Word of the Day

: May 28, 2009

eclogue

noun ECK-log

What It Means

: a poem in which shepherds converse

eclogue in Context

"Be it in the appropriation of the goatherd or shepherd in the pastoral eclogue, or the neatly controlled terraces of the Georgics, the pastoral has always been an idyllicised representation of the rural world...." (John Kinsella, The Literary Review, January 2005)

Did You Know?

Although the eclogue first appeared in the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus, it was the 10 Eclogues (or Bucolics) of the Roman poet Virgil that gave us the word "eclogue." (The Latin title "Eclogae" literally meant "selections.") The eclogue was popular in the Renaissance and through the 17th century, when less formal eclogues were written. As our example sentence suggests, the eclogue traditionally depicted rural life as free from the complexity and corruption of more citified realms. The poets of the Romantic period rebelled against the artificiality of the older pastoral, and the eclogue fell out of favor. In more modern times, though, the term "eclogue" has been applied to pastoral poems involving the conversations of people other than shepherds, often with heavy doses of irony.