/lit/ - Literature

Just finished Virgil's Ecolouges (C.Day Lewis trans) and it made me smile a little. The idyllic, Theocritean scenes, in natural settings, of either groups of peasants singing or single songs, each about matters vital in different ways (love and livelihood), written in a self-conscious, impractically poetic fashion (Virgil almost admitting, as he has one of the men admit outright in Ecolouge IX that
>... poems/ Stand no more chance, where the claims of soldiers are involved,
poetry is a quite useless thing in these pressing times), especially when one takes into consideration the fact these poems were written against the backdrop of land confiscations and in a time of intense strife, where pretty poems were little needed vs. more important matters such as a person's livelihood.

It was a bittersweet smile I had, considering the dreamy nature of these poems against a background of grief, and yet despite their dreamy nature, Virgil embeds them with many hardships otherwise, never allowing his work to be reduced to mere political allegory. Being a farmer himself, one can easily see how much he longs for simpler times.
Going to read the Georgics next week and then the Aeneid.