THE EVOLUTION OF ALLEGORY IN THE PASTORAL ... - Repositories

Shepherd has been for twenty centuries, in the
Christian church, a tender symbol of Divine
Care; and in literature the pastoral has never
really faded away, but has come back again and
again with persistent appeal.!
The rebirth of pastoral poetry, largely abandoned
as a poetic tradition after the late third century, began
in prehumanist Italy with neo-Latin literature imitative
of the best-known classical model, Virgil's Bucolics.
Soon, however, because of the adaptability of the pastoral
form and the spread of nationalism, pastoral poetry was
also being written in vernacular and becoming clearly established
as a literary vogue.
The powerful individualism of the humanists is the
primary reason that the Renaissance eclogue became something
more than a duplication of the classical convention.
The Middle Ages had offered only some clerkly imitations
of Virgilian eclogues which were hardly noteworthy except
for the intermingling of Christian allusions and pagan
mythology.
But the Renaissance man was born of a different
spirit.
The phenomenon known as the Renaissance was more
than the rebirth of Greek and Latin letters; it
was the rebirth of the individual, the awakening
of man to his right to freedom of thought, and
of this the study of the ancient classics was at
once the cause and result.2
The Renaissance poet employed the pastoral as a flexible
and personal medium to express thoughts and feelings on
almost any topic; there was no attempt "to produce a mirror
image of the Virgilian pastoral but to compose a poem