"Beechwood Park"

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Last year I started a project in which I read all of my literary anthologies.  I started with The Norton Introduction to Literature, 5th edition (which I'm still reading over a year later).  A few days ago, I read some things about pastoral poems.  After Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," which the Norton provides as an example of a pastoral poem, it says that the pastoral genre is

a poetic kind that concerns itself with the simple life of country folk and describes that life in stylized, idealized terms.  The people in a pastoral poem are usually (as here) shepherds, although they may be fishermen or other rustics who lead an outdoor life and are involved in tending basic human needs in a simplified society; the world of the poem is one of simplicity, beauty, music, and love.  The world always seems timeless in pastoral; people are eternally young, and the season is always spring, usually May.  Nature seems endlessly green and the future entirely golden.  Difficulty, frustration, disappointment, and obligation do not belong in this world at all; it is blissfully free of problems.

As I read this, I got to thinking about "Beechwood Park."  I'd never thought of it as pastoral before, but I think it does belong in the category even though it doesn't match all of the conventions that the Norton lays out.

I could probably make a case for each of the factors listed above (save for spring, since "Beechwood Park" takes place in summer), but what I think is most interesting about "Beechwood Park" as pastoral poem is the colors.  The Norton says that in pastoral poems, "Nature seems endlessly green and the future entirely golden," and those are the only two colors mentioned in "Beechwood Park."  The first verse starts with "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain / When all the air was damp and warm in the green of country lanes," and the second with "Do you remember golden days and golden summer sun."

In the BBC Mastertapes interview, Rod Argent says something about Odessey and Oracle's being about color:  "A lot of the songs were about color and colors."  They're talking about the mellotron, so it seems like they're talking more about tone color and the particular timbre of the mellotron, but since it's "color and colors," literal color (like the green and gold of "Beechwood Park") might be included in that too.  In any case, "Beechwood Park" uses color in a way that aligns it with the conventions of pastoral poetry, at least as they're outlined by the Norton.