 Whatever Happened To The Pastoral? Are We Too Jaded? __________________ When I was twelve years old, I came across Dylan Thomas' poem "Fern Hill"- and fell deeply in love with his language and his ability to make me feel that life is bigger than it seems. That there are mysteries and beauties kept hidden by our day to day routines, and that there is magic all around us. "Fern Hill" was filled with impossibilities- that 'owls were bearing the farm away'-- that a house could 'lilt' when one is young...and 'green...and golden'-- yet in the chains of mere mortality-- where everything alive fairly sings its own beauty, and its own demise. These are romantic notions couched in language flying high in metaphor, in imaginary tapestries that go far beyond the brute reality of everyday concerns. There is nothing, for instance, of relationships- and nothing of ordinary angst that tends to whine - to grumble and grouse - rather than rise up, and warble an aria. The musical language in Thomas' poem seems equally important to the ideas he presents, and it's a feature I find missing in much post-modern poetry, where the tendency is to present pain in its most ordinary garb, and nothing more. It's as though we've lost our wings - burned off somewhat in the latter part or the twentieth century- and gone for good in the beginning of this one. What's happened to flights of fancy - not preciousness - but beautiful beautiful glimpses of the largesse of life itself? Pastoral poetry is smitten with nature-- sees nature as nearly inseparable from the wonder of being alive, so that hardly a strophe gets by without allusion to it, and how often do we see this now? What I see are confessional poems about the wickedly hurtful business of love gone wrong, or life as a dung hill- and yes, the inevitability of death- but it hardly ever rises above those harsh and naked facts. We've forgotten how to sing, how to soar-- even in those chains. Thomas ends his poem, "Time held me green and dying- though I sang in those chains like the sea"- and he did. He did indeed. I just wish I'd hear contemporary 'belle cantos' doing more of the same, because we need it in our everyday lives--- maybe now more than ever. Main Page 
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