges, make an appearance in nearly every major river poem. In fact, English poets consistently place domestic rivers in the context of the most famous foreign rivers. Drawing on a variety of extra-literary sources and on selected passages from the lyric, I argue that the literary conventions governing eastern rivers are remarkably similar to developing early modern English attitudes toward their own rivers. First, the traditional role of the eastern river as geographical boundary or marker became one basis for the notion that local rivers could convey regional or national identity. Second, the legendary wealth associated with eastern rivers was realized in England’s mercantile adventures on the one hand and in the increasing attention to property interests in domestic rivers on the other. Finally, the exotic and fabulous alterity always connected with foreign rivers allowed English rivers to become a pastoral and lyrical space.  Thus the appearance of the great eastern rivers in English verse anticipates and partially determines the role of the domestic river.

(1) See for example, Wyman H. Herendeen From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh, PA:  Duquesne UP, 1986), or Maggie Kilgour. “Writing on Water.” English Literary Renaissance 29.3 (1999): 282–305.

(2) Mcrae, Andrew. “Fluvial Nation: Rivers, Mobility and Poetry in Early Modern England.” English Literary Renaissance 38.3 (2008): 506–534.