The Country

The "country" is one of several settings that do not appear in the poem, but to which the speaker alludes (3). The speaker refers to the "country" as a metaphor for the simple state that he was in prior to meeting his beloved. The country is associated with a state of childlike innocence. This is also significant because it refers to another important genre at the time of the poem's authorship, the pastoral. Pastoral poetry celebrated the joys of a supposedly simple, rural life, where humans were united with nature and did not have to worry about complex issues (though this was often not true of the poetry itself, which used the mask of simplicity to lodge broader political and social commentary). Reversing that notion, the speaker here celebrates the move away from this state of innocence and into the more mature state of love in which he...