10 - The shepherd's harvest

Summary

The shearing

So far as the agricultural theme is concerned, three related tasks remain for the poet. He has given most of his advice, and drawn together the major aspects of the shepherdly role: practical tasks, learning and teaching, benevolent care and the balancing in moderate harmony of the given conditions. Now he will complete the theme by particularising and localising the experience, rewarding the shepherd and connecting shepherding with the wider worlds of work which are his second and third theme. All this is done through the advice on shearing (lines 555–600), and the shearing festival (lines 601–720). This grand finale to the book has caught the attention of many readers and critics, with its striking blend of first-person narrative, pastoral eclogue, mythologising and lyric celebration. The poet creates an Edenic pastoral scene, incorporating ideas of childhood, innocence and communal rural delight, and set emphatically in the mytho-topographical land of Siluria.

Dyer announces his final theme with energy and impatience, as if he were by now becoming a little bored by the easy trick of contrasting foreign lands with Albion, and felt anxious to move on to the excitement of Silurian memories:

Such are the perils, such the toils, of life,

In foreign climes. But speed thy flight, my Muse!

Swift turns the year, and our unnumber'd flocks

On Fleeces overgrown uneasy lie. […]