Definition of "pastoral" []

• Of or relating to shepherds or herders. (adjective)
• Of, relating to, or used for animal husbandry. (adjective)
• Of or relating to the country or country life; rural. (adjective)
• Charmingly simple and serene; idyllic. See Synonyms at rural. (adjective)
• Of, relating to, or being a literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in an idealized way. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Of course all good poetry, descriptive of rural life, is essentially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral on the minds of men living in cities; but the class of poetry which I mean, and which you probably understand by the term pastoral, is that in which a farmer's girl is spoken of as a "nymph," and a farmer's boy as a"
• "But as readers of Virgil well know, the pastoral is already charged with homoerotic possibilities."
• "Bishop Vaughan planned what he called a pastoral seminary."