Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

INTENTION AND NATURE OF THE POEM
imagination. . . It raises in our minds a pleasing variety of Scenes and Landskips
whilst it teaches us... We find our Imaginations more affected by the descriptions
than they would have been by the very sight of what he describes.'
Hellenistic writers had delighted in passages of description (ekphrasis), and
Hellenistic landscape-painting was ubiquitous in Roman houses. The Georgics
can be seen as the first poem in which the descriptive element (largely embodied
in precept form) is the prime source of pleasure. Yet it is much more; for it
uses teaching about husbandry to convey the essence of a way of life, hard and
sometimes tragic, but regular and often rewarding. In the shameful darkness of
contemporary Rome and Italy it shines a ray of hope and pride. But it is also
representative of human life in general, with its rewards as well as its toil and
with intimations of divine presences and paternal providence. Selective variety,
another Hellenistic trait, and ingenious artistic structure sustain the whole.
4. STRUCTURE
In the case of a poem whose excellence depends on a variety of features the best,
perhaps the only, way of doing justice to it is by a running commentary, in
terms of structure. To several sensitive critics the Georgics has suggested a
musical composition, a symphony with four movements and various themes
enunciated and then harmoniously interwoven. 1 It falls into pairs of books,
each pair having an 'external' proem. The first and third books emphasize the
struggle against degeneration, disease and death and are generally sombre in
tone; the second and fourth deal by contrast with work that is easier, are mainly
cheerful, and end happily. But these are only crude generalizations: the modulations
of mood are much subtler.
After a neatly economical summary of contents, addressed to Maecenas, the
proem bursts into a breathless, grand-style invocation of agricultural deities
(twelve, a canonical number), followed by a balancing invocation, in the
exaggerated ' baroque' style of Hellenistic adulation, of the coming god Caesar
(1—42). (Modern readers may find this distasteful; but ancient ones, familiar
with the convention, and at that historical moment, will have taken it in their
stride.) Then begins, with spring, a long section on field crops (43—203). At
once the Hesiodic theme of hard work emerges. Ploughing slips insensibly into
study of local differences of soil, thence to the picturesque variety of products
of foreign lands, and so, by 'ring composition', a device as old as Hesiod, back
again to ploughing in early spring (of rich land only — poorer must be ploughed
in autumn: 63—70). So far, in twenty-eight lines since the proem, we have had
four precepts only, but a vivid, pictorial impression of continual work. The
1 The structure of the Georgics has been given a new dimension in the criticism of Burck (1929),
Biichner (1955), Klingner (1963) and Otis (1963). See further Wilkinson (1969), Ch. iv.
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