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These, too, are tinged with premonitions of loss that give shape to their georgic pleasures.

But only Blunk, aware that Wright had translated Virgil’s Third “Georgic” and committed much of “My Antonia” to memory, can tell you for certain that Wright knew both versions and chose Cather’s.

There is an impulse in these poems to inventory the natural world without the palliatives of conventional description; the paradox, as old as classical pastoral and georgic, is that our nature is to describe, an imperative that seems perfectly unnatural when measured against the unselfconscious work of bees or ants or oxen.

A dog is “passant, sejant then couchant,” and beekeepers go about “their Georgic business…mobled in muslin, calm-browed comb-setters and swarm-handlers of the scattered thorps.”

At the end of his first Georgic Virgil prays for the triumph of the one hope which the world saw—for the preservation and the rule of the young C�sar, and he sums up in a few lines the horror from which mankind seeks to be delivered.