Shifting Perspectives of the Pastoral in Karen Solie’s “Mole” and Mark Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis”

by Jackson Pinkowski

The pastoral is a genre which demands rethinking in late modernity. The return to a nature defined by simplicity is a possibility which seems fleeting with the passing of days, and to wholly depict nature in art, one must look further than the shepherd and his love. The desire for a shift in the point of view of the pastoral is reflected in two recent poems by prominent environmentalist writers – “Mole” by Karen Solie and “Tereticornis” by Mark Tredennick. The poems, named after an animal and a plant respectively, are imbued with a keen understanding of the pastoral tradition, making their focus on non-human entities more nuanced and thought-provoking. These urban poets do not long for a simple or singular nature but delve into a specific part of their environment and its dynamism. Each poem carves its respective path through the genre, converging in a similar subject matter and use of figurative language but diverging through varied effects of stanza, sound, and voice. Solie’s “Mole” and Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis” align in subverting the pastoral genre through a change of focus from the human to the non-human but differ in their use of form and technique.

“Mole” and “Tereticornis,” as hinted in their titles, upgrade the genre of the pastoral in focussing not on humans but on plants and non-human animals. Their content is not rooted in the tradition of a passionate shepherd or the naïve urban poet; instead, it is defined by the agency of the non-human. In Solie’s poem, the speaker opposes the mole’s presence, which initially seems to deny this creature its own existence. However, in positioning this animal as an enemy, the speaker affords the mole agency; in the poem, the animal can think, plan, and retaliate. In the first line, one begins to see the power which the mole wields: “Those new flagstones need undermining.” In listing the damage that the mole has or is going to cause in this garden, the speaker creates a series of deliberate actions that this animal inflicts. The choice of “undermining” highlights this: the mole is digging underneath the stone and also generally sabotaging and weakening the power of human impositions upon its environment. The mole is a subject explored much more than any human in the poem. It experiences fear and defeat, followed by revival and victory. Solie creates an animal which is able to act upon humans, just as humans can act upon it – a novel concept to the pastoral. The titular tereticornis of Tredinnick’s poem, meanwhile, is the subject from which the whole poem evolves. The history and ecology of Australia come into focus through the lens of this specific plant – a wildly radical shift of character in pastoral poetry. The agency of the tereticornis is strong in the section of the poem that describes the arrival of settlers: it is “unready / For timber that wanted to splinter so many hopes of hearth and / unhouse so many thoughts of home” (6–8). The tree actively resists the attempts to destroy it and, further, wishes to end the construction of houses. The tereticornis is strong and durable, with wood that is difficult to work, thus being able to thwart both the settlers who wished to build a home and the naïve pastoral poets who are ignorant of the true conditions of the environment. In “Mole” and “Tereticornis,” the animal and the plant are the axis around which the poem revolves, offering a new focus for the often anthropocentric genre of the pastoral.

The first significant way in which the two poems diverge is in the choice of setting. Solie’s “Mole” takes place in a garden, referencing the oft-used pastoral motif of the garden of Eden, the most famous example being Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The garden is transformed into an idyllic representation of nature unspoiled by human sin; however, the poet subverts this pillar of the pastoral by placing it under attack, not by humans but by nature itself. In describing the garden, the speaker offers the reader a glimpse into what this supposed paragon of nature looks like: “the concrete sundial could use a tilt and while he’s at it / he’ll make a disaster of the borders” (2–3). In this instance, the garden is neither a signifier of nature nor is it verily a garden. Instead, the speaker describes a collection of human-made artifacts and concepts that one associates with the so-called garden; nowhere in nature does the “flagstone,” the “sundial,” or the “border” appear. Whereas Solie’s poem takes place in the garden, the setting of Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis” is what is commonly thought of as nature. Most of the Australian coast is a prime example of what many view as an unspoiled wilderness, a repeatedly imagined space in the pastoral genre. However, Tredinnick, too, finds a way to write an ecosystem not fit for simple and singular categorization. The speaker commends the tereticornis for being able to prosper in its environment, which he describes as a “slow-tempered place on earth” (15). The adjective used to describe this location has its root in the verb “to temper,” signifying the way in which the ecosystem heats and dries to an extreme and then cools. Conversely, this adjective points to a noun, the temper which belongs to the land and imbues it with a certain harshness. Either way one interprets “slow-tempered,” the result is the same: Tredinnick represents an ecosystem neither simplistic nor naively pleasant. Solie and Tredinnick place their poems in iconic yet different settings of the pastoral genre and subvert them, creating environments not solely interested in the human but in plants and animals too.

The stanza form is an exciting aspect of both poems due to their lack of adherence to any one kind in particular.While there are fleeting moments of metre, the two are written in free verse with no consistent rhyme scheme. The way in which Tredinnick arranges the poem, with continuing varied indentations, creates a unique shape and transforms the beginnings and ends of lines into a series of protruding horns, invoking the image of the titular plant. The tereticornis, the poem’s namesake, was given its epithet due to the sharp covering of its flower, teret meaning cylindrical and cornis, in Latin, horn. Dually, the juts that the stanza forms make one recall the hills and ridges upon which the tree sits. It is also possible that this serpentine form is supposed to invoke the river of the “flooded redgum,” another name for the tereticornis (1). In shifting the indentations of the poem, Tredinnick creates a stanza which makes the reader question not only the ways in which poetry captures nature but also the ways in which nature shapes poetry. The form of Solie’s “Mole,” on the other hand, is a single unbroken stanza of eighteen lines. This straightforward and clinical approach to the stanza form reflects the ideals of the speaker. It does not inspire the image of nature as “Tereticornis” does, but rather reminds the reader of the artifice of the garden; a clean line runs down the edge of the poem. However, every line of the poem is enjambed, this pattern ending only in the penultimate line. Only at the end of the poem, once the mole has had its victory over human order, is a feeling of continuity or completion created. Using stanza in two innovative and distinct ways, Solie and Tredinnick show how the form can be used to represent nature in the pastoral genre.

The use of sound is another point where the two poems differ, particularly in the device of alliteration. In “Mole,” there is a striking use of consonance, whereas in “Tereticornis,” it is assonance which is most compelling. The tone of cold sterility which marks the poetic voice of “Mole” proliferates in the poem’s sound. For instance, the speaker describes the mole as “polydactylic and psychoanalytically proportioned” (11). The repeated voiceless consonants (hard “c” and “t”) create a staccato sound, which reminds the reader of the harshness and hostility that the speaker has towards the mole, and the two adjectives are far too rational and cerebral to fit the mole. In “Tereticornis,” assonance is used all throughout the poem, lightening it. While Solie’s alliteration divided the line into harsh consonants, Tredinnick’s assonance creates unity within the passage, leading the reader from one word to the next: “Above the farm they found arrayed around the bay” (Tredinnick 9-10). The short and long “a” sounds remind the audience of the lasting beauty of the tereticornis. Despite the incursion of “farm,” one of the only words that does not fit into this repetition of vowels, the landscape’s effect is still felt. In Solie’s use of consonance, the reader can see anthropocentric thought sharply dividing human from nature, while Tredinnick’s unifying assonance conveys the strengths of a pastoral genre with nature as its focus.

The two speakers, who narrate “Mole” and “Tereticornis,” respectively, introduce two new voices into the pastoral genre. As mentioned previously, the speaker of “Mole” is remarkable in the distaste expressed towards the titular creature; the thinking is purely constructed around the frameworks of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. The speaker can only describe the actions of the mole through the language of a middle-class human life. This is plainly seen when she states that when the mole “comes of age, he’ll rejoin his live / work situation as a manager and sole proprietor of our old estate” (15-18). This characterization of the mole makes it a human-like creature ruled by the same abstract cultural concepts as a man, an idea that is completely false. Even the animal’s own name invites the speaker’s anthropomorphic gaze. The mole becomes an undercover intelligence officer plotting the speaker’s downfall. The anthropomorphism of the speaker ironically calls attention to her inability to look outside a human and Western framework. The speaker of “Tereticornis,” by contrast, is the opposite of Solie’s. This voice has a keen understanding of the flora belonging to the land. It engages in a similar, albeit tamer, anthropomorphism to that used in “Mole” but results in a wildly different effect. The speaker describes the tereticornis scratching “with long fingers across the blue back of the sky” or even as “a mob / Of them, a mnemonic chorus-line, genies of the place” (3, 10-11). Although the plant is described by human descriptors, it animates and creates nuance rather than simplicity or cliché. The speaker of the poem adheres to an animism that views all things, despite their material differences, with the same interior existence, making them animated and alive. This would describe why the trees can exhibit these human traits and actions, as they too are subjects. The speaker’s sensitivity to indigenous life is also reflected in the tereticornis’ ability “to prosper through six / Seasons yearly” (14-15). This passage may puzzle Western readers regarding the additional number of seasons; however, the six-season calendar is the standard for many indigenous tribes of Australia, being able to represent its dry and wet seasons more accurately (Government of Australia). In the anthropocentric poetic persona of “Mole” Solie satirizes the traditional speaker of the pastoral, whereas Tredinnick offers a potential replacement in the animistic and indigenous.

In depicting the return to ideal simplicity through nature, the pastoral genre often turns nature into nothing more than a simplistic ideal. Poets Karen Solie and Mark Tredinnick have discovered this flaw within nature writing, and their works seek to correct its course. Though the poems “Mole” and “Tereticornis” take different approaches, whether it be varied use of stanza and sound or wildly different speakers, they arrive at the same goal; that is the refocusing of the pastoral back upon the environment and the plants and animals that inhabit it.

Works Cited

Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology. “Indigenous Weather Knowledge.” D’harawal Calendar - Indigenous Weather Knowledge, 2016, http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml

Karen Solie “Mole.” The Norton Anthology Poetry, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 2147.

Mark Tredinnick. “Tereticornis.” Walking Underwater, World Square, Australia, Pitt Street Poetry, 2021, p. 70

Jackson Pinkowski was born and raised in Toronto. He is an undergraduate student at McGill University majoring in English literature and Russian studies.