Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Rural Tradition by W.J. Keith

1976; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1976.0033

1913-4835

Alec Lucas,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

367 Reviews such as "Beauty like lightning does our Eyes Invade / They that Presume to Gain are Victims made." The queen of hearts shows a woman kneeling before a fire kindled on an altar of Venus, whose statue holds a heart in her hand. The woman prays "Oh! Mighty Venus see my Raging Pain / Behold my flaming heart & bring it back again." For readers familiar with such a deck, the erotic implications of Pope's famous couplet would have been all the more evident: "The Knave of Diamonds tries his wily Arts, / And wins (oh shameful Chance!) the Queen of Hearts. " Or consider that the knave of clubs, "destitute of Aid, / Falls undistinguish' by the Victor SpadeY' This sense of "spade" comes from the Spanish Espada (sword) and is thus part of the heroic vocabulary; but the more common sense of "spade" is "shovel," and the emblem on the cards certainly looks more like a shovel than a sword. Thus this word, like "honour," embraces both a high and low meaning, and is a mock-heroic in miniature. We may be tempted to think that the "victor Spade" also means that all the warriors, however they die, will ultimately be shoveled under the earth by humble grave-diggers. This implication becomes almost inescapable when we see Tracy's king of spades, which depicts a peasant holding his spade broadside to us as he digs in the ground. Surely some of Pope's original readers knew these cards and saw the poem in this way. But this was not the only illustrated deck of cards available to Pope's readers. It is unfortunate that Tracy confined his illustrations to a single deck. One very popular one celebrated the victories of the Duke of Marlborough. What irony is added to the grandiose military imagery of Pope's tiny game if we imagine it being played with these cards ! None of this makes much difference to our overall understanding of the poem, to be sure ; it remains in the realm of hints, implications, and nuances, at (or beyond, you may say) the margins of meaning. Yet this is how Pope often works - in his later political satires as well as in The Rape of the Lock - and any scholarship that helps us see this aspect of his art more clearly is very welcome. william Kinsley / Université de Montréal W.J. Keith, The Rural Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974). xi, 310. $15.00 With commendable books on the "nature writers" Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Richard Jefferies to his credit, W.J. Keith, in The Rural Tradition, set himself a similar, but much bigger, task of making "a study of the non-fiction prose writers of the English countryside," and he has succeeded in presenting an interesting and perceptive analysis of the work of several English essayists on any score, but especially as it relates to one of the oldest themes in literature. There have been books on some of his authors and individual articles on others, 368 English Studies in Canada but no comprehensive treatment of them and the tradition in which they wrote. From the beginning Keith recognized the size of his ambitious undertaking and has presented his study, not as a survey (except in the "Introduction," which defines terms, and the "Conclusion," which discusses one or two lesser nineteenth-century and a few contemporary authors), but as a series of specific chapters on the eleven people who, he holds, have contributed most to the rural literary tradition. Keith begins his selection with Walton and The Compleat Angler and traces the early line of succession through Gilbert White, the only representative from the eighteenth century, to William Cobbett, who lived and wrote during the trying times of the Industrial Revolution when, Keith maintains, the tradition struck firm root. Of the other eight writers Keith has chosen, all, with the exceptions of H.J. Massingham (1888-1952) and Henry Williamson (b 1896), are, significantly, nineteenth-century people, the list comprising Mary Russell Mitford, George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, George Sturt / "George Bourne," W.H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas. Although Raymond Williams contends that the date of the beginning of the so...