- pastoral
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—pastorally, adv./pas"teuhr euhl, pah"steuhr-/, adj.1. having the simplicity, charm, serenity, or other characteristics generally attributed to rural areas: pastoral scenery; the pastoral life.2. pertaining to the country or to life in the country; rural; rustic.3. portraying or suggesting idyllically the life of shepherds or of the country, as a work of literature, art, or music: pastoral poetry; a pastoral symphony.4. of, pertaining to, or consisting of shepherds.5. of or pertaining to a pastor or the duties of a pastor: pastoral visits to a hospital.6. used for pasture, as land.n.7. a poem, play, or the like, dealing with the life of shepherds, commonly in a conventional or artificial manner, or with simple rural life generally; a bucolic.8. a picture or work of art representing the shepherds' life.9. Music. pastorale.10. a treatise on the duties of a pastor.11. a letter to the people from their spiritual pastor.12. a letter to the clergy or people of an ecclesiastical district from its bishop.
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Literary work dealing in a usually artificial manner with shepherds or rural life, typically contrasting the innocence and serenity of the simple life with the misery and corruption of city or court life.The characters are often the vehicles for the author's moral, social, or literary views. The poet and his friends are often presented as shepherds and shepherdesses; two or more shepherds sometimes contend in "singing matches." The conventions of pastoral poetry were largely established by Theocritus, whose bucolics are its earliest examples. Virgil's Eclogues were influential as well, as was Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender in the Renaissance. The idea of pastoral as meaning a simpler world that somehow mirrors a more complex one also appears in novelists as different as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll, and William Faulkner. See also eclogue.* * *
Universalium. 2010.