Special Worlds: Pastoral Elegy in Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young

Stephen Sexton's If All the World and Love Were Young has a complex root system: its title traces back to Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (1600), an anti-pastoral reality-check for Christopher Marlowe's invitation to "Come live with me and be my love"; but its content derives from a more recent source, Shigeru Miyamoto's 1990 video game Super Mario World. Sexton's ekphrastic sequence – a poem for every level of the game – adopts, adapts and rejects Classical pastoral conventions in order to engage with the early death of his mother from cancer. Pastoral is both the medium of the mourning quest and – in part – that which is being mourned, and as the hero progresses, overcoming myriad dangers, he explores the osmotic relationship between real and imaginary worlds, the communal quality of mourning, the nature of memory, and the extent to which elegy should aim to process or to preserve.