V is for Vergil, who took what was a fleeting bit of background music in Homer,
that strain of elegy, and made it the central, inescapable condition of the
Aeneid. All those exquisite passages of lament and exhaustion, of time passing
and life lost, all that elegiac grace that seems to make of the Aeneid a long
lyric, mark Vergil as the first great gardener in the landscape of grief, and
the father of pastoral elegy. Is it a negligible irony or not that our vision
of pastoral elegy derives so much from the beauty of the Underworld? I know
only that any description of landscape has within it an elusiveness, an
unobtainableness that goes beyond the seasonal cycles and what they mean, and
that suggests something like the constant flourishing of a finality in which
we are confronted with the limits of our feeling. We end up lamenting the loss
of something we never possessed.
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