An Analysis Of Lactilla's Poem, An Inspector Calls

It is Lactilla’s position—and in turn where the reader is directed—that serves as a marked challenge to the pastoral mode. In the above scene, Yearsley’s presentation of the pastoral has her persona, Lactilla, engage with domestic images: “the kitchen fire,” “the low cottage door,” and the presence of her “fav’rite cow” do not take the reader to idealized versions of Bristol’s natural splendor; instead, the poem demands that Lactilla remain in a highly domestic space, and that she stay firmly in view of the cottage, the fire, and the hedgerows which serve as a barrier between herself and her milking cow and any notion of a boundless landscape. The tensions between the “kitchen fire” and Lactilla’s “shivering” frame give way to the ending of winter and the arrival of spring (35-65).
Yearsley shows a typical pastoral scene, one that honors the solitary walker, the observer of village custom and tradition. She does this while also distorting that pastoral image through the observer’s removal from the action within the games. The representation of the laboring-classes in this scene, however, troubles the idyllic picture of springtime