A Word of Introduction to Vergil's Georgics

A Word of Introduction to Vergil's Georgics

     Each book of the Georgics--ploughing and planting fields (book 1), growing vines and trees (book 2), herding sheep, goats, horses, and cattle (book 3), and beekeeping (book 4)--takes place within a lover's quarrel between the farmer and the earth. And each book is filled with hypnotically clear and loving transcription of the particulars of its realm. The farmer's world appears in its bright, raw, naked thingliness and always alive with suggested feelings, analogies, and thoughts.
     Vergil's theme is not merely the natural order and the goods and beauties it offers, nor merely that order in fruitful tension with human effort, making, and civilization, but something active within both of these: the intuited radiance of the divine creation that fills the poet's eye and heart with light. Vergil's realism gives us soils and ruminating or stamping creatures, birds and stars, a leaf unfurling, the rich textures of human crafts, the waxen wicker of the hive humming with its communal life, all as lit up by the active presence of their Creator, with the breath of God still on them, freshening them.
     That is why the world appears to him as a radiant, gigantically strange, and ever-proceeding gift, to be newly received again and again. One could prove this by quoting almost any line of the poem! But one thinks especially of the passage that recalls the first Spring of the rising world, of the wild trees of hills and forests that offer themselves to our sight and use in a ceaseless, prodigious free gift, and of--that first line of book 4--"heaven's gift of honey, pure as air."
     This intuition is why Vergil can so delight in the world, even as he acknowledges and feels deeply that nature, culture, and human history include terrible pain, ugliness, futility, frustration, and inexplicable evil. Witness his cry of despairing prayer over the Roman future at the end of book 1; his reflection on the corruption of urbanized manners in contrast to the piety and steadfastness that characterize the family farm, his many-sided meditation on human lots--blessed and unblessed--the farmer's, the philosopher's, the public man's, his own (the poet's)--at the end of book 2; the brutal plague he pursues in brutally exhaustive detail at the end of book 3; the unsettling picture he paints of the inundations of animal love that sweep over animal and human herds; his exploration in the Orpheus and Eurydice-story of the haunting power of poetry, but also its impotence in the face of death, and the unknown destiny of human loves.
     It is books 2 and 4, the world of trees and vines and the virtuous society of the bees (both which realms are blissfully free of animal passions, heat, blood, and sex), that most unmistakeably communicate the undying light of the first creation, but even here blight, unruliness, toil, war, plague, and death have made inroads. Between himself and the powers of darkness, Vergil interposes not the intellectual life (not the philosopher's visionary detachment) nor optimism about the civilizing project of Rome--though both hold great interest and attraction for him--but the native stoicism, practical wisdom, and piety of the surefooted Italian farmer on the one hand and, on the other, his own peerless poetic gift, whereby he sees--even if he cannot explain it--the world in its thisness and whatness charged by the grandeur of God.