Both Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Cecil Effinger are fascinating characters. Ferril was Colorado’s first poet laureate, holding that title from 1979 until his death in 1988. He was chosen to write the captions for the first-floor rotunda in the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, and his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood is a historical and literary landmark. Effinger was a Colorado composer and contemporary of Ferril who should be much better known than he is, having written well over 150 works, including operas and symphonies. But his fame rests largely on the Pastorales, a fact that he was wont to get a little testy about at times. As he’s said, “I’ve got the Four Pastorales for Oboe and Chorus which has gone hog-wild all over the place! It is done time and time again, you know, and others that I think are just as good, somehow don’t find their way!”
I would love to know how Effinger chose these four poems; I thought at first that Ferril had put them together into a set, but that’s not true. The poems are from several different books of Ferril’s poetry and don’t have a unifying theme that I can see. I’m going to guess that these four just happened to catch Effinger’s eye. The suite has a lovely, haunting oboe accompaniment which adds to its evocative power and is probably one reason for its popularity. Here are the four poems with my attempts to analyze/explain them without ruining the poetry.