This eclogue was cracked open for me by Ashley Sarpong, assistant professor of British literature at Stanislaus State University in California. She revealed so much that’s going in this poem at the level of genre, and much that’s funny and delightful about it. It’s a classic eclogue, structurally, in that it starts with an exchange between two temperamentally contrasting shepherds and ends with a little story about sheep and wolves.
Thank you to Joe Minden for, this month not only playing the part of Diggon the morose shepherd but also describing the woodcut and taking my recorder on a field trip to Bristol where he asked his expert friend, folk musician Nick Hart, to peruse shepherd-themed folk songs in the Roud index. A huge thank you to Ashley Sarpong for a wonderful conversation, thank you to NH Chaundler for the fifth installment of her continuous response to the shepherds calender from the Scottish borderlands, thank you to Ella Mahony for the logo, thank you to Theo Addis for technical advice and help, and especial thank you to Femi Oriogun-Williams for mixing and mastering the episode, as always, but also for fixing an especially thorny sound problem that would have run us aground, without his help.
