Del A Maticic (NYU)
Plants in Vergilian pastoral have long been read as metapoetic metaphors (see esp. Henkel 2009: 36-169). This is not only because the Greek and Latin words for “tree” and “wood” (ὕλη and materia especially) also denote “matter” in the abstract sense, but also because of various ways in which trees formally resemble poems (grafting and echoes as allusions, shadows as anxieties of influence, and so on). The motif of the poem-tree is epitomized in Ecl. 10.52-4, when Gallus imagines his “loves” growing with the trees on which they are carved (crescent illae [arbores]; illae, crescetis, amores, 10.54). On a metaliterary reading, Gallus strives to write elegy on the pastoral medium of the tree—thus signifying the fusion of genres the Tenth Eclogue enacts. However, though growth essential to the relation of poem and plant here, it is hard to square them with the metapoetic metaphor. As my paper argues, the dynamics of such plant growth as it figures in pastoral complicate our readings of the metapoetic siluae metaphor.
Despite the increasing awareness of real human lives behind pastoral people (see esp. Alpers 1979 and Apostol 2015), less attention has been paid to the ramifications of animal and especially plant life in the genre. As such, romanticizing notions of the pastoral landscape as “Muse’s garden” (Berg 1974) or “landscape of the mind” (Snell 1953) still persist behind the notion that pastoral trees are almost always metaphors for the poems that contain them. My paper, by contrast, reads the vegetal world of pastoral non-anthropocentrically, and strives to consider the nonhuman world as more than just a reflection of human lives and concerns. I argue that a robust theory of plant life underlies Vergil’s representation of trees, imbuing them with energy and agency that transcends the controlling power of human artistry.
In various ways, Vergil channels the phytic energy of plants into his poems, making his poems more plant-like rather than merely make plants poem-like. In Ecl. 5 and 10, trees inscribed with poems fuel and energize the creation and growth of poetry much like living firewood (ligna). Elsewhere, sylvan echoes and reverberations, often classed as examples of the so-called “pathetic fallacy,” do not simply repeat what has been said, but rather contribute to co-authoring the songs, by subtly changing them and harmonizing with human voices. At the close of the collection, when Vergil compares himself and Gallus to a suckering alder (10.72-3), he distinguishes himself from his predecessors by figuring his poem as “greener” in relation to his literary trees. Whereas the Theocritean shepherd breaks off twigs to weave a metaliterary basket, and Gallus cuts poems into trees, Vergil simply sprouts like a poet-tree hybrid. As such, the tree of Vergilian pastoral is, like many other raw materials in Augustan poetry, an excellent example of a “matterphor” (Gandorfer and Ayub 2021), or an entity inhabiting the space between the literal and metaphorical, where, in the words of Barad 2007, we can “meet the universe halfway.”