Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Song V

SONG V.

Pastoral convention

The weeping spring mirrors Araminta's tears—standard pastoral machinery. Barbauld's setting this up to undercut it.

AS near a weeping spring reclin'd
The beauteous Araminta pin'd,
And mourn'd a false ungrateful youth;
While dying echoes caught the sound,
And spread the soft complaints around
Of broken vows and alter'd truth;
An aged shepherd heard her moan,
And thus in pity's kindest tone
Address'd the lost despairing maid:
Cease, cease unhappy fair to grieve,
For sounds, tho' sweet, can ne'er relieve
A breaking heart by love betray'd.
Why should'st them waste such precious showers,
That fall like dew on wither'd flowers,
But dying passion ne'er restor'd?
In beauty's empire is no mean,

No middle ground

**Mean** = middle position. Women in 18th-century courtship had binary status: worshipped or worthless. This is the poem's thesis.

And woman, either slave or queen,
Is quickly scorn'd when not ador'd.
Those liquid pearls from either eye,

Oriental hyperbole

Tears worth an empire—conventional lover's exaggeration. The shepherd mocks how love poetry overvalues women's beauty while real society undervalues their autonomy.

Which might an eastern empire buy,
Unvalued here and fruitless fall;
No art the season can renew
When love was young, and Damon true;

Pastoral names

**Damon** is the stock shepherd-lover name from classical pastoral. The generic name suggests all lovers are interchangeable.

No tears a wandering heart recall.
Cease, cease to grieve, thy tears are vain,
Should those fair orbs in drops of rain

Southern sky

Mediterranean climate reference—those skies weep for days. Even infinite tears won't work, he says.

Vie with a weeping southern sky:
For hearts o'ercome with love and grief
All nature yields but one relief;
Die, hapless Araminta, die.

The advice

The shepherd's solution to heartbreak is literal death. Barbauld is satirizing how pastoral poetry treats women's suffering as decorative.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Barbauld's Anti-Pastoral

This poem pretends to be conventional pastoral—shepherds, weeping maidens, classical names—then uses those conventions to expose how love poetry trivializes women's actual powerlessness. The aged shepherd seems to offer comfort but delivers increasingly brutal advice: your tears are worthless, you can't get him back, you should die.

The key line is "In beauty's empire is no mean"—there's no middle position for women in courtship. You're either "slave or queen" and the moment adoration stops, you become scorned. This isn't the shepherd being cruel; it's Barbauld describing 18th-century social reality through his mouth. Women's value was entirely dependent on men's desire.

The shepherd systematically dismisses every resource Araminta has: her tears could "buy an eastern empire" but are "unvalued here." No "art" (skill/artifice) can restore the relationship. The hyperbolic imagery (tears worth empires, competing with southern skies) emphasizes how love poetry inflates women's beauty while they remain powerless. Barbauld wrote this in the 1770s, when she was arguing for women's education and rational companionship in marriage—this poem shows what happens when women have beauty but no autonomy.

The final advice—"Die, hapless Araminta, die"—is the logical endpoint of treating women as decorative objects. If your only value is being adored, what's left when adoration ends? Barbauld isn't endorsing this; she's making the reader recoil from it. The poem is a trap: it looks like pastoral comfort, reveals itself as pastoral cruelty, and forces you to question why this genre treats female suffering as entertainment.