Imagining Affect: Movement and Emotion in the Georgics

In its imagination of human beings and the land, the Georgics explores the emotions farming prompts, ranging from the old man of Tarentum’s satisfaction to the despair caused by the need for incessant labor. By drawing on ideas from affect studies about people’s emotional responses to and impacts on their environment, I argue that the Georgics portrays its characters and poet as experiencing and creating fundamentally different emotions as they move through space. The farmers’ motions through their land provoke a range of emotions and agency in a goal-oriented yet endless journey, while the poet’s literary movement, which likewise gives rise to a variety of emotions, trends toward a greater degree of agency and an achievable goal. In my paper’s conclusion, I bring together this relationship between emotional and physical movement to argue that the story of Orpheus stands as a warning about the dangers of everlasting movement and emotion.

In the Georgics, the farmers’ emotions arise from and have an impact on their movement through the environment. In Georgics 2, for example, the poet imagines two different sorts of emotional interactions the farmer can have with the land, the first filled with satisfaction as he plows a rich plot of soil (2.204-8), the second suffused with anger and terror, as he roots up trees that have long held birds’ nests (2.206-11). These emotions that arise from the farmer’s interaction with the land are connected with an endless journey. Whether it is in the dressing of the vines (a task that must be repeated annually; 2.397-419) or the characterization of his journey as a voyage upstream (1.199- 203), the farmer fails to enjoy any great degree of agency in a journey that is endless and repetitive.

While the Georgics’ poet also experiences a range of emotions in his literary movements, his journey through the poem is goal oriented and tends to an increasing amount of agency. The hope in his opening prayer to the gods and Caesar (1.40-2) contrasts with the terror evoked by the out-of- control chariot at the end of Georgics 1 (1.509-14), yet as the poem moves onward his emotions shift toward feelings of accomplishment and completion. In Georgics 4, the poet accepts that he turns toward home (4.116-9) and is constrained by narrow bounds (4.147-8), limits that are balanced by the satisfaction of a journey he can and does complete (4.559-66).

In a brief conclusion, I argue that the poet’s positive emotional experience of a finite journey contrasts with the endless grief Orpheus expresses as his head travels down the Hebrus River (4.523-7). Here, though, even as the poet contrasts the satisfaction of his own completed journey with Orpheus’ never-ending sadness, I suggest that the recollection of the Eclogues’ opening line in the Georgics’ final verse sends the poet’s audience on their own circular journey through the literary and emotional spaces that the poet himself has fashioned.