A violin, a field, a storm: in four short lines Dave Bonta turns a peaceful landscape into a place where something unseen is on the move. The title, "Pastoral Symphony," promises calm. The poem lets that calm last for exactly one stanza, then undermines it.
The first stanza is a picture with no action in it: "the flutter of a violin / over the fields." There is no verb, only a noun phrase, so the image hangs in the air like the sound it describes. The word "flutter" is the first hint of unease. It suits a violin's trembling tone, and it also suggests wings, leaves, or a pulse that is slightly too quick. "Over the fields" then lifts the music out of the concert hall and lets it drift across open ground, as if the landscape were being played rather than just listened to.
The second stanza brings in verbs and with them a sense of threat: "what secret armies come quietly here / where it storms." The poem has no punctuation and no capital letters, so the first line could be a question ("what secret armies come?") or an exclamation of wonder or dread. The reader has to decide, and the poem gives no help. The phrase "secret armies" is the poem's strangest and most productive image. The poem never says what they are. They might be raindrops, wind moving through grass, the notes of the music, or something more menacing. The choice of "armies" brings in the vocabulary of invasion, and "secret" suggests that the attack is going on unnoticed, perhaps inside the music itself.
The paradox of "come quietly" is worth pausing on. Armies are loud, and storms are loud too. Yet these armies arrive in silence "where it storms," as though the visible storm were a distraction and the real event were happening underneath it. The impersonal "it" in "it storms" works like the "it" in "it rains." The weather acts, but nobody and nothing is named as the actor. The armies are the poem's attempt to give that blank "it" a shape.
The poem's sound reinforces this shift. The first stanza is soft and airy, built from the f and v sounds of "flutter," "violin," and "fields." The second stanza turns harder and more hissing: "secret," "come," "quietly," "storms." The k sounds click like footsteps and the s sounds seem to whisper. There is no rhyme, and the poem does not need one. Its line lengths do the work instead. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly eight, four, ten, and three, so the second stanza starts with the longest line of the poem and ends with the shortest. The enjambment of "here / where" is just as important. "Here" briefly feels like an arrival, and then "where it storms" fills in the place with weather, so the destination turns out to be the storm itself. The poem stops on "storms," a single stressed syllable, with no resolution after it.
For many readers the title will also recall Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, known as the "Pastoral," which includes a thunderstorm movement in the middle of its country scenes. The poem does not mention Beethoven, so any connection is an inference, but it fits: a musical form built to celebrate nature that has a storm inside it. Even without that echo, the title does its job by setting up an expectation of peace that the poem disturbs.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. The pastoral tradition usually treats the countryside as a refuge. Here the countryside is both beautiful and under quiet siege, and music, which we expect to soothe, seems to carry the warning. The compression recalls haiku, which leaves a gap between two images and trusts the reader to cross it. The gap between the violin and the armies is not explained, and the reader's imagination has to supply the army. Having done that, the reader is left with the unsettling suggestion that the most dangerous things in a landscape may be the ones that arrive without a sound.