Published in Vol. XXXVI, no. 1, John Beardsley’s poem “Pastoral” is reviewed by an editor of Mid-American Review.<\/i><\/p>\n
As we enter Beardsley\u2019s \u201cPastoral,\u201d we take from the simple and familiar title a sense of impending rural comfort. The compendium of our experience with the pastoral rushes forward and leaves us anticipating a romantic exploration of rural life and landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We then are given the first line of this \u201cPastoral,\u201d in \u201cThe snow sang like a shot,\u201d and immediately know that there is a complexity here. Our attention is called to a dominating feature of this landscape, the snow, which seems to live so fully and joyously that it sings, but like a shot. The juxtaposition of the staunch violent noise of a gun firing with the purity of a living, singing snow leaves the reader fascinated about this world, this pastoral, in which the violent and the beautiful can exist in such magnificently direct proximity. <\/span><\/p>\n Beardsley continues to develop his initial image by crafting the snow into an all encompassing entity that \u201csunk all it could see \/ into its curves and blued \/ barrels\u2026\u201d The snow takes the underlying forms of the pastoral landscape and makes them its own, adopts them into its own intimate contours. But this pastoral snow is as willing to reveal as it is to consume and \u201cgave it out \/ again blistering.\u201d The snow releases the forms held within it just as strikingly as it takes them in. <\/span><\/p>\n Once we find ourselves situated within the poem\u2019s snow capped pastoral body, the speaker of the poem enters, a voyeur over the snow, \u201clooking across it.\u201d The speaker looks through the snowscape \u201cat the long black body \/ of an animal I cannot \/ name\u2026\u201d Just as the speaker cannot identify this black creature streaking through the trees, we are left with a blurred image of the animal fleeing from the \u201cshot\u201d through the white gleam of the snowy landscape. The animal \u201c\u2026moved like \/ a loss a blood through \/ paper birches.\u201d We are struck again by the brilliant contrast of beauty and violence involved in the image of an obscured animal moving fluidly, \u201clike a loss of blood,\u201d through the trees of the landscape, staining the glistening snow with the ruby traces of its recent wound. The bark of the \u201cpaper birches\u201d seems to magnify the contrast of red and white. <\/span><\/p>\n Next, we arrive joltingly at a sense of isolation within the snowfield, as \u201cit was talking to itself.\u201d The landscape maintains its sense of life and voice, but now it seems highly personal, as if the speaker of the poem is overhearing the field\u2019s intimate laments. But the speaker is not obtrusive. Instead, they identify with this overhead self-intimacy, identify with the field talking to itself, \u201cas I do at night.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n At this point, we see the speaker and the landscape as two isolated, intimate figures that share a sense of value in the personal voice.<\/span><\/p>\n But the speaker must address this bleeding figure that runs through the snow topped, birch-laden woods. This unnamed animal that seems so integral to the scene at hand. \u201cO stranger in the distance,\u201d the speaker announces, \u201cI\u2019ve made you a fetish \/ of neck-wrung chickens \/ to keep off our fathers\u2019 \/ hungering ghosts\u2026\u201d In this shocking moment, the speaker reveals a depth in his sentiment for the distant stranger. The motives and actions of the speaker are brought into question, as well as the history involved in their complex present state. <\/span><\/p>\n The obscurity behind the \u201cstranger in the distance\u201d allows our minds to wander, wondering if perhaps the stranger is no longer the wounded animal, wondering if perhaps the stranger is now, to the speaker, something or someone beyond this scene in the snowy woods. We become aware of a depth in the obscurity of the images. <\/span><\/p>\n Still, the speaker is engulfed in the interaction of beauty and violence that has so far saturated the poem, as \u201cI bound \/ their throats in my sawn-off hair.\u201d But again, their internal stance on this interaction is questioned as they cry out, \u201cO god of embarrassment, \/ god of bullets-in-the-back,\u201d and make a sacrifice to this addressed being, exclaiming that \u201cI give you my teeth, pink \/ at the root.\u201d They proceed to \u201cSleep in this lot I\u2019ve dug \/ where even the snow can\u2019t see.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n We arrive back at the initial image, the all-encompassing snow that has taken every feature of the landscape under its vast white arms, into its body. But not the speaker. The speaker arrives at a point so personal, a point so privately intimate that they sleep \u201cwhere even the snow can\u2019t see.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n The final line of the poem revisits the ongoing theme of beauty interacting with violence. It weighs the joy of song against the brutality of retrieving that joy from within the core of a conflicted individual, as the speaker proclaims, \u201cI\u2019ll scrape out the song from my lungs.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Published in Vol. XXXVI, no. 1, John Beardsley’s poem “Pastoral” is reviewed by an editor of Mid-American Review. 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