Eclogue - Analysis

A pastoral scene that refuses to stay pastoral

Ashbery borrows the old eclogue setup—named speakers trading lines in a landscape—only to show how unusable that tradition has become for what the poem wants to say. The opening is outwardly simple: People and sticks go down to the water in an empty day. But the speaker immediately asks, How can we be so silent? and answers with a grim kind of fertility: Only shivers / Are bred here, in a strange land of whistling goats. The central claim the poem keeps circling is that the usual language of belonging—pastoral ease, inherited wisdom, even the ritual of dialogue—can no longer hold emotional experience. What remains is a landscape that looks like a refuge (water, wind, goats) but behaves like a pressure chamber, breeding tremors rather than songs.

Cuddie’s calm voice vs Colin’s desperate “father”

The poem’s tension sharpens because the two voices don’t want the same thing. Cuddie speaks like a guide who believes in weather and ritual: A wish is induced by changes in the wind; we can go to the water’s edge; reflection will do its work. Colin speaks like a child caught in an adult metaphysics, calling out Father and describing a recurring dream of a whitened / Face and sides that accost him in dull play. Even the verb is telling: the father’s presence is not comforting; it’s a confrontation staged as a game that has gone stale. When Colin asks, If you in your bush indeed know her / Where shall my heart’s vagrant tides place her? the old pastoral props (the bush, the shepherd’s knowledge, the water) become a way of asking for an address for desire—where to put it, how to locate it—rather than a way of celebrating the countryside.

Water as the poem’s false solution

Again and again the poem offers water as a place where meaning might stabilize. Cuddie invites the prince-like Colin to the edge; he predicts that Madness will gaze at its reflection. That line makes the water feel less like cleansing than like a trap: the mind looks for itself and finds only a warped surface. When Cuddie later insists, Now we must dip in raw water / These few thoughts and fleshy members, the phrase raw water is unnervingly physical, as if the water is uncooked matter that can’t be made safe. What is being dipped is not only thought but body—fleshy members—so the “cure” is invasive. The contradiction is that immersion is supposed to refresh, yet the goal is ethically inverted: So evil may refresh our days. The poem won’t let purification stay pure; whatever refreshes you might be exactly what corrodes you.

The hinge: pain arrives, and the heart becomes an object

The poem’s most decisive turn comes when Colin interrupts the scene with sudden bodily knowledge: What is this pain come near me? Up to that point, the poem’s strangeness is largely external—wind, peons, reflection. Now it enters the chest. Colin expects a familiar romantic climax—Now I thought my heart would burst—but what happens is stranger and smaller: spiked like some cadenza’s head, / A tiny crippled heart was born. Instead of one heart breaking open, a new damaged heart appears, an afterbirth of feeling. The musical comparison (cadenza) makes the moment sound like a solo flourish, but the flourish turns into a spike, an injury. This is a poem that refuses the grand, legible heartbreak and gives you a deformed, miniature organ: the emotion is real, but its shape is wrong, and that wrongness is the point.

Parents, “she,” and the desire to be cut down

After the heart’s birth, Colin’s language becomes both more pleading and more violent. She has descended part way! suggests a figure arriving from above—muse, lover, mother, goddess, memory—yet she remains unnamed, only she, like a force rather than a person. Colin’s response is not courtship but self-erasure: Now father cut me down with tears. / Plant me far in my mother’s image. He asks to be felled and replanted, as if the only way to survive the approach of “she” is to become something else entirely—an object in a different lineage. The wish to be planted in the mother’s image leads not to warmth but to labor: cold work of books and stones. Books and stones are both heavy, both durable; they promise permanence at the cost of feeling. The poem’s contradiction here is brutal: Colin wants rescue through origin (father, mother), but that rescue looks like becoming inert—text and rock—rather than becoming whole.

Fragmented dialogue and the failure of “old advice”

Near the end, the alternating voices break into jagged half-lines that don’t truly respond to one another. Cuddie says, I need not raise my hand, a phrase that could mean refusal to strike or refusal to intervene; Colin answers with apocalyptic images: She burns the flying peoples and spears my heart’s two beasts. Cuddie, meanwhile, offers something like traditional consolation—To hear its old advice, or to cover with its mauves—as if the world can be softened with a color, a veil, a pastoral wash. But Colin’s “she” is not pastel; she is incendiary and surgical. The key tension becomes: can inherited language—old advice, courtly titles like O prince, pastoral mauves—do anything against a force that burns and spears? The poem seems to answer no, and that “no” is enacted not by argument but by the way the lines stop lining up, as if the conversation itself cannot bear the load.

How can he “depart unhurt”?

The ending is the poem’s sharpest, quietest provocation. After burning peoples and spearing beasts, Colin concludes, And I depart unhurt. Taken literally, it is almost impossible; taken emotionally, it sounds like a defensive miracle. The poem has shown a heart that splits into a tiny crippled version of itself, a desire to be cut and replanted, an appeal to water that refreshes evil. So unhurt reads less like truth than like the final spell you cast when you can’t bear one more sensation. Yet it’s also possible that “unhurt” means something colder: Colin has succeeded in becoming the thing he requested—book, stone, the kind of person who can leave a burning vision without registering damage.

A question the poem leaves burning at the water’s edge

If Madness is the one who gaze[s] at its reflection, what does it mean that the poem keeps returning to the water anyway? Maybe the water isn’t for healing at all—it’s where the self goes to practice a convincing version of itself, one that can say I depart unhurt while the real damage is displaced into smaller, stranger organs.