What good is it -- you'll remember -- what good is it, Milton asks, ; "to tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade"; that's, of course, the vocation of poetry if that shepherd-poet is just going to be struck down in his prime as Edward King had been?

大家可以看到，弥尔顿在这里发出了疑问，“进行平凡微不足道的诗歌创作“，又有何益;,当然，就田园诗人而言，诗歌的天命,是否在于如同爱德华金一般的英年早逝？

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选

This is the vocation of poetry in this pastoral lexicon.

在田园诗范畴内诗的职业就是牧羊。

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选

Milton was always wrestling with the problem of vocation in all of its meanings, and the problem of what a calling actually is and how one actually knows one has a calling is a problem that pulsates somewhere beneath most of the lines of poetry that Milton writes.

弥尔顿经常纠结于这两个,含义，以及到底什么是神的招唤,还有人们是怎么知道他被召唤了,这些问题反复出现在,弥尔顿的诗句中。

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选

But Milton portrays himself as a laborer here, a poet who by labor and intense study actually has to work to produce the great poem. Milton's divine vocation, his calling, seems in this light to be something like a vocation in the modern sense: it's a job that exacts work or labor.

但弥尔顿把他自己描绘成一个工人,一个只能通过努力学习来创作出,伟大诗歌的诗人，弥尔顿的神圣的使命，他的天职，就此而论就像现代意义上的职业了：,一份要求工作和劳动的职业。

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选

You remember he's written his father in "Ad Patrem" that the trade, the vocation of poetry -- it may be homely and slighted in his father's eyes, but it was of course worth all of Milton's time, all of Milton's uncessant care and investment.

他在写给父亲的Ad，Patrem中说，写诗这个职业在父亲看来或许,简单无趣，却值得弥尔顿付出所有的时间，精力，和投资。

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选

And so in the sentence that we've just looked at at some length now we have embodied in the form of a shifting argument - a really slippery argument -- the two senses of the word vocation: vocation as a job and vocation as a divine calling.

所以在我们详细看过的句子里,现在我们把他具体化成为论点的形式,这是一种狡猾的论辩--vocation的两种含义：,作为工作或者作为神的召唤。

耶鲁公开课 - 弥尔顿课程节选