The Working Body’s Decline

Abstract Chapter 2 examines Mary Leapor’s ‘Colinetta’ (1748), which braids together pastoral, georgic, and elegy to represent the disturbing slide of the beleaguered body of working georgic, labouring against nature’s decline, into the dying body of elegiac pastoral—a haunting inversion of the idyllic lives of shepherds traditionally understood as pastoral’s principal subject. Leapor’s ‘Colinetta’ dwells in a sombre relation to this genre and uses the churchyard to depict the end of a body whose labours—of both georgic work and pastoral song—can no longer be performed. Chapter 2 also reads into the tradition of topographical poetry, which is pushed to engage with new territories of feeling in Ann Yearsley’s ‘Clifton Hill’ (1785). Topographical poetry is typically organized by confident possession of a landscape experienced through an oscillation of fixed prospects seen from an eminence and more dynamic involvements from within the scene—an experience unpicked by Yearsley, whose physical movement is halting and whose imaginative and poetic ventures are always under threat. The difficulty Yearsley feels in occupying Clifton Hill as a working woman is cathected in the poem’s churchyard scene, where lofty heights collapse in trembling depths and the prospect view is agonized by its vertiginous drop into the grave.