There lies toward the summit of Parthenio, no mean mountain of shepherd Arcadia, a delectable plain, not very ample in size, being bounded by the build of the place, but so full of fine and greenest herbage that only the sportive flocks, feeding there greedily, hinder perpetual verdure. [Follows a list of its trees, with appropriate adjectives and allusions. In spring, when the glade is at its best, shepherds meet there to match their skill with lance or bow, with leap and rustic song. At such a time Ergasto, moping apart, was challenged by Selvaggio in terza rima.]
Such are the prelude to Arcadia and its first eclogue; and so it continues. For the whole book is an alternating series of prose descriptions and lyrics. There is no narrative sequence and arrival. We are bidden to linger in Arcadia, to move only from one grouping to another. The alternation of prose and verse, as old as Boethius, was new for pastoral. For its time the fluent rhythmic prose, at once easy and regulated, was the distinctive achievement. The verse is competent in a considerable range of meters. Both prose and verse, whether in reminiscence of pastoral hexameters or in feeling for a rhythm natural to Italian speech, are largely dactylic. Meter XII ends with a dactyl every one of its 325 lines; but Sannazaro’s habit is no such tour de force. His dactyls are not insistent; they are merely predominant in a pleasant variety. For he is studious of variation. In the first eclogue Ergasto’s reply links some ten tercets by internal rhyme (lines 61-91):
Menando un giorno l’agni presso un fiume,
Viddi un bel lume in mezzo di quell’onde,
Che con due bionde trezze allor me strinse,
Et me dipinse un volto in mezzo al core,
Che di colore avanza lacte e rose;
Poy si nascose immodo dentro all’alma,
Che d’altra salma non me aggrava il peso.
and then resumes the terza rima. In Meter II, lines 86-96, the responses begin by repeating the rival’s last line, somewhat as in the refrains of popular poetry. Sannazaro is a careful artist.