Comparison Of Being Mucking Out 'And The Georgic'

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“O greatly fortunate farmers, if only they knew/How lucky they are!” Virgil proclaims, expressing in a single sentence the admiration for all aspects of pastoral life that he and his fellow pastoral writers share and convey through their poetry (Virgil 83). In “The Zen of Mucking Out” and The Georgics, both Maxine Kumin and Virgil make use of word choice and imagery to embrace and even exalt the often unglamorous and constant labor required by pastoral living while simultaneously rejecting chaotic non-rural life; additionally, the Georgics and Robert Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” both illustrate a characteristic that unites almost all pastoral literature: the dichotomy between natural beauty and vitality and seemingly …show more content…

In “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Frost views a disaster – in this case, a devastating fire that decimates a farmhouse – through the lens of a pastoral writer, choosing not to dwell on the seemingly hopeless situation, but to focus on the signs of beauty and vitality that appear in the blaze’s wake. For instance, he compares the lone chimney left in the charred husk of the farmhouse to “a pistil after the petals go,” and describes “birds that came to it through the air/at broken windows flew out and in” (Frost 4, 13-14). Through his word choice in describing the remnants of the fire and the birds that make their home there, Frost skillfully juxtaposes the harsh reality of disasters that can befall farms with the natural beauty and life that persevere through such setbacks. The entire piece, therefore, has a tone of rebirth and beauty in the face of devastation. Virgil’s writings in The Georgics echo this dichotomy of beauty and disaster in multiple places, though perhaps not in such a dramatic fashion as Frost does. He describes a desolate landscape, but then contrasts the apparent hopelessness with the landscapes advantageous

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