One of the more memorable longish (nine-page) poems of the late twentieth century is Philip Hodgins’s “Second Thoughts on The Georgics”  (Animal Warmth [North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1990]. Aware both in the title and throughout the poem of Virgil,  Hodgins* considers how well the georgic mode reflects the agricultural practices in Australia before the millennium.

Hodgins poem is very much a georgic.  It is full of the “best” recommendations, advice that come out of the sense that “There’s a kind of satisfaction from doing  things   . . . thoroughly.”  There are thoughts on how to grow wheat,  on how to start a vineyard, on how to maintain a herd of cows,  on how to break a horse,  on how to train dogs, and on how to keep pigs healthy.  The didactic voice gives bit of advice after bit of advice:

 

Use of neighbor’s chisel and plow [to cultivate the ground] —

they’re too expensive to buy you own

 

. . .

don’t buy pre-grown vines from a nursery—

you can easily pick up the cuttings

when someone else is pruning theirs.

 

. . . be careful

not to leave loose bailing-twine in the paddock.

 

Certainly never rake hay on a windy day.

 

. . . the best thing is to get in early

and spray your pasture with black oil.

 

Make sure the [pig] pens have a concrete floor

with good gutters and a decent fall

so they can be washed out easily.

Some of this advice stresses what should be done during certain months of the year.  There are the moments of practiced attentiveness we would expect from someone concerned with a livelihood dependent upon the interaction of plants and weather; a jocular instance suggest that a farmer can tell when seasonal change occurs by attending to television advertisements. And there are cautionary tales.  When a wheat farmer brought his kid along when delivering a harvest to a silo, the kid fell into the silo and the wheat “swallowed him like quicksand.” When a pig owner did not attend to the cleanliness of his pigs, the pigs “came down with a dose of leptopsosis.  And the speaker recounts how once got “drenched to the bone with DDT” and “felt sick as a dog later on.”

Mixed with the advice—and to an extent shaping the advice—is complaint.  The poem opens by saying “You’d have to be out of your mind / to want to run a farm these days.”  Satisfying as the work—along with the mastery entailed in developing the sense of “fine-tuning” required—is, “there’s bugger-all money in it.”  There may be “tax write-offs,” but crops do not go for “a fair price.”   Moreover, “There’d hardly be a farmer in Australia / who hasn’t got something wrong with his health.”

With the complaints come the second thoughts about the georgic.  One second thought has to do with whether the georgic is a nostalgic mode.  Farming, the poem contends, is a vocation that, after one has left it to live in “a rented room in a city,” one “might remember” for its good moments and accordingly “feel . . . drawn back there/ to those wet paddocks imbued with light.”  Here the poem acknowledges how, like the pastoral, the georgic can have a nostalgic feel.  But the remembered glow of radiance—along with, perhaps, the reminder “of home”—is not what a farmer focuses on while he works; he focuses on the value of the work, on doing it well.  Another second thought concerns whether the georgic—a mode that gives useful advice—is itself useful.  Is the mode still meaningful?  Hodgins worries that it is not:

They might be useful for writing down

a bit of didactic pastoral stuff

in a language that reminds  you of home

but that’s about where it ends.

If Virgil were here I reckon he’d agree.

The georgic, Hodgins worries, is no more than artful language, no more than an aesthetic form that contains words and advice that—given what has happened to farming as an economic activity—make little sense.

–Bill

*For a biography on Philip Hodgins:  http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/hodgins-philip