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Pandemic Pastoral and Post-Pastoral Occasions in Poetry of the Covid-19 Crisis

Sarah Montin

Abstracts

Why does the pastoral aesthetic, as well its many contemporary, prefixed versions (anti-pastoral, dark pastoral, post pastoral, etc.), feature so prominently in poetry written on and during the Covid-19 crisis? Taking this question as a starting point to critical exploration, this article analyses how the topical poetry written during the period of the first lockdown in Britain (March-June 2020) relied extensively on the classical literary convention to articulate the experience of the pandemic. Taking as corpus the poems featured in the “Write Where We Are Now” online anthology curated by Carol Ann Duffy in 2020, this paper analyses how using and subverting pastoral tropes and effects allowed poets to reflect upon one of the great catastrophes of the early 21th century, linking the trauma of mass death to contemporary questions on (eco)poetry and its relation to nature and the environment.

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  • 1 “Globally, the pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people, and the United States suffered mo (...)

1The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, though concurrent to and far deadlier than the First World War1, went almost entirely unrepresented, or at least unrecognized in Anglo-American literature – “a conspicuous literary and critical silence” and a resounding “modernist mystery” (2) according to Elizabeth Outka in her ground-breaking study, Viral Modernism (2020). By way of explanation Outka outlines the formal difficulties in representing illness and hidden violences such as corruption and contagion, “paradoxically represented in gaps, silences, atmospheres, fragments and hidden bodies” (2), in short as spectral presences, focusing on realms of experience – the atmospheric, the affective – contrary to its highly-visible representational rival, WWI and its catastrophic human-inflicted violence, inscribed in the materiality of mud and male bodies. “We are trained […] to see the trauma of war, not the trauma of pandemic (4)” writes the author of Viral Modernism, in a statement which alludes both to our historical and cultural biases valorizing war over illness (“less important or politically useful”, 4) and to a blind spot in our own epistemological training as literary and cultural critics. Literary representations of pandemics or outbreaks of disease were persistently muted throughout the 20th century, when they were not drowned out by, or incorporated in, evocations of the political. War, which tends to consume cultural attention, also works, in time of crisis, as a motivating frame of reference and engagement as well as a powerful metaphor for violence and disruption. This tendency to formulate outbreaks of illness in terms of war was still prevalent one century later when political and cultural commentators consistently relied on martial rhetoric to define the Covid-19 crisis, as well as its poetic production, strikingly likened to war poetry in the TLS or the New Yorker (Rozzo 2020).

  • 2 In designating pastoral as a mode, I am in keeping with the critical line initiated by Paul Alpers (...)

2However, unlike the 1918 influenza pandemic, and despite the persistent simile between the martial and the microbial (see Mary Beard’s analysis of the Iliad as originating in infection, Beard 2020), the literary production of the Covid-19 pandemic was not subsumed under the military metaphor. Yet most texts written at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak did tend, as their Modernist counterparts, to avoid direct representations of illness, contagion and trauma, this time blurring evocations of sickness to focus, somewhat counter-intuitively, on the celebration of the “green world”. In the midst of a global health crisis which some commentators readily interpreted as “Gaia’s revenge”, it would not have been unreasonable to expect these natural scenes to be redolent with negativity, toxicity, contamination and apocalyptic imagery, in keeping with the ever-growing ranks of eco-disaster or eco-apocalyptic literature. Yet most of these texts, written from cramped interior urban spaces, are concerned with consolatory images of nature, effecting a surprising return to the pastoral aesthetic or a form of pastoralism in the face of crisis. I take pastoral in the broad sense of this notoriously protean concept and mode2, defined by Terry Gifford as an idealized vision of nature (however bleak it may appear to be), for city dwellers, focusing on a discourse of retreat with implicit or explicit contrast to the city or the world at large (1992:2). Written in reduced circumstances (small rooms, often reflected in compact poetic forms, revolving round the use of synecdoche), the poetry of the Covid-19 crisis offers a minimalist and suburban pastoral, its retreat or escape (if there is indeed one) found in garden allotments rather than fresh woods and pastures new − “a slim wideness” in poet Matt Howard’s words, inscribing the tension between restraint and amplitude, enclosure and fruitfulness, at the heart of its poetics.

  • 3 In the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where a group of young people, fleeing the Plague in Flo (...)
  • 4 Buell however nuances this affirmation by noting that “the job of setting a pastoral moment in an a (...)

3Still considered today by some of its commentators as an escapist, compensatory form evading the tensions of the present, I want to show here that the pastoral is a relevant poetic mode with which to engage with the immediate and chaotic experience of pandemic and, at its heart, the momentous occasion of mass death. Pastoral, “the world which epic forgot” to use Richard Hunter’s term (Hunter: xvi) commenting on Theocritus’ Idylls, is perhaps a highly literary form of discourse speaking of the simple life, but is also a mode which has traditionally provided an opportunity for writing about the unheroic and the everyday, as opposed to the epic mode. Humble by theme and topic if not by style, like the delicate pattern of a cup described in Idyll I “call[ing] attention to itself only on the closest inspection” (Hunter: xvi), the modesty of the pastoral mode appears particularly well-suited to evoke the prosaic repetitiveness and minutiae of life in lockdown, and insist on the value of everyday contemplation, through its multiple depictions of otium3 as opposed to the chaotic world of negotium. In its attachment to the humble and the local, the pastoral also appears, paradoxically, to be a most opportune mode with which to deal, through contrast, with the abstract global scale of the pandemic, arguably a fitting example of one of Morton’s “hyperobjects”. Although traditionally considered as removed from History, a genre practicing a “willful retreat from social and political responsibility4” the pastoral mode allowed poets in lockdown to engage with the occasion and register the vast, abstract trauma of the pandemic.

  • 5 The site has now shut down and the poems are no longer available online, presumably for copyright r (...)

4In order to offer an analysis of the contradictory pastoral tensions at work in this contemporary topical poetry, my paper will base its analyses on a selection of poems from the widely-publicized “Write Where We Are Now5” project, curated by Carol Ann Duffy for the Manchester Writing School at the University of Manchester. Assembling several hundred poems written during the period which corresponds to the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK (26 March to 30 June 2020), the project aimed at offering a “living record of what [was] happening”, a “permanent, creative, historical and sociological record of th[o]se extraordinary and challenging times” (Duffy 2020).These texts, firmly inscribed in historical circumstance, offer a rich example of contemporary topical poetry, wherein confirmed poets (George Szirtes, Gillian Clarke, Alison Brackenbury, Andrew McMillan, to name but a few) and emerging authors, grapple with the representation of the pandemic experience.

5The issues I will address in this paper through a close-reading of a selection of poems, are the following: how do these texts hold the pastoral aesthetics (in particular those pertaining to the idyllic and the elegiac modes) and the pandemic experience in the same frame? How does the pastoral provide both a familiar, historicized, structure and a flexible literary template with which to invoke the present? How can we read this as more than a traditional (not to say facile) recourse to “the comforting familiarities of pastoral landscape and conventions” (Love: 203) to deal with mourning and loss, in the face of the unrepresentable and or the inarticulate – in short, the occasion of mass death? Finally, in line with former Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s declaration that “you can’t write poems about the natural world now unless it’s in an environmental context. Every word you write on that subject sort of quakes with the background predicament” (Flood)– how do these poems of the pandemic experience address ecological concerns, allowing (some) poets to renegotiate their relationship to nature and environmental concerns within the context of the Covid-19 crisis and the wider issues of the Anthropocene?

Shades of Arcadia

6The arrival of spring, traditional season of hope and regeneration, was particularly celebrated during lockdown, allowing poets to conceal prevailing thoughts of illness and death under idyllic landscapes of nature reborn. Although an entirely naïve, un-reflexive use of the pastoral aesthetics appears implausible in the 21st century, a number of poets writing for the “Write Where We Are Now” project continued to offer versions of the “sentimental pastoral”, theorized by Leo Marx as a mode where retreat, unencumbered by the necessity of return, is viewed as an end in itself. Adrian Salmon’s “Almost”, in which the speaker and/or reader are invited to escape from the world into a wooded oasis, illustrates the staying power of the traditional retirement poem:

And when you’ve given the day 
almost up for lost, find yourself a wood 
where the sun is a rumour in the trees, 
where your playlist is water and wind, 
where grass soothes the ice-scarred rock

And when you’ve given the world 
almost up for lost, look out to a wood  
where a hovering bird 
restores death to its place in things

And when you’ve given yourself 
almost up for lost, follow the path
[…]to a midnight sky where light persists, 
gifted by lonely stars.
(Adrian Salmon, “Almost”)

7Typical here is the ritualized simplicity (thematic and stylistic, based on anaphoric repetitions) of the poem, suggestive of the pastoral dream of a “disencumbered, stripped-down life” (Buell: 42). Nature is constructed as a purely abstract, unlocalized Arden, a place designated by stylized, unspecific natural terms (“wood”, “trees”, “water and wind”, “grass”, “rock”, “sky”, “stars”), a soothing, musical presence replacing technology, and a sky offering, through the common elegiac trope of the “persisting light” of stars, the fantasy of permanence in the face of chaos. The emotional simplicity of the poem is offered as a counterpoint to the complex nature of the pandemic-stricken world and its associations with loss, catalogued in the refrain. Typically, it is nature, emblematized by the “hovering bird”, that brings balance and consolation by “restor[ing] death to its place in things”. At no moment is the poet or the reader invited to return from, or on, the pastoral oasis. Even more frequent however than the one-way retreat to an uncomplicated, sylvan locus amoenus, is the image of the garden with its associations of (domestic) stability and order, implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the outside world of panic, plague, pandemic:

Grateful for a garden when the Plague- 
mornings I stepped into its green and breathing room  
for sanctuary— 
trying to be part of what the garden will- 
thoughtless; ever. 
(Carol Ann Duffy, “Fragments Found After”)

8The hortus conclusus motif, typical of the Christian pastoral, fuses here the closed-in suburban garden (“green and breathing room”), rediscovered during the inactivity of lockdown, with the poetic Eden, “the emblem for a legendary time when humanity and the created world existed in unexamined harmony” (Potts: 119). In the line of Marvell’s “Garden”, these poems construct the suburban garden as a place of sensory and spiritual delight, a natural sanctuary for the contemplative life, away from the din of the world and man’s artifice. In Gillian Clarke’s “What Day is It”, the refuge of the garden is set against the 40.000 dead (which “will not come again”) of the pandemic, the huge abstraction of the death toll contrasting with the intricate detail of nature reborn or, in Clarke’s words, “imagining green again”:

[…] The garden lifts its face to drink the rain.
Closed flowers of wild geranium bowed
by the weight of downpouring water -
Heat rises.
Flowers open rose to the sun.
Birds fall quiet a moment – then
the tsee-tsee-tsee of some small bird,
possessing its somewhere, and, further off,
in the fields, anthem, hymn, penillion.
There is no one left on earth
but you, me and the wild ones,
no sound but their songs.
(Gillian Clarke, “What Day is It”)

9The garden is, once again, figured as a sanctuary, its religious connotations apparent in the evocation of the bird’s sacramental song (“anthem, hymn, penillion”). Influenced by the romantic lyric, the poem offers a classic anthropomorphic vision of nature as symbolic site of human emotions: the garden is in mourning; it “weeps” then “lifts its face”. Clarke ends her poem on the reassuring image of a couple finding its place in the garden; Adam and Eve before humanity’s fall from grace, at one with the natural world, communing with its non-human inhabitants (“you, me and the wild ones”) in a ceremony of innocence. The familiar analogy of birdsong and poetic song, renewed in the uncomplicated relation between humanity and nature, is reminiscent of Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop” which constructs the pastoral ideal as an eternal England, miraculously perceived through birdsong. This is, in effect, an archetypal form of pastoral effect we are confronted with here: rather than disturbed by the poet, faith in nature is used a buttress against the outer world and its grief, the natural process being the occasion of consolation. The death-toll of the pandemic, and its accompanying grief, is allowed to disappear behind the green screen of the garden. Here our cherished, nostalgic views of natural stability, through images of the regeneration of nature are confirmed, fulfilling pastoral’s “double longing for innocence and happiness” (Poggioli: 14).

10More often than not, the poems focus on depictions of an arrested world in which nature, conversely, comes alive again and takes over the urban space, in a form of “reclaiming” which delighted humans the world over during lockdown. Here is embodied the neo-pastoral dream of “the poisoned rain of modern life com[ing] to a halt” (Morton: 172). “Iron gives way to ivy” sums up Theophilus Kwek in his sacramental “Psalm for a Pandemic”, the simplicity of the paronomasia revealing, paradoxically, the magnitude of the shift:

Left to themselves, the shapes of all green things  
begin to describe their own flourishing.
A field rouses itself into a mist,
a shimmer of birds among its tallest
grasses. From bridges, the bougainvillea
let their long hair down. Kerbside, the verges
surge without remorse.
[…] Iron gives way to ivy. Where are the 
hard words now, of our roadsigns and hazards?
As hair gone uncut, the whole earth thickens.
We can be kind too, if they let us.
(Theophilus Kwek, “Psalm for a Pandemic”)

11In this near sonnet, nature manifests itself as a plentiful totality (“all green things”) imbued with its own vitality. As in Gillian Clarke’s poem, the natural world is shown in the process of opening and rising, with all the symbolical associations which accompany these images of resurrection. The first couplet ascribes both a biological and creative/linguistic agency to inarticulate nature: green things “begin to describe their own flourishing” (just as the garden “imagines green again” in Clarke’s poem), as opposed to “our hard words, our road signs and hazards”, written traces of urban rationalization that have lost all meaning; empty or broken signs opposed to the literal and symbolic “thickness” of the physical world. Devoid of the pastoral’s traditional nostalgia for the past, the impulse here is hope for the future (a mythic future of the earth), engrained in the poet’s faith in nature. The sacralization of nature and its persistence is in keeping with Morton’s concept of “romantic environmentalism” (172), the anthropomorphised tableau of nature offering humankind an example of moral superiority and inspiration (“we can be kind too, if they let us”).

Precarious pastoral

12However, the reader must not be entirely taken in by these poems ‘apparently undemanding simplicity or complacent belief in the consolatory powers of nature − the unforgettable occasion of the pastoral is after all, in this instance, mass death, trauma and worldwide illness. It is through the obliqueness of pastoral reference − it has become a truism to recall it − that the poet comes to negotiate distinct polarities “between inside and outside, past and future, loss and consolation” (Twiddy: 1), and seeks a form of reconciliation with natural forces and, ultimately, death. Gillian Clarke’s poem in particular, her choice to end on a paradisaical image which mutes the “40.000 dead” of its dramatic beginning, reads as a conscious poetic effort to “press back against the pressures of reality” (to quote Wallace Stevens). This is perhaps why, even when the poem denounces or regrets a lack of mourning ritual in the modern pandemic world, it seems the possibility of pastoral consolation persists:

[…] The fields are filled with flowers, harvest
of petalled fire yearning towards the sun,
but who will pick them now, long past their best?
They raise no revenue, their purpose gone,
their meaning lost. There's panic in the streets
and who needs flowers now the hospitals
cannot contain the dead? There's only grief
to guide the times; no wreath, no ritual,
but from the distant hills a white wind blows
the grace of flowers and the scent of rose.
(Jacqueline Saphra “Sonnet 34”)

13In the last rhyming couplet of Jacqueline Saphra’s sonnet, the volta introduces a corrective to the cynical and anxious questions (“who will pick them?”, “who needs flowers?”) and the disenchanted vision of a politically unstable and avaricious age (“They raise no revenue”) explored by the poet ― “But from the distant hills the white wind blows/ the grace of flowers and the scent of a rose”. Blown in by a symbolically “white” wind, theses tokens are offered as consolation to the “grief of our times”, as an enduring trace of prelapsarian grace and innocence. Thus, the disrupted funeral rites (“no wreath, no ritual”), the now meaningless floral offerings (“their meaning lost”, “their purpose gone”), seem to have their significance restored through the pastoral rhetoric that acts as the ritual of mourning itself, re-enchanting the utilitarian world. Yet it is only from the “distant hills” that consolation blows, ephemeral and fragile; the trace of the real thing (“the grace”, “the scent”) but hardly its essence. The fragility of the final offering reveals the pandemic poet holds no absolute certainty in the pastoral refuge or its rhetorical consolations. In George Szirtes’ “Pastoral”, the last stanza does not even propose a counterpoint to the chaos and corruption of the city:

They are winding down
but you can hear the panic
in what they still fear:

the loss of control,
loss of face and loss of time.
Outside the raving

spring with its blossom,
its versions of pastoral,
its vast sprawling trees

all slipping away.
(George Szirtes, “Pastoral”)

14The pastoral lying outside the speaker’s window is, here too, characterized by its lack of substance, disseminated in different “versions”, “all slipping away” in the stand-alone last line. The pastoral effect is too reflexive, translated away from itself in multiples versions and thus already almost absent, to be of any consolation. At the heart of this precariousness lies the familiar yet inescapable evidence of the rift between man and nature. What the politicians (the same indeterminate “they” featuring in Kwek’s poem), representatives of the city, fear is loss of control, blinded by their vanity to the real loss that is our disconnection with the natural world. “Our separate status”(Pinson, “notre statut de séparés”) was starkly reminded to us, even heightened by the pandemic, emblematized by the number of poems where the speaker, exiled from the natural world, writes from their window, contemplating nature from behind a glass as a distant spectacle. This position of the poet as an outsider celebrating nature is not new: “Distance was the hallmark of the old pastoral artist; he stood outside the green world” (Love: 203). What has changed however is the nature of this distance that is critical, anxious rather than celebratory. The poet, wary of distance which encourages aestheticization, turns towards a critique of their own pastoral impulse, as in Rip Buckley’ ironical “Summer”:

How delicious, the early morning
on the first day of virus summer
with squadrons of sparrows charging
between the motionless gardens,
and my silent riot of back-door roses
tucking into their daily ration of sunshine.

What a privilege, to visit in little
those dawns and sunsets of the Western Front
(Rip Buckley, “Summer”)

15Here the metaphor of war is plainly used to undermine the idyllic “deliciousness” of early morning in suburban gardens. Images of war (“squadrons of sparrows charging”, “daily ration of sunshine”) are forced into juxtaposition with nature, holding the two polarities in the same frame. In a (quintessentially British) historical twist, the garden becomes a miniature Western Front which the poet admires from his window, contemplating (“What a privilege”) catastrophe from the safety of his armchair. The irony of the poem is built on this essential yet conventional dissonance (“dissonance – the warlike – is ineradicable from Arcadia”, Mc Loughlin, 99), pointing to the poet’s complicity, his consciousness, perhaps, of pastoral as a flawed aesthetic choice.

Et tu quoque in Arcadia

16Critics agree that one of the central tenets of the pastoral attitude and ideology is its ambiguity or doubleness (in Leo Marx’s terms its “dialectic mode of perception”, 44), its “Janus-like stance towards the truths it attempts to comment on” (Hodgkins: 37), its multiple frames, aesthetic and ethical, combining the pleasure of finding refuge in consoling nature while simultaneously expressing irony at conventional pastoral representations. It is hardly surprising that the Covid-19 pandemic was particularly conducive to the anti-pastoral vein, one of the central branches of the mode, where a corrective to (an often only implicit) idealisation is offered. Death has always been an inhabitant of the pastoral (“et in Arcadia ego”), even in the most idealized of landscapes, and it is this tradition which Andrew McMillan alludes to in his double haiku “Garden”:

in the beginning
the dead like the first flowers
for Adam were few

enough to name them
but soon they grew too many
the vast fields of them
(Andrew McMillan, “Garden”)

  • 6 And more specifically of Siegfried Sassoon’s horror in front of the “intolerably nameless names” in (...)
  • 7 For Peter Sachs, naming the dead is the first step of the elegiac process: “The survivor leans upon (...)

17The death process is natural in the garden, even in Eden, as McMillan’s first haiku reminds us. But the deaths of the pandemic have transformed the rare flowers of the dead into “vast fields” (reminiscent of the killing fields of war poetry6), preventing the adamic poet from naming them7, thus, thwarting the mourning process as well any potential catharsis, consolation, and closure. The deaths of the pandemic, the holes they puncture in the space of the poem, cannot be grieved (or filled) through the traditional elegiac process. Renunciation and melancholy, but also demystifying realism, irony and anger, skepticism at the consolatory power of nature and the poetic process itself, are the central tenets of these poems which choose to foreground the ethical over the aesthetic stance. At the heart of many of the poems lies the poet’s condemnation of our modern attitude towards death. Peter Sachs famously noted that that the modern pastoral elegy had to reinvent itself partly because “[..] death has tended to become obscene, meaningless, impersonal – an event either stupefyingly colossal in cases of large-scale war or genocide, or clinically concealed somewhere behind the technology of the hospital and the techniques of the funeral home” (Sachs: 299). While not all elegiac, many poems of the corpus focus on our shared callousness towards death, the implication of personal and public guilt undermining the pastoral impulse.

18The conventional device of the pastoral catalogue is particularly apt at assisting ironic perception, as in Paul Stephenson’s “Spring and You Know, the Usual Thing”:

Blossom on windscreens, windscreen wipers.
Blossom on bumpers, atop the tread of tires.
A carpet of blossom in the space between cars.
A blanket of blossom on fag packets, dog ends.
Pink blossom petals like confetti on dog shit.
White blossom on a green disposable mask.
(Paul Stephenson, “Spring and You Know, the Usual Thing”)

19The casual address of the title, implicitly mocking the poetic tradition and its contemporary practitioners, establishes a disenchanted complicity with the reader while undercutting the lyrical impulse. Mocking, or rather spoiling, the hackneyed trope of the spring blossom, the repeated image is juxtaposed first with urban industrial detail (windscreen wipers, tires, bumpers) then with waste, expressed in deliberately bathetic, colloquial terms (fag packets, dog ends, dog shit). Though the convention stays pastoral (in its opposition of urban life and nature, waste and natural profusion, as well as its reflection on the transitory nature of life), the themes of disposability, fragmentation and disconnection, carried by the accretive syntax with its implications of emotional disconnection, prevent any form of reconciliation with the ideas of transience and mortality emblematized by the fallen blossom. Despite their poetic and pastoral associations, blossoms, just like “fag ends”, are nothing more than (urban) dross. Stephenson’s last line is reminiscent of Pound’s famous equation of faces and flowers (“Petals on a wet black bough”) revealing beauty in the midst of alienating metropolitan life. Here there is no revelation of any sort, the image of a blossom on a “green disposable mask” (the only mention of green in the poem), acting as a grimly ironic memento mori, both elements joined in the trope of disposability and waste, eradicating any hope of permanence. Though the tableau goes against formal pastoral conventions, the moral is entirely in keeping with the mode– the aesthetic subversion is used to point out and condemn the literal and spiritual pollution of contemporary urban life.

20The humorous “We’re Queuing at Sainsbury’s”, is no less ironical, taking as departure the iconic cherry blossom contemplated from the vantage point of a queue in front of Sainsbury’s (a literal place of negotium):

[…] and the big cherry opposite, on Scarcroft Road
is full of buds, and sparrows quarrelling.
We watch as the tree dresses itself
like a bride, though weddings are forbidden,
and the wind drives confetti down the road
eerily empty of traffic.
Overnight the remaining petals go
brown and crispy.
We see the shine of small green globes
fattening up in bunches,
watch them turn yellow this week
then tinge with pink, and soon
they’ll be red as tired feet halted by hazard tape
waiting for the masked man to nod
next through the sliding door. He watches us watch him
and another week passing,
hot spring turning to summer cold,
no one chatting now, bewitched by our phones -
so many dead, the PM proud of his response, and MPs
queueing to vote, like us queueing at Sainsbury’s.
(Sue Norton, “We’re Queuing at Sainsbury’s”)

21As in many pandemic poems, the immobility of queuing humans, retired as passive spectators (watched, watching or bewitched by their phones) is contrasted with the flux of nature. The recursive ending emphasizes the impression of empty repetition, which is not countered by a consolatory allusion to the regenerative cycle of birth and death (the leaves simply go brown and crispy by stanza 4). The impossibility of establishing a connection with nature and fellow man (“no one chatting now”), our essential disjointedness, is highlighted by the two central similes of the poem, comparing nature to broken signs (“like a bride though weddings are forbidden”) or grotesquely contrived comparisons (“red as tired feet halted by hazard tape/waiting for the masked man to nod”). In its ironic diction, its deliberately drab mise-en-scène, the poem hollows elegiac speech, though it is, once again a (dark) pastoral scene of sorts, presented as we are with the contemplation of man’s mortality through the spectacle of nature, albeit in a highly artificial urban setting. Death intervenes briefly yet explicitly in the last stanza, through a very muted expression of grief (“so many dead”, a repressed exclamation without punctuation, far from the powerfully individual elegiac cry initiated by Theocritus weeping for Adonis) caught between phone screens and politicians’ empty rhetorical flourishes. At the heart of this both mundane and extraordinary tableau of life in lockdown, lies also a condemnation of our indifference − a striking absence of personal grief or public mourning in which the poet is wholly complicit (as attested by the use of shared pronouns in these poems).

22The moral attitude is adopted without ambiguity in these poems built around the criticism of the “city” and the castigation of contemporary hubris. Rosie Jackson’s “Clothed in Mud and Feathers” offers a stark vanité, as it chastises the poet and the reader for their culpable self-delusion and shows us, without coyness, the skull in the garden:

[…] Yet still you carry on
as if you’re more than a bag of bones, as if
when you wake to the sound of neighbours
mowing the lawn, the light of April sun
calling you down, it matters to attend
to your own garden.
(Rosie Jackson, “Clothed in Mud and Feathers”)

23Pastoral scepticism is induced by guilt – the traditional guilt of the mourner left behind, compounded by the social guilt of taking pleasure in one’s garden, a commodity of privilege. The invocation to “tend […] to your own garden”, typical of the contemplative pastoral, is thus derided as just another self-deluded vanity. This scepticism inevitably ends up by pointing at the hollowness of poetic discourse itself, in a self-reflexive turn which is characteristic of the mode. Carol Ann Duffy shows just this in her “Fragments Found After”:

Grateful for a garden when the Plague- 
mornings I stepped into its green and breathing room  
for sanctuary−
trying to be part of what the garden will- 
thoughtless; ever. 
*[…]
And if I count and name the differing greens,  
I do not see them.
*
Two months alone. 
I have run out of ways  
to look at the blackbird
[…]
*
Inevitable- 
the end of poetry 
in the same poem by everyone.
(C.A. Duffy, “Fragments Found After”)

24Starting with enthusiasm but ending in despondency, the poem is surprising for the instigator of the “Write Where We are Now” project and former Poet Laureate, often keen on extoling the comforts of poetry (in theory rather than practice as the uncertainties at the heart of her work often reveal). Far from a calming refuge, the garden is experienced a source of growing existential and poetic unease. Despite its initial image of the garden as a sanctuary from which to escape from “plague-mornings”, the speaker gradually understands that she cannot be “part of the garden will-thoughtless”, and that her presence is more than anything else, an imposition on, and interference with, nature− the speaker’s creative attempts are likened to “noise” and “disorder”, upsetting the natural balance (“It was me kept tipping the scale”). In fragment 3, the poet stops on the word “green”, realizing that poetic naming, enumeration and qualification is in no way “seeing” nature for what it is:

And if I count and name the differing greens,  
I do not see them.

25In Fragment 5, Duffy refers ironically to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, countering that she has “run out of ways of looking”. The garden is not regenerative, or rather its passive contemplation brings nothing: the poet underlines the inevitable reiteration of themes resulting in “the end of poetry in the same poem by everyone”. Pointing to the challenge of poetic vocation in time of crisis, Duffy’s poem implicitly calls for new ways of seeing and encountering nature to allow for poetry itself to survive.

The garden unmade

  • 8 “Post” indicates a conceptual rather than a temporal shift: “It is not after anything but beyond, o (...)

26If anything else, the coronavirus outbreak starkly reminded us of the interdependence of non-human and human welfare for our survival, and the urgency of rethinking ecologically our relationship with and within nature. To this end, many pandemic poems, though they rarely take a clear ecological stand, participate in the turn towards a “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Keller), effecting a critical shift from representing nature as theatre for human events to a presence for its own sake (Buell: 32). While exploring the dialectical movement between retreat and return which is at the heart of the pastoral concept, these poems articulate what Buell has called a more “mature environmental aesthetics” (32) as they move towards the post-pastoral8 mode (Gifford).

27As analogy of man’s rationalization of nature and longstanding metaphor for both God and the poet naming his creation (as well as, more prosaically, an important civilisational feature), the figure of the observant gardener appears frequently in the collection. Rosie Jackson’s “April is the Cruelest Month”, reveals how careful scrutiny of one’s garden allows the speaker to overcome her initial glibness (showcased by the poem’s deliberately banal reference to Eliot in the title), and return on her complacent idealization of nature. It is only through the implicit comparison between the “mass graves of bin bags” (the only reference to death in the poem) the poet has gathered in unweeding her garden and the multiple deaths of the pandemic, that she re-examines her own complacent attitude towards nature:

What can I do, but look more closely
at things I have ignored? See this profusion
in the lawn of prunella vulgaris, which some regard
as weeds, their purple flowers proud
as miniature orchids. When I look them up on line,
I discover they’re self-heal, edible and miraculous
as any wounded thing could wish for.

28The play on the various ways of “looking” (look closely, regard, look up) that go against passive contemplation, the use of “literate” (Gary Snider’s term) horticultural terms grounded in the ecosystem and going against the abstract vagueness of “green”, “blossoms”, “trees”, that we have seen in other poems, insist on a new form of awe and humility (one of the prime tenets of post pastoral) in front of nature, here embodied by the prunella vulgaris. The pastoral journey of retreat and return is here entirely analytical, staged through a process of changed recognition from one stanza to the next. The same process is visible in M.R. Peacoke’s “The Gardener” which is more original, however, in recognizing nature’s own creative/destructive impulse and the ambiguities of man’s response to it. Here the speaker examines his garden which, far from offering refuge, is retreating from humanity, further back into time:

Back came the dandelions,
the hard green of mare's tail, bindweed loitering up,
ground elder edging in. Lost to themselves,
the measured paths. A forest of infant birch
among the tumbled walls is reaching upward.
Was there ever a door, an outside and an in?
Ghost of myself, I wait while time retreats,
leaf by leaf. The songless garden is unmade.
(“The Gardener”, M.R. Peacocke)

  • 9 Gerda Stevenson’s “Dandelion Clock” for example, Julie Mellor’s “Haiku sequence”, or short “still l (...)

29As in the previous poem, the different plants are enumerated with precision (“dandelions, mare’s tail, bindweed, ground elder”), the pastoral catalogue transformed into a typically rural list of weeds. Despite the presumably happy dissolution of barriers between the man’s constructions and nature during the pandemic (“Was there ever a door, an outside and in?”) and the return to a form of wilderness, the poem also carries a hint of nostalgia for “the measured paths” of before, lost in the disorderly upsurge of spring. The last two lines oscillate ambiguously between hopefulness and hopelessness: “the songless garden is unmade” emphasizing loss through the privative suffixes, and image of un-creation or de-creation. The speaker in this new order has become “a ghost of [him]self”, as “time retreats” taking nature back to an original form from which the poet is excluded. Man thus disappears, joyfully or regretfully, as nature actualizes. This same movement of decentering humanity while actualizing nature can be found, in stylized manner, in the haiku9 featured in the collection:

the fox is all here
                the garden turns actual
                                unlike the poet
(Rip Bulkeley, “Three Fox Haiku”)

30Contrary to Peacocke’s poem, time does not go backward (or forward), and nature is captured in its immanence, through the stylised figuration of what the poet Philippe Jacottet calls “meteors” (124). The accentual emphasis of the first line is placed on the “all”: “the fox is all here”, entirely present in the deictic, actualizing the garden, “unlike the poet” who disappears behind his object.

31Perhaps the most interesting poems of the corpus are those, however, which do not separate humankind and nature, focusing not on man’s disappearance, subsummation or one-sided relationship with an indifferent world, but on a more complex evocation of similarity and/or equality between the speaker and nature. In Gillian Allnut’s “Garden Esh Winning”, nature is not portrayed as a reflection of human predicaments nor as a contrast, nor it is depicted either as a site of instruction or contemplation, but as an equal, coexisting partner in the world:

The sheep are loud about their lambs
and no cars come.
It’s tea-time
in the small eternity of lockdown.
[…] I lay my hand on the deeply divided
trunk of the willow, as if
patience had been tested there
and trust.
My hands are full of their own
sore places.
I hark at the thorn-pierced places –
blackthorn, hawthorn, rose-thorn –
of a garden weather-hardened,
cruel as time.
(Gillian Allnut, “Garden Esh Winning”)

32In her deliberately factual, prosaic style, the poet does not shy away from direct pastoral reference in her first line, the bleating of the lamb in the garden replacing the hum of engines. But instead of offering a form of communion (or deploring a separation) with nature, the poem insists on the recognition of a shared existence and experience, an interrelation as well as a continuum, through the image of the willow’s “deeply divided/trunk” and “the thorn-pierced places” which could allude to the speaker’s hands as much as the tree or the garden itself. Just like the gardener’s hands pocked with “sore places” in its (antagonistic? difficult?) interactions with nature, the willow’s patience and trust have been tried by humanity. Nature is not hostile per se, but full of thorns the poet takes care to enumerate; an ambiguous garden which certainly is no locus amoenus, “weather-hardened, and “cruel as time”. The garden here too is “unmade”, devoid of anthropomorphising (the one romantic impulse is prefixed by the hypothetical “as if/patience has been tested”) and if it does reflect on the pandemic, it is only very implicitly, no longer offering a transparent meditation and reading from nature to man. Far from the more (deliberately or not) naive examples of pastoral effect we saw in our first part, this discordant harmony between humanity and nature, the poet and nature, is also powerfully suggested in Alison Brackenbury’s “Pandemic is Declared”:

My hills lie lost in cloud.
My sister sleeps in Spain
with chocolate and stale bread,
locked in her hotel room.
While countries count their dead
she hopes for the last plane.
A foreign sun flies red,
My morning lifts through cloud.
The milkman did bring eggs.
Truly, this is no war.
the nameless birds cry loud.
Her unwalked hills keep cloud.

Deep in the pond, globed eggs
somersault, ripple legs.
Green, dappled frog I saw
may pass, leave twenty more.
March migrant, jay shrieks loud.
The pond’s frog sky streams cloud.
(Alison Brackenbury, “Pandemic is Declared”)

33Though the syntax and poetic diction of this poem appear simple, the construction is complex, built on myriad contrasts; most significantly the images of home and away, the mundane detail of “stale bread” and momentous historical tragedy (“countries count their dead”) united by rhyme, the humanized landscape and the self-animated microcosm of a pond. The evocation of the first days of lockdown is built on the juxtaposed, poeticized cloudy landscapes of Gloucestershire and Spain (“My hills”/ “Her hills”). The latter is defined by negation (“nameless”, “unwalked”), while the speaker, at first, fully inhabits her own garden. Through a process of disappearing possessive pronouns and articles, the speaker, however, seems to gradually renounce her linguistic ordering of the natural world, as she goes from a poeticized landscape of hills to a chaotic evocation of the deeps of a pond. Juxtapositions, absence of articles, confusion of proper and common nouns; all aim to express the immanent agency of nature (“somersault, ripple legs”, “jay shrieks loud”). Semantic and syntactic ambiguity (“may pass”/march migrant”) creates poetic parallels, opens and destabilizes meanings, as in the last line. From the first to the second stanza, an inversion of the order of things has taken place: the non-human that started out as a backdrop to the evocation of the pandemic, has taken over the human perspective as well as the syntax. The trope of human life halted while natural life continues is renewed in Brackbury’s poem, but here the natural world offers no particular counterpoint to human action, no consolation to the reader/speaker, no contemplative return, nor sounding-board to man’s emotion. It is simply a mute vital presence, “vibrant matter” in Jane Bennet’s terms, which the reader can chose (or not) to read as analogy or contrast with human action.

Conclusion

34By refusing, in line 12 (“Truly this is no war”), the familiar metaphor adopted by politicians and commentators at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak, Alison Brackenbury also declines the “frames of war” which, according to Judith Butler, allows deciders to determine which deaths are more “grievable” than others. Lying in the lap of ease, “the small eternity of lockdown”, like Virgil at the end of his Georgics, “quite at home/ In studies of the arts of peace”, the lockdown poets represented in this paper, chose the pastoral and its “multiple frames” (Buell: 51) in part because it is traditionally constructed as the antithesis of the world of war – as an “act of magic to depict the exact opposite of the way the world was at the time of the poem’s composition” (Heaney: 9).

35Another, perhaps more pragmatic, explanation for the extraordinary number of pastoral contributions reviewed in this paper should take into account the very swift creation and public promotion of the “Write Where You Are Now” website and the urgent necessity to supplement C.A. Duffy’s anthology in the early months of lockdown. The recourse to the easy, comfortable and comforting, pastoral script no doubt guaranteed broad popular reception, wide internet circulation and thus ready acceptance in an online anthology primarily designed to bolster morale during a time of crisis. Pastoral, even in its darkest versions, appeals to a sense of belonging and community, be it solely a literary one. In the same way as Outka wrote of the primacy of the war theme over illness, owing in part to its nation-building capacity, evocations of nature were assumed by the lockdown poets to foster more community spirit (and more sharing power) than intubation narratives: who could not empathize with the plight of the “exiled pastoralist” now become an everyday experience? Pastoral, in the mainstream, unradical forms explored here, is undeniably built on a common sensibility and shared literary heritage, a tried and known script of retreat and return, rejection and illumination, memento mori and immortality, with which it aims to question, but also simplify, the hyperobject it reacts to. These poems, ostensibly arranged by date of composition and presented as “record of our times”, are, furthermore, far from being recollected in tranquillity − it is not altogether surprising that when asked to contribute a topical poem on a subject as overwhelmingly novel as global lockdown, and as lacking in language as the pandemic, stupefied poets turned towards the most reliable, consensual and seemingly “universal” of subjects: nature and humanity’s relationship with it. Paul Fussel notably marvelled at British writers’ consistency in turning to pastoralism (“the British model world”) and ruralism as a contrast to chaos, “regardless of what exile or war we are talking about” (232-3). But is the aspiration towards a green dream just out of reach really that surprising when one writes from a position of (peri)urban reclusion, in the midst of a crisis imbedded within the ecological crisis, a catastrophe within a catastrophe? “There is likely no nal escape from idyllic hopes – after all, our need for green-scapes goes deeper than the Anthropocene” (3) writes Heather Sullivan as she analyses the contradictory movement towards lushness and toxicity of the “dark pastoral”. This “necessary fantasy” is confirmed by the surfeit of natural themes in the vast outpour of topical poetry written during the first lockdown and which was not specific to British and Irish poetry. Dwight Gardner’s scathing review of Alice Quinn’s anthology of Covid-era American poetry (Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic), reads this as a generalized lack of inspiration: Much of the tepid free verse is about flowers. Or birds. Or trees. […] mostly they've been written as if by comfortable indoor cats”, reminding us of Carol Ann Duffy’s own lines bemoaning “the end of poetry/ In the same poem by everyone”. Most of France’s Covid poetry was also premised on the reassuring, albeit hackneyed, spectacle of resilient nature: “Covid 19/Tout est annulé/ Sauf le printemps” (Vincent Hoarau). Interestingly (and apart from it being an obvious choice for publication on social media), the most recurrent form of French Covid poetry was the haïku, a form which by insisting on the immanence of nature, behind which the motionless poet momentarily disappears, fuses the spectacle and its beholder in the celebration of the “être-au-monde”. While haïku do feature in the British output as we have seen, most poets resorted to exploring nature from without, choosing reflection and revolution over fusion. Rather than the transfiguration through and in nature offered by the haiku, most of the examples of pastoral explored here are premised on an analytical engagement or confrontation with the traditional pastoralist’s vision. The passivity of the vita contemplativa, “the longing for a stillness beyond the flux of things” (Bernard: 12), the stasis of the mind, is not a feature of the pandemic pastoral, perhaps precisely because it is written, paradoxically, from within a form of otium, in the urban exile of lockdown.

36Critics have doubted that the pastoral aesthetic, even under its contemporary forms, could fruitfully engage with crisis (in first place the ecological crisis) because of its very “literariness”, its tendency to turn the depiction of nature into the refuge of a purely aesthetic experience. However, if “what keeps a literary kind viable is its ability to measure up to the challenges offered by new historical and sometimes tragic historical circumstances” (Heaney: 1), then most poems of our corpus, while not quite Heaney’s examples of “eclogues in extremis”, manage to prove their validity, even while only obliquely alluding to the Covid-19 crisis. Far from proposing the simple, mindless repetition of a pattern, the pastoral tradition has always forced poets and their audience to articulate, albeit indirectly, their anxieties about the political, social as well as natural, state of the world, constantly renegotiating man’s relationship with the City and the Country of their times. By turning, somewhat counterintuitively as we contended in the introduction to this paper, to the pastoral aesthetic to engage with the first global health crisis of the 21rst century, the poets also self-consciously chose to foreground continuity over discontinuity, the familiar over the unfamiliar (or, at times, rather the “unheimlich”, “one the one hand what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and out of sight”, Freud: 219). In moments of crisis where “time is experienced as a rift, as difference, and hence as the epitome of discontinuity and a-synchronicity […] to the effect that that individuals feel severed or excluded from a shared present, ie. the contemporary” (Baumbach: 4), pastoral’s specific temporality, harking back to a slower time, works as a precarious bridge over this rift. The pastoral insists on the vitality of a tradition in order to make sense of the present. In this sense, the mode was foregrounded by many poets precisely because of its predictability, immediacy and above all the faith it proclaims in tradition and historical continuity. Even in its “prefix modes” (anti-pastoral, dark pastoral, post-pastoral), as Gifford calls them, when irony, anger or scepticism take over the poem, the pastoral impulse remains primarily idealistic – believing in the power of poetry, be it to console, to deny consolation or to redress, fostering connectedness and community even as it deplores our disjointedness. What the Covid-era’s literary input has shown is that, just as the emblem of the garden offers an organic example of structure and flexibility, the pastoral, even in its aspects of ritualized repetition, insists on the vitality of the world it represents as well as the fertility of its own ordering principle, while maintaining at all costs what Heaney called the pastoralist’s “covenant with life and the times” (3).

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Bibliography

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https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-first-pandemic-in-western-literature

Bernard, John. D. Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud (vol.XVII). Ed. & trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953-74.

Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Routledge: Oxon, 2020.

Heaney, Seamus. “Eclogues In Extremis: On the Staying Power of Pastoral”. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature , vol. 103C, No. 1, 2003. 1-12.

Hodgkins, Christopher, George Herbert's Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2010.

Jaccotte, Philippe. Une transaction secrète. Lectures de poésie. Paris : Gallimard, 1987.

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Love, Glen A. “Et In Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Theory Meets Ecocriticism”. Western American Literature, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 1992. 195-207.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, [1964] 2000.

McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 2007.

Outka, Eizabeth. Viral Modernism. The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2020.

Pinson, Jean-Claude. Pastoral. De la poésie comme écologie. Paris : Champ Vallon, 2020.

Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, [1957] 2014.

Potts, Donna L. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011.

Rozzo, Marc. “War Poems of the Pandemic”. The New Yorker, 11 May 2020,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/war-poems-of-the-pandemic

Sachs, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985.

Sullivan, Heather, “The Dark Pastoral: Goethe and Atwood”. Green Letters, 20 (1), 2015. 1-13.

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“Write Where We Are Now” Project. https://www.mmu.ac.uk/write or “Carol Ann Duffy and Manchester Writing School Spearhead International Poetry Project Responding to Life in Lockdown”, Manchester University site, 20 April 2020, https://www.mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/story/index.php?id=12193

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Notes

1 “Globally, the pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people, and the United States suffered more deaths in the pandemic than in World War I, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq−combined” (Outka: 1). Conversely, the Covid-19 pandemic, has brought about the deaths of an estimated 6 million people since beginning 2020.

2 In designating pastoral as a mode, I am in keeping with the critical line initiated by Paul Alpers (What is Pastoral? 1996).

3 In the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where a group of young people, fleeing the Plague in Florence, retire to a country estate and its “delectable gardens”, to devote themselves to the activities of otium, (storytelling, dance, music, games, exercise).

4 Buell however nuances this affirmation by noting that “the job of setting a pastoral moment in an appropriate ideological frame” appears “trickier than it might seem” (Buell: 44).

5 The site has now shut down and the poems are no longer available online, presumably for copyright reasons.

6 And more specifically of Siegfried Sassoon’s horror in front of the “intolerably nameless names” in his poem “On Passing the New Menin Gate”.

7 For Peter Sachs, naming the dead is the first step of the elegiac process: “The survivor leans upon the name, which takes on, by dint of repetition, a kind of substantiality, allowing it not only to refer to but almost to replace the dead” (25).

8 “Post” indicates a conceptual rather than a temporal shift: “It is not after anything but beyond, outflanking, transcending the pejorative pastoral of false idealization and retreat from engagement with the complexities of the present” […] “avoiding a stable, complacent form of harmony in favour of a dynamic, self-adjusting, post-equilibrium accommodation to what Daniel Botkin (1990) named “discordant harmonies” (Gifford: 199).

9 Gerda Stevenson’s “Dandelion Clock” for example, Julie Mellor’s “Haiku sequence”, or short “still lives” poems such as Moire Egan’s “Lemons”.

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References

Electronic reference

Sarah Montin, Pandemic Pastoral and Post-Pastoral Occasions in Poetry of the Covid-19 CrisisAngles [Online], 18 | 2024, Online since 01 November 2024, connection on 09 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/8215; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12lxv

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About the author

Sarah Montin

Sarah Montin is Senior Lecturer in literature and translation at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle. She is interested in questions of aesthetics and ethics in crisis and has published Contourner l’abîme. Les poètes-combattants à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2018)
Contact : sarah.montin@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

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