SOURCE: Scott, Peter Dale. “Alcuin's Versus de Cuculo: The Vision of Pastoral Friendship.” Studies in Philology 62, no. 4 (July 1965): 510-30.

In the following essay, Scott examines the symbolic meaning of the cuckoo in a poem by Alcuin, arguing that he used this central image as a means of sublimating the expressions of desire contained within the poem.

Though I believe Alcuin to have been the innovator of Christian pastoral, I cannot claim that he showed any great interest in perfecting the genre as such. Indeed, he seems almost to have stumbled upon it by accident. We must remember that, when he began to write, the terms pastoralis and ecloga were both too vague to have any precise connotation, though by his death they were re-established as formal genres.¹ From the standpoint of his contemporaries, Alcuin's “pastorals” are always examples of some other form: the Conflictus Veris et Hiemis is...