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Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w

Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w