ABSTRACT
John Gay has often been dismissed as an elegant lightweight. It is true that in his work there is little of the stridency or vehemence of his friends Pope and Swift, even in his ironic masterpiece The Beggar's Opera. Rural Sports was one of the poems to benefit from careful revision for a collection Gay put out in 1720. It turns angling and hunting into an elaborate ritual, with their own Queensberr. The primary impulse is burlesque - standard motifs like the lover's lament, archaic diction, the whole Arcadian flummery. The poem is stately, amused, a bit highfalutin'; words are made to perform deliberately graceful feats of mannered charm. But there is no unreality. The euphemisms are transparent, and thus comic. Gay's epistles are among the most accomplished in English, and deserve to be much better known.
