Bucolic Phantasmagoria.

I wonder if there might not be a connection between a passage in Theocritus that's always troubled me, Idylls 1.132-37, and the oddly unsettling final moments of Idyll 7. Daphnis is in his death throes in the Sicilian woods and has just called Pan down from the mountains to receive his pipes; one stanza later he will throw himself into a stream, Hylas-like, and drown.

'νῦν ἴα μὲν φορέοιτε βάτοι, φορέοιτε δ’ ἄκανθαι,
ἁ δὲ καλὰ νάρκισσος ἐπ’ ἀρκεύθοισι κομάσαι,
πάντα δ’ ἄναλλα γένοιτο, καὶ ἁ πίτυς ὄχνας ἐνείκαι,
Δάφνις ἐπεὶ θνάσκει, καὶ τὰς κύνας ὥλαφος ἕλκοι,
κἠξ ὀρέων τοὶ σκῶπες ἀηδόσι γαρύσαιντο.
      λήγετε βουκολικᾶς, Μοῖσαι, ἴτε λήγετ’ ἀοιδᾶς.'
χὢ μὲν τόσσ’ εἰπὼν ἀπεπαύσατο ...

'But now let let the brambles bear violets—let thornbrakes bear them; let the lovely narcissus deck junipers, the pine come to fruit with pears—let everything be changed because Daphnis is dying--let the stag tear hounds apart, from the mountains let owls cry in contest with nightingales. Leave off, ah muses, come leave off the bucolic song.' So much he said, and ended.

We ordinarily take this as a series of ἀδύνατα, impossible disruptions of the natural world unhinged by the death of Daphnis--as though Daphnis thinks of himself and his life as so central to the natural order that his death is just as much an impossibility as fruiting pines or savage stags.

I'm not sure this is the whole story, however. Daphnis doesn't give us any other reason to expect solipsism from him; he doesn't wish for the whole woodland of Sicily to huddle about his agonies with consummate concern, they simply do—it's a function of his beauty and his song. No, if he cries out for the world to burst into alien glory when he breathes his last there must be something else at stake, not narcissism certainly; it's not youthful incredulity in the face of death, either, since this is a voluntary wasting. After all, Priapus can chide him in lines 82-85, saying

                                                  ἁ δέ τυ κώρα
πάσας ἀνὰ κράνας, πάντ’ ἄλσεα ποσσὶ φορεῖται
[...]
ζάτεισ’· ἆ δύσερώς τις ἄγαν καὶ ἀμήχανος ἐσσί.

The girl is roaming on foot among the fountains, through all the groves, in search of you—ah, you are cursed in love, too cursed, and helpless.

This changed world—πάντα ἄναλλα—isn't a world in mourning, either: strange, yes, but indifferent to Daphnis' pain. I do think there's a logic to these ἀδύνατα, though, even if a strange one.

For vegetation to burst into unnatural fruit and flower is less a sign of chaos than of enormous, irrepressible vitality—the underbrush doesn't wither, it begins to put out small soft flowers; dark boughs of juniper whiten with daffodils. It's as though the powers that hold back from a surfeit of exuberance have lost their hold on the Sicilian woods; even the woody, inedible fruit of the pine turns soft and delicious. I don't think we can take this as a revel of the senses, though—among this sweet-reeking flora the animals too have changed their nature, and not in the same way. For the little scops owl of line 136 to cry out to the nightingale is usually taken as a sign that the aesthetic hierarchy of nature has been overturned, much as Simichidas calls himself a frog contending with grasshoppers at Id. 7.41, but there are three good reasons to look more carefully at this screeching.

First, there's the fact that these σκῶπες may be voiceless—this would mean that the important issue is having a voice, not the contrast between proverbial cacophony and tunefulness. In fact, if we assume a voiceless scops, then perhaps we shouldn't take it for granted that the nightingales win the contest: if the silent bird is given a voice, much as the drab thorn-brake and fruitless pine are now maculate with lushness, that voice may very well be rapturously beautiful. Now, even if we do take this for the screech-owl whose name means "mocking," I think we should let this spondaizontic γαρύσαιντο take the weight it deserves—these uncanny mountain birds aren't just singing, they're making a fantastic noise together: whether the owl gets a new voice or not, there's a new and alien vitality in the aural landscape. Last there's that enigmatic κἠξ ὀρέων—neither owls nor nightingales live in the mountain wilderness; the one is a lowland bird, the other lives in the agricultural countryside. This confusion of habitats suggests to me that the teeming wilderness Daphnis has already exhorted outside the boundaries of its biology also sneers at the fiction of habitat—Daphnis suggests forests creeping up mountains and, it seems to me, erasing man's fields and foundations.

This landscape with man rubbed out of it—bucolicized back into wilderness—inevitably reminds me of Henri Rousseau and his fruit-besotted beasts. These suddenly timorous dogs, too, make me wonder if there are any men left. Theocritus' stag has changed its nature, and certainly not just as an ἀδύνατον; the new vitality that sets the birds at war has infected him too, and with sudden courage he turns on his predators and tears them apart. This pack of hounds should be able to fight back, though, shouldn't it? But they're a vestige of an earlier, ordered world—without guidance, without an organizing principle, this stag can gore them in their confusion.

I think we find this same alien vitality at the end of Idyll 7, when Simichidas and his friends settle down for a harvest banquet as guests of Phrasidamus and Antigenes. The closing passage of the poem is a bucolic phantasm, a delirium of lushness:

πολλαὶ δ’ ἄμμιν ὕπερθε κατὰ κρατὸς δονέοντο
αἴγειροι πτελέαι τε· τὸ δ’ ἐγγύθεν ἱερὸν ὕδωρ
Νυμφᾶν ἐξ ἄντροιο κατειβόμενον κελάρυζε.
τοὶ δὲ ποτὶ σκιαραῖς ὀροδαμνίσιν αἰθαλίωνες
τέττιγες λαλαγεῦντες ἔχον πόνον· ἁ δ’ ὀλολυγών
τηλόθεν ἐν πυκιναῖσι βάτων τρύζεσκεν ἀκάνθαις·
ἄειδον κόρυδοι καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών,
πωτῶντο ξουθαὶ περὶ πίδακας ἀμφὶ μέλισσαι.
πάντ’ ὦσδεν θέρεος μάλα πίονος, ὦσδε δ’ ὀπώρας.
ὄχναι μὲν πὰρ ποσσί, παρὰ πλευραῖσι δὲ μᾶλα
δαψιλέως ἁμῖν ἐκυλίνδετο, τοὶ δ’ ἐκέχυντο
ὄρπακες βραβίλοισι καταβρίθοντες ἔραζε·
τετράενες δὲ πίθων ἀπελύετο κρατὸς ἄλειφαρ, (135-47)

translated so beautifully by A. S. F. Gow:

Many a poplar and elm murmured above our heads, and near at hand the sacred water from the cave of the Nymphs fell plashing. On the shady boughs the dusky cicadas were busy with their chatter, and the tree-frog far off cried in the dense thorn-brake. Larks and finches sang, the dove made moan, and bees flitted humming about the springs. All things were fragrant of rich harvest and of fruit-time. Pears at our feet and apples at our side were rolling plentifully, and the branches hung down to the ground with their burden of sloes.

This is a locus amoenus with amplifiers dialed to 11, a strangely animated landscape—the vegetation shivers, the boughs are alive with winged things and fruit rolls uncannily past the banqueters. Let me put aside issues of artifice, the locus amoenus as a trope, and the relationship between Simichidas' encounter with Lycidas and this dreamy realization of bucolic ideals and focus on its specific richness, its overwhelming sensual vitality. Obviously the situation is much less ambiguous than it was in Daphnis' song—this is a celebration of consummate life, of nature at the service of human delight; this is nature burgeoning within its normal boundaries, proper fruits on the proper trees, and though we again see elements of Idyll 1—pears, songbirds, nymph-infested waters, thorn thickets—this is a dream less troubling than Daphnis', less unbridled.

I think this takes us back to the song of Idyll 1, to the prototypical bucolic. You'll notice that I've punctuated the earlier passage eccentrically and included the refrain, λήγετε κτλ., in Daphnis' speech—Thyrsis has been singing the refrains so far, but "begin once more the bucolic song" shifts to "leave off" at line 127 as Daphnis gives his pipes away to Pan. This first λήγετε and possibly the next are just a continuation of the mimetic refrain-singing that we've seen so far as punctuation for Thyrsis' own poem. But here, I think, Daphnis' voice assumes or infects the refrain: where Thyrsis prepared to end his song at line 127, Daphnis—ur-Bucolicist that he is—leaves off singing forever at line 137: ἀπεπαύσατο.

Here I speculate: could it be that there's a link between the thriving bucolic tradition—a tradition among the living, triumphalist, if you like—and Daphnis' despairing silence, I mean in relation to these two bucolic phantasmagoriae and their disjunction? Both precincts of the bucolic, idyllic singing-contest with Lycidas and Sicilian swan song, conjure up landscapes that rustle with strange vitality; and of course bucolic as a genre makes it its business to create and sustain a myth of the pastoral landscape. But far from being an Adonis figure, a nature god whose death should bring wailing and winter, Daphnis and his song seem to exert a kind of check on the bucolic fantasy: while he sings even the wolves grieve for him, the pastoral landscape is harmonious, generically stable, and really seems to revolve around him, bucolic arrayed around the bucolicist. But he gives up life and song (no singing head of Orpheus here) and the power of that song goes awry, as though released from its normal boundaries. This gives us an explanation for the phantasmagoria in Idyll 7: Simichidas' encounter with his divine traveling companion is manifest in the landscape summoned by his song, amplified if you like, but kept within the blissful order of its golden genre by the promise of future music.

I mentioned Hylas earlier, and while hunting down the citation for that episode in the Argonautica (1.1207ff, by the way) I found a rather nice facing-Greek edition online, especially since the Perseus Argonautica comes with notes only. While we're on the subject, may I praise Richard Hunter's green and yellow for a moment? I've been left cold by more Cambridge commentaries than not, but Hunter's insight into Theocritean poetics is simply, stunningly good. He's particularly brilliant on Idylls 6 and 7--of all the Cambridge commentaries I've used lately, his is probably the most literary and sensitive: you can write papers with it. Speaking of papers, I found D. M. Halperin's 1983 paper, "The Forebears of Daphnis" (TAPA 113: 183-200) frighteningly learned and of course interesting, particularly for those of us interested in the near eastern roots of our civilization.