The images on the urn held by Father Thames as he utters his prophecy about the future of Great Britain:

The figured streams in waves of silver rolled,
And on their banks Augusta [London] rose in gold. (335-36)

Written to celebrate the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession and gave Great Britain new access to trade in the New World, including Spain's West Indies slave contracts. George Granville was Secretary of War and an admirer of Pope's poetry; the poem flatters both his martial and his poetic achievements (his poems to "Myra" are referred to at 298).

How does Pope adopt the pastoral conventions of a Golden Age to accommodate when we might see as its opposite -- an Age of Gold?

Def of Golden Age -- prelapsarian Eden or Ovid's Golden Age - a time of harmony between humans and the natural world, in which neither money nor politics - beyond the 'natural' authority structures of patriarchy - are needed.

Characteristic strategies in "Windsor Forest":

1. Aestheticization: turning natural objects or natural phenomena into cultural products, art objects.

1. Naturalization: presenting cultural products as effects or phenomena of nature, not as the effects of human acts or interventions.

And another question: How does this poem imagine the poet's public role?
(Compare to Swift, Finch, Gray)

Map of "Windsor Forest":

Set at Windsor, a royal seat since Norman times and also home turf of 17th-c. poets; compares WF to Eden and implicitly Pope's poem to Milton's PL (1-10). Describes the landscape as tho it were a painting (17-42), and compares its natural products to India's and to those of Greece's mythological landcapes.

43-84: Reviews the tyranny of William the Conqueror (seen by some as a usurper - think Manfred), who like Nimrod the hunter/tyrant of Genesis 10.9 treated the English people as "the royal game" (as in game animals to be hunted, 64) and the "wanton victims of his sport" (78).
85-164: subsequent rulers restored the British countryside by allowing their subjects greater "Liberty," which implicitly restores "the golden years" (91-92).

93-164: Hunting, throughout the four seasons of the year (an adaptation of pastoral that includes aestheticized scenes of violence)

165-218: an Ovidian account of how the Loddon River, a tributary of the Thames, came to be part of the landscape of Windsor Forest: Lodona, one of Diana's nymphs, is being chased by Pan and only escapes rape by praying to be turned into a river: "The silver stream her virgin coldness keeps, / Forever murmurs, and forever weeps" and reflects a fanciful World-Upside-Down image of the Forest. Following the Loddon's course (literally and metaphorically) takes the poem "naturally" to the Thames.

219-298: meditation on the delights of being a Windsor-Castle-based courtier/bureaucrat under Anne and her ministers (incl. Granville) - 2 lines - then the delights of being a Windsor-Forest-based independent scholar/poet/philosopher - 21 lines. This inspires the poet to pray to the Nine Muses for inspiration like that of past poets identified with the area: Cowley, Denham, Granville, Surrey.

299-328: picks up on the history of British monarchy from line 164 as a history of warfare and oppression, exemplified in the execution of Charles I, which led to plague (323), the Great Fire of London (324), and civil wars (325) - until Anne, god-like, ordains harmony: "…the world obeyed, and all was peace!" (328)

329-422: Father Thames (a personification of the river that runs through London) predicts a glorious future for Great Britain, in which warfare will be converted into hunting, Windsor's oaks, turned into ships, will bring the world's treasures home to Great Britain, including balm, amber, coral, rubies, pearls, and, naturally, gold (check out the sun's role in "ripening ore to gold" [396]. The world's indigenous peoples will also come to admire GB (note the "feathered people" at 404). GB's triumph will end slavery and exile all kinds of nasty personifications to hell.

423-434: the poet's farewell: do we believe his claim that he only wants to sing his "unambitious strains" [as in strains of music] to "list'ning swains"? (What kind of roles for a poet have been defined earlier in the poem?)