答案是:From Latin pastor, a shepherd. The first pastoral poet was Theocritus, a Greek of the 3rd century B.C. The pastoral was especially popular in Europe from the 14th through the 18th centuries, with some fine examples still written in England in the 19th century. The pastoral mode is self-reflexive. Typically the poet echoes the conventions of earlier pastorals in order to put "the complex into the simple," as William Empson observed in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). The poem is not really about shepherds, but about the complex society the poet and readers inhabit.
