The biblical image of the good shepherd who knows each sheep by name contrasts with the herd as the anonymous collective — the individual subsumed into the mass whose loss is noticed only statistically; A poet might write "the herd moved as one creature across the hill, its individual members invisible in the collective motion, the whole expressing a single will that no single animal possessed"; In philosophical poetry the herd carries the negative connotations Nietzsche gave it — the unthinking collective that follows without question — but pastoral poetry resists this condescension by showing the complexity of relationships within a herd and between herd and herdsman; Classical pastoral is organized around herds: Theocritus's goatherds, Virgil's shepherds, the cattle of the Georgics — the herd as the basis of wealth, the subject of daily care, the community of domestic animals that structures the pastoral world; In elegies for pastoral landscapes, the passing of the herd along the drove road or through the village street represents the living abundance of the pre-industrial countryside — the noise, the smell, the visual spectacle of many animals in motion — that mechanized farming has made invisible; Hardy's Wessex poems attend to the herd as a social fact — the convergence point for the labor, anxiety, and satisfaction of agricultural life, the animals that embody the year's investment and the possibility of its loss.