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A Song of Farms
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May 12, 2010
- Posted by: margaret
3 Comments
- Chansonetta and Joshua explore the dewy morn
In honor of the season and the wakening farm, I’ve been reading Janet Lembke’s beautiful translation of the Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. Written between 37 and 30 BC, the poem is both a celebration of the natural world and a treatise on farming. It’s lovely and lyrical, and has been bringing a thoughtful quiet to the end of my day. Surprisingly, much of its practical advice is also relevant (though I have no idea what arbutus leaves are…).
Some instructions on goat keeping from Book Three:
…I exhort you to supply your goats with arbutus leaves and provide access to a fresh stream and place their pens away from the wind, facing the south and the winter sun at the time that Aquarius begins to set and sprinkle the end of the year with cold rain. The nannies, too, must be tended with no trifling care, and profit from their milk will be no less, although Anatolian wool dyed in Tyrian purple is traded for a high price. From them, sturdier kids; from them, a great plenty of milk; the more the pail brims with foam from the emptying udder, the more free the rivers that stream from pressure on the teats. Not less, meanwhile, do herdsmen cut the beards from the hoary chins of Libyan billy goats and shear their coarse hair to use in soldiers’ tents and jackets for shivering seamen. They browse in the woods, yes, and on Arcadian summits, feeding on sharp brambles and thorny shrubs that love steep places; leading their kids, they themselves remember to come home, and they barely clear the doorstep with their bulging udders. Thus, the less their want for human care, the more eagerly you should protect them from ice and snow-bearing winds, cheerfully providing them with hay and brushy fodder, nor should you ever close your hayloft for the whole winter.