Moortown Diary: จอร์จิค
(Georgic) ขนบวรรณศิลป์ กสิ กรรมและ
กำสรวลท้องทุ่งในบทกวีของเท็ด ฮิ้วจส์
ดร.ชัยยนต์ ทองสุขแก้ ง
ภาควิชาภาษาตะวันตกและภาษาศาสตร์
คณะมนุษยศาสตร์ และสังคมศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยมหาสารคาม
https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofhumanities/english/researchcentres/centreforliteratureandarchives/hughes218x250.jpg
แนวคิดและลำดับกำรนำเสนอ
• เท็ด ฮิ ้วจส์ กับบทกวีธรรมชาติ
• ขนบวรรณศิลป์ที่สะท้ อนความสัมพันธ์
ระหว่างมนุษย์กบั ธรรมชาติ
• ขนบท้ องทุ่ง pastoral
• จอร์ จิค georgic
• ลักษณะของกาสรวลท้ องทุง่ pastoral
elegy
• เท็ด ฮิ ้วจส์กบั หนังสือ มอร์ ทาวน์ไดอารี่
Moortown Diary (1979)
http://www.shorthorn.co.uk/dairyshorthorn/images/articles/robinson/RobinsonNMR4S.jp
Ted Hughes: Nature, Environment, and
Ecology
• The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
• Lupercal (1960)
• Crow (1970)
• Remains of Elmet (1979)
• Moortown Diary (1979)
• River (1983)
• Wolfwatching (1989)
• Birthday Letters (1998)
http://weknowyourdreams.com/single/crow/crow-01
Wildlife vs ‘Wilderness’: สัตว์ป่ำ/ธรรมชำติอนั ไร้กำร
ควบคุม
• “The Hawk in the Rain”, “The Jaguar”
• “Thrushes”, “Skylarks”, “The Howling of the Wolves”
• “February”, “The Black Rhino”
• “Crow Hill”, “Wind”, “Heptonstall”
• “October Dawn”, “Relic”
Moortown Diary (1979)
• ขนบวรรณศิลป์กสิกรรม (จอร์ จิค)ที่ม่งุ เน้ น
ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างมนุษย์กบั ธรรมชาติ
แบบต่างตอบแทน ที่บอ่ ยครัง้ การใช้
ประโยชน์จากธรรมชาติมาพร้ อมกับการ
ควบคุมดูแลและพัฒนาธรรมชาติเพื่อ
ประโยชน์สงู สุด โดยอาศัยแรงงาน การ
ทุม่ เท การดูแลรักษาให้ ผืนดินอุดม
สมบูรณ์
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https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofhumanities/english/researchcentres/centreforliteratureandarchives/hughes218x250.jpg
ขนบวรรณกรรมท้องทุ่ง Pastoral vs กสิ กรรม Georgic?
• Pastoral
• ‘[P]astoral is a manifestation of an apparently universal, preconscious, human desire to an ideal and simple world. Because this
desire cannot usually be fulfilled in the “real” world it is the natural
territory of art and literature’. (John Goodridge, 1995)
• Theocritus's Idylls in the ‘Golden Age’ of Greece (Acadia)
• Christopher Marlow’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
• ดู Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (1995)
Pastoral? –
romantic and
harmony
https://www.toperfect.com/pic/Oil%20Painting%20Masterpieces%20on%20Canvas/Dupre%20Julien_France_1851-1910/6-Le-Berger-farmlife-Realism-Julien-Dupre.jpg
Georgic? – hard labour
and practicality
http://txagtalks.texasfarmbureau.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/3/030711Silhouette.jpg
The Georgic- didactic/instructive
• Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century BC) as a founding text,
while 18th-century georgic poetry is modelled after Virgil’s
Georgics (36-29 BC): a didactic poem on cultivation and animal
husbandry.
• James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-44) - the natural elements
in agriculture
• John Philips’s Cyder (1708) -the cultivation of the apple orchard
and cider production
• John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) -shepherding practice and textile
economy
• They send out, too, an environmental message of control,
management, and an ethic of care to farmers.
• a positive, and even a heroic view of labour as a pleasurable
and a socially progressive activity’.
• co-operation and the reality of hard rural work particularly
highlighted in the georgic
• ‘[I]f pastoral evoked the temperate poise and innocence of
the Golden Age, or its Christian equivalent the Garden of
Eden, the georgic is located in the fallen world of corruption
and death, the changing seasons, and the necessity of
human labour’. (David Fairer, ‘The World of Eco-Georgic’,
2011)
• georgic poetry –peripheral and antagonistic to green rhetoric
due to its desire to harness nature – can, in fact, ‘supply a
contrastive language that helps the ecocritical to define
itself’ (Fairer)
• the mastery of nature and exploitation of natural resources
for human ends which is limited and reductive
• georgic work as ‘uncertain, challenging and occasionally
frustrating’.
• Nature can be seen as recalcitrant. The georgic is concerned
with co-operation and care between humans and nature.
• Moortown Diary- the integration of attentiveness in the
pastoral and the representation of toil, misery, and cooperation in the georgic.
• The world’s fertility and abundance are ‘the result of hard
work, effective implements, foresight and expertise’.
• It is georgic that really struggles with nature, recognises
diversity, tries to understand how an interdependent system
can be sustained and properly exploited (and knows how the
two go together).
• Its practicality is a key feature, and its recognition of issues
like excess, waste, process; its reading of the signs, its
temporal responsibility, its shifts of emphasis from leisured
consumption in favour of practical production.
• The importance lies in balance and exploitation in the
human-nature relationship— biodiversity of plants and
animals for cultivation and productivity.
• To sustain the environment for utility, a farmer must be
aware of nature’s diversity, complexity, and contrast. Thus,
human labour will bear fruit in agricultural practice.
• Moortown Diary - farming practice, the harvest of crops, and
animal husbandry.
• co-operation and care
• a record of a fresh and original farm experience contributes
to the recovery of mutual respect and connectedness
between man and nature.
• The poet’s capacity to act leads to our admiration of the
uniquely human engagement in the creative-destructive
processes of nature that farmers undertake in their daily
work. (“Dehorning”, “Tractor”)
• Organic imagery to represent non-human animals, seasonal
changes, earth, air, light, rain, and vegetation in contexts of
ecological dynamism that connect fundamental worldly
elements to poetic imagination. (“Last Load”)
• The record of care in animal husbandry illustrates his interest
in the farm; rearing livestock in poetry reveals animals’
physicality as much as environmental interconnectedness
through life and death along the seasonal cycles.
• Anti-/post-pastoral? (“February 17th”, “Ravens”, “Struggle”)
• The emphasis on animals’ suffering and pain reflects
Hughes’s sympathetic imagination that creates the ecopoetics of Moortown Diary.
http://www.farmerscientistnetwork.co.uk/uploads/images/Bill_Cowling_with_Sheep_USE.jpg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/29/raven1-xlarge_trans++l_tzPcsKQBkyUuy8aItKEaOc8QzOSzmi2XEC4LOS1Gs.jpg
Romanticised farm? Hard Labour and
Death
http://wildlifearticles.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ppEtYRvlfWGsCZO-800x450-noPad.jpg
“February17th” as Anti-/post-pastoral?
[...] I went
Two miles for the injection and a
razor.
Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings,
levered with a knife
Between the vertebrae and
brought the head off
To stare at its mother, its pipes
sitting in the mud
With all earth for a body. [...]
(25-30, p. 519)
[...] A blood-ball swollen
Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap
Squashed crooked, tongue stuck
out, black-purple,
Strangled by its mother, I felt inside,
Past the noose of mother-flesh,
into the slippery
Muscled tunnel, fingering for a
hoof,
Right back to the port-hole of the
pelvis.
(9-15, p. 518)
• The representation of birth and death in livestock through hard
labour addresses uncertainty, challenge, and even frustration in the
mastery of the animal driven by natural forces (the survival instinct).
• Hughes’s depiction of births of the lambs and calves, signifies the
farmer’s fruitful labour in the human economy of which the
domesticated creatures are a part.
• However, failure in the aforementioned activities reveals the limit
upon human ability to intervene in natural processes.
• In this study, the management of a farm including animal husbandry,
assisting newborns, nursing ill animals, erecting fences, haymaking,
shearing sheep, and handling machines will be centrally and critically
analysed to explain my reading of Hughes’s georgic reinvention.
Pastoral Elegy:
Praising the
natural
environment and
mourning the
dead
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Pastoral Elegy: Mourning the Deceased
• Traditionally, there are three functions of the elegy: to lament, praise,
and console.
• These respond to the experience of loss. First, elegy laments over the
death by expressing grief and deprivation. Second, it praises and
idealises the deceased and preserves his memory among the living.
Third, it consoles a reader, by finding solace in meditation on natural
continuances or on moral, metaphysical, and religious values.
• Elegy often involves questions of initiation and continuity,
inheritance and vocation.
• Moortown farm is a mourning landscape that memorialises the dead;
Hughes represents Orchard’s heroic and physical labour in working
with the earth, machine, and animal. (“The day he died”)
• Lamentation in the external environment unfolds the
presence/absence of the land steward’s labour, devotion and the
bond with his subjects (animals and the farmland).
• “A monument”- ‘land-mark’, to praise Orchard’s skills in wiring the
farm border
• Man’s Edenic labour to cultivate the earth
“Hands” as Pastoral Elegy and Modern Georgic
• Your hands were strange – huge.
A farmer’s joke: ‘still got your bloody great hands!’
You used them with as little regard
As old iron tools – as if their creased, glossed, crocodile leather
Were nevertheless, like an African’s footnotes.
[…]
(1-4)
And when you grasp nosed bullocks, praising their mouths wide,
So they dropped to their knees
I understood again
How the world of half-ton hooves, and horns,
And hides heedless as oaken-boarding, comes to be manageable
(9-12)
“Hands” as Pastoral Elegy and Modern
Georgic
• Hands more of a piece with your tractor
Than with their own nerves,
Having no more compunction than dung-forks,
But suave as warm oil inside the wombs of ewes,
And monkey delicate
(16-20)
[…]
Your hands lie folded, estranged from all they have done
And as they have never been, and startling –
So slender, so taper, so white,
Your mother’s hands suddenly in your hands –
In that final strangeness of elegance.
(26-30)
• As Craig Robinson remarks, Hughes as the farmer-poet is a
good shepherd: ‘man as custodian and helper of nature’. MD
is engaged with birth and death, growth and decay, success
and failure, the interactions between the human and the
animal along the changing seasons, and with the necessity of
human labour and custodianship.
• As Peter Sacks suggests, the symbolic environments of the
elegy and the pastoral integrated with decomposition and
renewal can ‘intensify their grief or gratitude regarding an
otherwise manifold and ungraspable world of nature’.
“The day he died”
http://www.gallaberfarm.co.uk/images/home/cows-full.jpg
• The pastoral scene is disarrayed and interrupted by the cold
weather.
• Though enlivened by light in spring, the land is dry and
deprived of its proprietor and this signifies emptiness.
From now on the land
Will have to manage without him.
But it hesitates, in this slow realisation of light,
Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,
With roots cut
And a great blank in its memory.
(21-26, p. 533)
• In my reading, Moortown Diary is a combination of the elegiac
convention and the georgic in the representation of the farming
figure as a shepherd or a land steward.
• Jack Orchard’s labour in animal husbandry and the cultivation of the
earth will be critically considered as memorialisation in poetry.
• Hughes here approaches elegy by incorporating the hardships of farm
labour and the representation of the deceased farmer as a guardian
of the land and of animals. The poem “The day he died” can be read
in relation to the ethic of care already discussed, and the toil of
farming in which the cattle rely on the mastery of Orchard.
“The day he died”
• “The day he died” makes a distinction between the environments
influenced by the seasonal cycles and the management of livestock.
• The transition from winter to spring offers a contrast between the
symbols of death and rebirth in the animals, the plants, and the
human figure.
• As Hadley argues, death is ‘described in relation to a sympathetic
earth; nature is a part of death and mourns it’.
• Thus, Hughes focuses on the farmer’s death by considering the harsh
remnants of winter to make a transition from loss to renewal. This
constitutes the elegiac tone; however, it is counterbalanced by
spring’s liveliness.
• “The day he died” opens with the ‘silkiest day of the young year,’ and
the ‘first reconnaissance of the real spring’ (1-2, p. 533) to make a
contrasting image of death in winter and to emphasise hope and
resurrection in the landscape.
• The description of the light and climate which results in the
‘confidence of the sun’ (3) creates the distinctive, vital environment
where there is hope after loss. In this section, the vitality of nature is
interrupted by the farmer’s death.
• Hadley contends that, after Orchard’s death, ‘nature recoils
as if it has lost an integral mechanism to its working’.
• However, I argue that the environment in ‘The day he died’ is
not perceived as disintegrated after losing the farmer but,
rather as thriving along the seasonal cycle.
• Although the battered snowdrops suggest oppression,
spluttering thrushes and singing pigeons indicate
resurrection from death in winter
• Through the diversity of birds, Hughes depicts the restoration of lives
in the farm environment by invoking sound, breaking the gloomy
atmosphere of the elegiac model.
• The seasonal change from winter to spring indicates growth and
rebirth: a familiar trope. Hughes refers to Orchard’s death on the day
before Valentine’s Day which is popularly associated with love,
unification, and continuity.
• Furthermore, “The day he died” indicates the ethic of care implicit in
the toil of farm work. As the animals wait for hay and ‘Stand in a new
emptiness’ (20), they wait for warmth and attentiveness.
• Hughes offers the interpretation of ‘warmth’ in the literal meaning
when harsh winter is replaced by warm spring. The cattle stand with
frost on their backs while the ‘confidence of the sun’ seems to
interrupt that gloomy scenario.
• As the poet points out, the farm animals are ‘trustful cattle’ (18); they
are yearning for the steward to feed them with care.
• The sense of emptiness, or loss, is apparent in the landscape as the
season transforms the whole environment; however, a sense of unity
and resilience is depicted in the animals and the earth.
• In so doing, Hughes’s imagination of the empty farmland reveals his
environmental consciousness in relation to the farming figure who
fosters care in livestock.
• Hughes highlights Orchard’s absence by considering disconnection;
the root symbolises the tie that the farmer has fostered in cultivation,
broken by loss.
• The empty landscape suggests absence; however, it also identifies
resilience in the animals and the earth. The reference to ‘roots cut’
invokes discontinuity in the landscape and its foundation in which the
farmer has shaped and cultivated growth and fertility.
• Now what the poet represents is ‘a great blank in its memory’. In this
context, Hughes uses the word ‘blank’ to imply the farmer’s absence
from the land; the psychological space is incorporated with the
physical space.
• As “The day he died” represents seasonal transformation in the
constitution of the mode of elegy in this context, agricultural labour is
memorialised in the landscape as much as the human body.
• Hughes is fascinated by farm work embedded in the land through
struggle and harshness; the physical labour and effort that Orchard
puts in the earth can be interpreted as a monument.
• As itself ‘A monument’, the poem shifts mourning away from loss to
focus on the farmer’s practicality and determination in his task as an
‘appropriate means of remembrance’. Hughes examines human
labour in relation to the elegiac convention.