The pastoral tradition in poetry presents shepherds in a rustic setting. They may not be actual shepherds but are presented as such as part of the artificial convention of the genre. “Pastor” is the Latin word for shepherd. In a pastoral elegy, the poet laments the death of a friend, and the whole of nature also mourns the loss. Often, the elegy offers a hope of immortality for the one who is mourned, or there may be other forms of consolation with which the poem ends.

The earliest pastoral poems were the Idylls by the ancient Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the life of shepherds in Sicily in the third century BC. The pastoral form was developed by the Roman poet Virgil, in the first century BC. In his Eclogues and Georgics, Virgil presented an idealized picture of the simplicity of rural life. The influence of both these poets can be seen in Milton’s “Lycidas.” For example, Theocritus’s Thyrsis (Idyll 1), a lament for the poet shepherdess Daphnis, begins with the following lines:

Thyrsis of Ætna am I, and this is the voice of Thyrsis.