Pastoral poetry was written for city people dreaming of shepherds
Since classical antiquity, poets have sold townspeople a fantasy of shepherds lounging in Arcadia, courting in a lovely landscape with barely a chore in sight. The tradition runs from Theocritus and Virgil through Spenser and Marlowe, and theorists cannot even agree whether it is a genre or something looser, an attitude toward nature.
At heart the pastoral idealises herders who move their flocks with the seasons in search of water and grass, and it is aimed mostly at readers who live in towns. It is also called bucolic, from the Greek for cowherd; a piece of music in the style is a pastorale. The favourite setting is Arcadia, a poetic invention only loosely tied to the real rustic district of Greece and imagined as the home of Pan. Characters often carry Greek names such as Corydon, and their work with sheep fades so far into the background that they seem permanently at leisure.
Hesiod's Works and Days already looked back to a golden age lived in harmony with nature. The Hellenistic poet Theocritus then wrote Idylls of herdsmen talking, probably drawing on the scenery of Cos and perhaps on Sicilian folk song, and pitched plain Doric speech against the grand hexameter of epic, a mix of simple and refined that later poets copied. Virgil's Eclogues brought the form into Latin, used it to contrast town and country and to carry political allegory, and were the first to place shepherds in Arcadia. Horace poked fun at the dream with Alfius, a moneylender who longs for the fields but never quits his trade.
Italian writers revived the mode from the 14th century, Petrarch in Latin and later Sannazaro in Italian. England's first examples were Alexander Barclay's Eclogues of about 1515, and Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender of 1579 gave a poem to each month, written in dialect, with Spenser disguised as Colin Clout. In Marlowe's 1588 lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, the shepherd woos with gold and silver dishes, luxuries of the town rather than the field.
The 17th century produced the country house poem: Ben Jonson praised the Sidney estate in To Penshurst in 1616, and Andrew Marvell wrote Upon Appleton House in 1651 while tutoring Lord Fairfax's daughter. Robert Herrick's The Hock-cart broke the rules by celebrating hard labour, which is why Raymond Williams singled it out. Critic Paul Alpers treats pastoral as a mode marked by humility toward nature, and Terry Gifford identifies three distinct senses of the word.
Source: Pastoral
