.
prance'n 'bout
mine pit
fire
triplettes
wit
forest green
amber cotton
redwine
stay back edvard frocks (he jamez)
blindz meanz
')
.
wheat
such handsome
thuh
gold shift'n
beautifully
with push
each
thuh wind
bendz
with mine
each
push
hern harvest'en
with ourn
each
swerve veer bend
seed'did
lock'd
.
no
poof
nor
thuh white
angelz
untether'd wingz
'twere
from ether
thuh
baring gold (edvard auburn)
tressez hern meanz
'to
hip's camberz
digits all
thick
20 uv'em
lips all
thick
4 uv'em
sea frock
blue
bright white teeth
panniez
lock
*for thuh decipherer uv
"dramatic verse"; i pull'd
this one out uv thin air ')>
.
uh feminine'z
fistful flowerz
uv
bowing
conceding
tumbling
such pretty flicker'n
each theirn
petal
float 'top thuh
kentucky grass
blue
uh message
path
welcome
lure
purty room
one
fer hern first
love
.
‘Tiz ‘cauze uv hern
flash florid
hern
En mine hammock
Whilst thuh morning rush
Uv thuh creek
Chip Chip
Chip
Chipmunk’s preen
Cool spring breeze
Past mine kitchen
Vindow
Uh
flower mine
en
Hammock
dreamz
.
yet lips
hern
be soft
and hern step
poof toot
poof
too
hern be
digits
tickle thick
shoots
ooh
mmm
this one'z
speak mine
cauze'd
fancy hallucinate
dream
do'd
You once sang a song
For me to dance to,
Yet I let pride hold me back.
Now I wait for your drumbeats.
Will you sing for me now?
You spoke in poetry, not plain words.
You spun flowery tales,
Yet I pretended not to understand.
Now I long for your poems.
Will you write for me now?
You gave me inspiration so true.
Please do not let this horse die.
I am letting go of all the shackles
That once held me down.
I am waiting for the drumbeats still.
Come and play for me now.
Please do not sing to another;
Let not this travesty occur.
I hold my dance for your drumbeats.
Will you play for me still?
At our lagoon, will you wait?
Should I hope to meet you there?
Will I hear your drumbeats there?
Love me now,
Love me forever.
Now Tim is great, enthusiastic and in no way dim' he an Aussie asset, is our mate
Tim..He is full of good intention ya'know
I can feel it from here.' Mind he's often meeting with legends, reckon i should make that clear, wether it 'green lightening
tech'? Or innovations coming through from
The paddocks to the table.? Tim brings it
To you..Remember nation of battlers.' How
Far you have come, i believe any setback at
Home or external? You will overcome.' We
Do not need Brussels, but more men such as Tim..And the true Aussie spirit,to light up all the country from whithin
.
azzzzz thuh
wizzzard
bamb
i mean
poof
'tain't cinderella
ain't red
l'il
whut's'er name
or no
goldilocks
bamb
i meant wooosh (did too)
she cute though
appalicious
bamb
cute
,)>
*appalicious; mine portmanteau for,
appalachian ~and~ delicious
who luvz yuh <]')
.
sure enough
'tiz i
wrrrrrrrgh
urrrrg guh
mmmm
(((wow)))
sniffffff hahhh
hmmm
mor'nin
come'mere luv
yeahhhh
"what's that edvard"
,)>
.
yep
all i did
were wake
one eye
it's comforter
uuuhp
yuuhp
that raven
her
whistle
oh
y'all don't know
and dare hern tuh think
she soundz thuh same
mine croak
huh
i got'er buy uh
grunt
I REMEMBER THE LITTLE THINGS
BY ALICE MARAGLIA
2019
I was raised with a set of morals we don't hear much today
things like, "yes mam," "no sir", please and thank you.
Excuse me when we needed to be heard, now all you
get is a push and a shove, no one cares.
Men tipped their hats to women passing by,
"Good Morning" was a standard reply.
Seats on the bus were offered up out of respect
to an elder, a mom to be, or the disabled who cannot see.
Today, there are no moral standards to teach our young,
How are we making America Great again?
Did our political correctness replace those values?
We will never go back to the day it once was.
The Bible was read morning noon and night,
now we have the cell phone, and AI to guide us at night.
Be careful people, you are being invaded by a stranger
who knows not or cares, for the danger ahead is clear.
.
habits
they never
change
'tiz up early in thuh
a.m.
kiss'er
werk
fish
gather
luv'er
chop wood pound wood
burn wood
repeat benefit eight
Quiet, the slow icy drip.
Firelight cakes the trees.
Evening, wooded clearing , winter trapper.
Lonely but content.
Envisioning the furry catch.
Money lining woven pockets.
Jerky in his hands.
Abandoning Los Angeles.
New York City too.
His fiancee waiting, sturdy cabin.
Miles away, Oh, miles away.
Hard for her, work hard for her.
Baby in her swollen tum.
Silence, Trap Shuts.
Victory, Yes Victory!
.
mhmm
'tiz where mine
spillz 'pon slip
and
all thuh rest
wow'n mine
Yahweh's Bucolic
yet hern pretty
insists
'we trek that'
9hundred foot
hill
and mine duze
And back
such thuh wet
such thuh rise
such thuh spill'd
Introduction
The special pleasure of reading pastoral writing lies in the tension between invitation and doubt. A quiet field, shaded path, orchard, pasture, or garden may seem to offer release, yet the strongest poems make us wonder what that calm excludes, repairs, remembers, or conceals. When such poems are placed side by side, the countryside becomes more than scenery: it can serve as refuge, workplace, inheritance, moral contrast, threatened habitat, or stage for longing.
As you read the community poems, notice how differently writers establish their rural worlds. One poet may linger over light, birdsong, weather, and seasonal change; another may center a solitary speaker, a family memory, an encounter with an animal, or the physical demands of labor. Some poems may embrace serenity, while others complicate it with grief, environmental unease, loneliness, irony, or awareness of the life left elsewhere. The form permits both intimacy and breadth because a closely observed place can open into questions about time, belonging, desire, and human responsibility.
Reading beyond the first example reveals how much depends on selection and perspective. Compare which details poets admit, which disturbances they postpone, and whether their landscapes remain stable by the ending. Notice, too, how voice changes the meaning of apparent simplicity: a resident, visitor, exile, mourner, lover, or child will not perceive the same field in the same way. Browsing several Pastorals turns the collection into a conversation about what people seek in rural space-and what the land quietly asks of them in return.
Reading Guide
Read a Pastoral slowly enough to distinguish the observed landscape from the emotional or intellectual landscape laid over it. Trees, water, livestock, weather, cultivated ground, and open distance may carry literal presence, symbolic weight, or both. The central pleasure often comes from discovering how a poet transforms place into a way of thinking. As you compare community poems, attend not only to what looks peaceful but also to the choices that create, interrupt, or question that peace.
- Track the speaker's position. Determine whether the voice belongs to the place, visits it, remembers it, or imagines it from afar. That position affects authority and longing. Ask: does this speaker observe rural life closely, or use it chiefly as an escape from another world?
- Separate concrete detail from decorative scenery. A precise gate hinge, furrow, seed head, hoofprint, or change in wind can make a landscape inhabited rather than picturesque. Ask: which details feel discovered through attention, and which seem included mainly to signal beauty?
- Listen for the sound of the setting. Vowels can widen a line into spaciousness, consonants can roughen labor or weather, and pauses can create contemplative quiet. Ask: how does each poet's soundscape support or resist the mood suggested by the images?
- Notice contrasts and absences. The city, conflict, machinery, commerce, or social pressure may remain unnamed yet shape the poem through their absence. Ask: what alternative life is the countryside being measured against, and does that contrast feel simple or complicated?
- Watch the movement of time. Seasonal change, daylight, growth, decay, and recurring tasks naturally provide pastoral pacing. Ask: does the poem dwell in a suspended moment, follow a cycle, or move toward an irreversible change?
- Locate the tonal turn. Tranquility may deepen into gratitude, tip into melancholy, or be disturbed by danger, memory, or self-questioning. Ask: where does the poem revise its own first impression of the place?
- Examine the final image. Pastoral endings often determine whether the landscape offers consolation, remains vulnerable, or exposes the speaker's illusion. Ask: does the closing return us to the land with altered understanding, or merely repeat the opening mood?
After reading one poem, choose another with a similar setting but a different voice or emotional direction. Comparison makes subtle decisions about distance, detail, sound, and idealization easier to hear.
Writing Tips
Begin with a place that can withstand sustained attention. It may be known intimately, remembered imperfectly, visited briefly, or imagined from fragments, but it should offer more than a pleasant backdrop. Before drafting, identify what the speaker wants from this landscape: shelter, clarity, reunion, absolution, escape, continuity, or confrontation. Then ask what the place can give-and what it refuses to give. That friction will keep the poem from becoming a scenic postcard.
- Choose material with an active relationship to place. A walk through fields is not yet a poem. Give the speaker a reason to notice this particular fence, animal, tree, storm, crop, or stream. Material suits the pastoral mode when the rural setting changes how the speaker feels, remembers, judges, or decides.
- Build from sensory evidence before abstraction. Instead of announcing peace, freedom, purity, or simplicity, create the conditions in which a reader might experience them. Texture, temperature, distance, scent, and physical movement make reflection credible. Let an idea arise from contact with the world rather than being placed on top of it.
- Interrogate borrowed prettiness. Beginner drafts often rely on generalized flowers, golden sunlight, singing birds, and green fields. Such images can work, but only when made particular or placed under pressure. Ask what species, season, weather, damage, labor, or history complicates the attractive surface.
- Decide how much idealization the poem understands about itself. A speaker may sincerely long for rural peace without the poem endorsing every assumption behind that longing. A neglected tool, distant road, exhausted worker, broken wall, or altered habitat can introduce complexity without destroying lyric calm.
- Use structural freedom purposefully. Pastoral material can accommodate meditative stanzas, narrative progression, patterned rhyme, loose lines, or recurring phrases. Treat any chosen shape as an expressive instrument rather than proof of compliance. Spacious lines may suggest openness; compact stanzas may emphasize enclosure, routine, or concentrated observation.
- Shape sound without turning nature into an effects catalogue. Echo, alliteration, internal rhyme, and repeated vowels can evoke movement or stillness, but excessive imitation becomes mannered. Read aloud to hear whether musical language deepens attention or merely beautifies every object indiscriminately.
- Create movement within contemplation. Even a quiet poem needs development. Let the eye travel, the weather change, a memory intrude, an animal act unexpectedly, or the speaker's interpretation shift. Insufficient development leaves the landscape static and makes the ending feel interchangeable with the beginning.
- Earn the ending. Avoid closing with a broad lesson about nature or a simple declaration that country life is preferable. Return to a transformed image, unresolved contrast, changed sound, or small physical action. The best ending often enlarges the place while resisting a tidy moral.
During revision, underline every concrete image and circle every abstract claim. Where several claims appear without sensory support, return the speaker to the physical setting. Then read the draft aloud twice: once for pace and sound, and once while listening for predictability. Test whether a reader expecting serenity encounters only confirmation or discovers a more layered relation between beauty, labor, memory, and change. Remove decorative details that do no emotional work, sharpen the speaker's position, and make sure the final image grows from the poem's actual journey.
Interesting Facts
- A serene surface can increase dramatic pressure. When a landscape appears safe and ordered, one damaged tree, approaching storm, uneasy memory, or discordant sound becomes especially powerful. Calm is therefore not merely a mood; it can serve as the background against which disturbance becomes legible.
- The absent world may remain an active presence. A poem need not describe streets, offices, crowds, or technology for them to influence its rural retreat. What the speaker has left behind can shape every silence, making omission an important part of the pastoral design.
- Point of view can alter the ethics of beauty. The same valley looks different to a farmer, tourist, returning adult, displaced resident, or person grieving there. Comparing community poems shows why the observer's relationship to the land matters as much as the visible scene.
- Length changes the meaning of stillness. A brief Pastoral may preserve one luminous instant, while a longer poem can reveal weather, work, ecological change, or self-correction. Neither scale is inherently stronger; each creates a different test of attention.
- Musical language can both enchant and warn. Soft repetitions may lull the reader into contemplation, whereas rough consonants or broken pacing can expose strain beneath an idyllic view. Sound often tells us whether the poem trusts its own tranquility.
- Restraint can make social meaning more forceful. A fence, boundary marker, empty farmhouse, polluted stream, or mechanized sound may imply ownership, loss, or environmental pressure without an explanatory speech. Carefully selected objects allow the landscape to carry argument.
- Several interpretations clarify the form better than one model. As you browse the poems in this collection, compare how writers balance refuge with realism. The differences reveal which pastoral qualities are durable and which belong to an individual poet's temperament, setting, and purpose.
Popular Themes
Pastoral subject matter works best when the landscape does more than illustrate a predetermined feeling. Rural space can slow attention, expose seasonal cycles, preserve memory, or sharpen the contrast between a desired life and an actual one. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than a statistical ranking of what appears most often.
- Solitude and retreat. Distance from crowds or obligations gives a speaker room to listen and reflect. The theme gains depth when seclusion has a cost, such as loneliness, avoidance, or the knowledge that retreat cannot last.
- Love and companionship. Paths, gardens, woods, and fields can become intimate spaces for courtship, reunion, or shared silence. Natural cycles also allow affection to be measured against growth, ripening, weather, and inevitable change.
- Memory and homecoming. A remembered farm, village edge, pasture, or family garden can hold several periods of life at once. The landscape invites comparison between what endured, what vanished, and what memory may have idealized.
- Labor and sustenance. Planting, tending animals, harvesting, mending, and preserving food prevent the countryside from becoming mere decoration. Work introduces bodily knowledge, repetition, dependence, and the uneasy boundary between simplicity and hardship.
- Grief and elegy. Seasonal decline and renewal can give mourning a setting without promising easy consolation. A familiar tree, path, or empty dwelling may preserve the presence of someone absent while showing that the physical world continues.
- Environmental vulnerability. Drought, erosion, habitat loss, fire, flood, or altered seasons can trouble expectations of harmony. Pastoral beauty makes damage visible because the reader has first been taught to value the threatened place.
- Belonging, ownership, and exclusion. Boundaries in rural landscapes are both physical and emotional. Gates, fences, inherited acres, common land, and inaccessible paths can prompt questions about who may enter, remain, work, remember, or call a place home.
As you read the community poems, compare works that approach similar themes. One writer may find restoration where another finds illusion; one may celebrate continuity while another notices change. Those contrasts show how individual voices transform shared pastoral materials.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a memorable Pastoral lies between the desire for harmony and the knowledge that no inhabited landscape is entirely simple. Rural beauty can be sincerely cherished without being treated as innocent of labor, ownership, danger, change, or loss. A technically recognizable poem may provide fields, trees, animals, and tranquility; a compelling one makes those elements necessary to a particular consciousness. Its setting could not be exchanged for another without changing the poem's emotional argument.
Strong structure grows from the speaker's manner of attention. A poem that follows a path may let each turn reveal a new layer of memory. A seasonal sequence may move from abundance toward decline, or reverse that expectation. Refrains can imitate recurring work, persistent desire, or the mind's inability to leave an image behind. Rhyme and measured cadence may intensify order, while loosened syntax or disrupted lines may register weather, anxiety, or a fracture in the imagined refuge. In each case, pattern matters because it shapes the reader's experience of place, not because it decorates the scene.
Editors and attentive readers notice when subject and craft reinforce each other. Precise nouns establish credibility; controlled sound creates atmosphere without coating every object in sweetness; pacing allows perception to become thought. They also notice predictable idealization, forced archaic language, mechanical musicality, and explanations that tell the reader what the landscape already shows. Another common weakness is insufficient development: the poem begins in admiration and ends in the same admiration, with no discovery between. Complexity does not require a dramatic catastrophe, but it does require some alteration in knowledge, feeling, or relation.
Individuality remains visible through the speaker's stakes and the poet's selection of detail. Two writers can observe the same kind of meadow and produce radically different work because one listens for family history, another for ecological change, and another for the limits of solitude. The memorable poem does not merely announce a preference for country over city; it discovers what this place permits the speaker to understand and what it leaves unresolved. Comparing several community poems develops judgment because quality becomes easier to recognize across differences. Readers can see how restraint, irony, tenderness, unease, narrative, and song each preserve pastoral identity while testing its assumptions.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community poems speak to one another. Compare how different writers handle rural beauty, labor, solitude, memory, disturbance, and return. A thoughtful comment might identify an image that changed the mood, a turn that complicated the landscape, or a sound pattern that made the setting vivid.
Then try your own Pastoral. Begin with a place worth sustained attention, allow it to resist easy idealization, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another setting, voice, and set of questions to the continuing community conversation.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 786 poems, providing many opportunities to compare how individual writers approach pastoral setting, voice, atmosphere, conflict, and closure. Across a collection of this size, readers can encounter multiple interpretations rather than treating one poem as the sole model. Some poets may follow familiar conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them through contemporary settings, unsettled tones, varied structures, or unexpected perspectives.
Pastoral Categories
Read wonderful pastoral poetry on the following sub-topics:
death, elegy, love, nature, rhyme, sonnet
and more.
Definition | What is Pastoral in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.