Marvell's self-conscious exploration of pastoral paradoxes makes his poetry a convenient stopping place for this study: it provides us both with a sense that pastoral has, in effect, ended where it began, and with a very clear consciousness of the arbitrariness of such “beginnings” and “endings.” If much of his poetry seems to be a farewell to pastoral, it is well to remember that this is a space that has always been occupied by pastoral poetry – and it is a space that pastoral will continue to inhabit. The self-contradictory constructions that Marvell appears to push to their limits reappear, in different forms, not only in contemporary works like Paradise Lost – in which prelapsarian nature is created by an art supremely self-conscious of its own limitations – but also in modern poems such as (to cite only one of the more obvious examples) Robert Frost's exercise in pastoral praeteritio, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.”