2 - Initiations and peak times

Summary

Going to work

The distribution and organisation of labour in rural poetry is a helpful indicator of the concerns of the poet. How is labour initiated? In Milton's portrayal of Eden, Eve attempts to divide rationally the work between herself and Adam:

Adam, well may we labor still to dress

This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flow'r,

Our pleasant task enjoined, but till more hands

Aid us, the work under our labor grows,

Luxurious by restraint …

Let us divide our labors.

(Paradise Lost, IX, line 205 ff.)

Eve's primitive socialism suggests much more than it seems to. For the cautious Adam, Eden is a place of dangerous temptation, where ‘I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me’ (IX, line 358), and their separation, for whatever practical reason, is potentially hazardous. A simple division that makes sense to Eve symbolises a serious ideological disunity, which leads to disaster. The subtext that Satan may have put this idea in her head is slightly remote (her dream is five books earlier), but the important point is that for Milton labour, its division and its implementation, so important in the Puritans' world-view, is the natural territory of ideology, and of ideological conflict.

For Alexander Pope, by contrast, it is not, and rural labour in his Pastorals is initiated with studied lassitude. The speaker in ‘Summer’ says ‘Let other Swains attend the Rural Care’ (line 35), while in ‘Spring’ Strephon says to Daphnis, ‘Sing then, and Damon shall attend the Strain / While yon slow Oxen turn the furrow'd plain’ (lines 29–30).