Not one body, but five : This surprising announcement came in January, nearly three months after the disappointing news that none had been found or were likely to be. The bodies in question belong to the massive burial complex at Amphipolis in Macedonia, the most important archaeological discovery in Greece in a century. For those interested in such things, the excavation has offered more twists and turns than most forensic crime dramas can cram into a season. In 2012 archaeologists began to dig, having previously discovered a marble wall running around Kasta Hill in the ancient city of Amphipolis. Public interest intensified with each new discovery: thirteen steps leading down; headless sphinxes guarding an enormous sealed entrance; two gorgeous caryatids flanking a second doorway; in the middle chamber, a magnificent floor mosaic depicting Hades’ abduction of Persephone. As workers proceeded to clear the third and last chamber, speculation was rampant: Who was buried there? Could it be Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, or his wife Roxane, or his mentally impaired half-brother, Philip III Arrhidaeus? Once cleared, the chamber at first seemed to be empty. But then, in the sort of turnaround one would expect more from Jerry Bruckheimer than an archaeological dig, a cist vault, sealed and hidden in the floor, was located. When, some weeks later, the initial forensic analysis came in, it only deepened the mystery: Who in the world did we find?

It’s the historical context that makes the discovery so tantalizing. All indications are that the tomb dates to the period of upheaval immediately following Alexander’s death in 323 BC, while its unprecedented scale—the perimeter measures over sixteen hundred feet—suggests great power and wealth. Before the excavation, it had been reasoned that if the body of a woman in her fifties was found, it had to be Olympias; if a man in his thirties, Philip III. But the results met no one’s expectations: There was a woman in her sixties; two middle-aged men, one of whom died by the sword; one infant; and one cremated body from which nothing can be gleaned. More tests are planned to date the remains and determine whether the dead were related. One thing, at least, is clear: The site’s interpreters will be busy for a while.

It goes without saying that the finds are as exciting as they are confusing—everyone loves a mysterious pile of bones. If the mysteries are solved, however, I wonder what we’re likely to learn. Many will remember the sensation when, in 2012, the body of Richard III of England was exhumed from a parking lot. Bioarchaeologists found eleven battle wounds on the king, diagnosed him with scoliosis, deduced that his diet consisted of freshwater fish and exotic birds, and calculated a ninety-five-percent probability that his eyes were blue and a seventy-seven-percent probability that his hair was brown. From the body of Alexander’s father Philip II, identified just last year, we can tell that he suffered from sinusitis and pleuritis. King Tut’s mummy shows signs of inbreeding, including genital deformity, though we still don’t know what killed him. It’s all information, I guess, but how much of it is knowledge? Nevertheless, for all that silence of the bones, we still want to know Olympias, or Alexander, or Philip, not only through books but in the flesh; though the chasm is uncrossable, such discoveries feel like a bridge.

Alexander’s body will probably never be found. Thanks to the exertions of Ptolemy, one of his generals, he ended up in Alexandria, and has no doubt long been lost in the gradual subsidence of the Egyptian coast into the sea. Alexandria is a town well versed in irrecoverable loss—not a day goes by without scholars and ancient-history buffs thinking wistfully of the seven hundred thousand scrolls held by the famous library at its height. Those vanished texts constitute a lost heritage that lovers of literature and history would value far more highly than any body, even Alexander’s.

The books may be gone but the library, surprisingly, is not. Inaugurated in 2002, its reincarnation is called the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and it seems intent on looking forward, not back. So, at any rate, its striking architecture suggests. The building, a massive, slanted, glass-ceilinged disc set in a reflecting pool, resembles nothing so much as a spaceship rising from its own crater. The mise-en-abyme of disc and pool is intended to evoke the library’s two chief purposes: to be the world’s window onto Egypt and Egypt’s window onto the world. Though it will never be the intellectual center it once was, it remains, as the Termini railway station is for Rome, an image of Egypt’s aspirations in the present.

But to get on with things. This essay is about another sort of reconstruction: Aaron Poochigian’s new translation of the Argonautica, the epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes, published by Penguin Classics under the title (presumably chosen for marketing reasons) Jason and the Argonauts. It tells the story of Jason and his band of sailors as they journey far from Iolcus in Thessaly to win the Golden Fleece from Aeëtes, the barbarous King of Colchis, and of how Jason’s love affair with the powerful and dangerous maiden-witch Medea paves the way for his safe return. In one sense, Jason’s task is not unlike that of the archaeologists at Amphipolis. In another, Poochigian’s reminds us of the new library: He draws on the past to illuminate the present. I’d like to consider the context and meaning of Apollonius’ poem, as well as Poochigian’s quest to smuggle it, like the fleece, out of the distant Hellenic past and into the Anglophone present.

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The Argonautica is a strange poem. Very strange. Let’s take one passage from the end. The first two books describe the voyage of the Argo to Colchis. The third details the love between Jason and Medea, and Jason’s completion, with her help, of the trials set by Aeëtes, while the fourth follows the vicissitudes of the Argo on her difficult journey home. Eventually the Argonauts land on the island of Anaphe (“Epiphany”), revealed to them by Apollo in the midst of a “deep and nightlike darkness” off the coast of Crete. One of them, Euphemus, has a dream:

[I]t seemed that he was clutching to his breast
a clod of earth, a sacred gift, and white
droplets of milk were somehow nursing it,
and from the clod, small as it was, emerged
what seemed a maiden. Ravenous desire
took hold of him, and he made love to it
but afterward cried out in lamentation—
he felt as if he had deflowered the daughter
he had been nourishing with his own milk.

Then the “daughter” speaks. She turns out to be Thera, a child of Triton, destined to be “the grounds for all of your descendants.” Jason somehow understands everything. He tells Euphemus to throw the clod—given to him by Triton while they were sailing around Lake Tritonis—into the sea: “the gods will make an island out of it, / and there your children’s children shall reside”:

So Jason read the omen, and Euphemus
did not invalidate his friend’s prediction.
No, giddy with prophecy, he flung
the clod of earth into the sea and from it
emerged the sacred island of Callista,
the nursemaid of Euphemus’ descendants.

After this, only about twenty-five lines remain before the poem comes to an abrupt end. A modern reader is bound to be baffled, maybe even put off, by the weirdness. Why should this passage serve as the denouement to the oddly lurching travelogue that is the Argonautica ?

Apollonius knew exactly what he was up to. His goal, as a citizen of the Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria and head of its famous library, was to forge connections between Greece and Egypt. He knew that the people of Euphemus’ island Callista (modern Santorini/Thira) had gone on to found Cyrene, a sometimes-friendly neighbor of Alexandria to the west. If the myth establishes the Greek origin of one of North Africa’s most important cities, on a deeper level it suggests a fusion between Greek and Egyptian culture. In his dream, Euphemus’ breasts drip milk and he fears he is committing incest with his daughter—incest and androgyny being quintessentially Egyptian, at least in Greek eyes. Yet the passage as a whole reworks Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode, whose long narrative about the Argonauts opens with an account of the clod. Thus the Argonautica ends by grafting Greek literature onto Egyptian culture in exactly the same way that the Greek city of Alexandria, and the Greek empire of the Ptolemies, are grafted onto Egyptian territory.

Let’s imagine it’s January, sometime in the 270s BC. Alexandria, only midway through her first century of existence, is the chief city of the Mediterranean. Athens and Thebes are mere shadows of their former selves, put down for good by Philip II at Chaeronea in 338. Turbulence following the death of Alexander, Philip’s son, has rendered rival court cities—Pella in Macedon, Seleucia and Antioch on the Orontes in the Levant—unable to compete with stable Alexandria. Rome, like Carthage, is rising, but remains an intellectual and cultural backwater. Alexandria’s heyday is at hand. It boasts a new lighthouse, one of the wonders of the world, on Pharos Island, and, in the Egyptian district, the first temple of the new god Serapis. A soon-to-be-renowned gymnasium, with six hundred feet of porticos, is going up. On the north coast, the Ptolemies’ enormous palace complex includes the magnificent Museum (not a museum in the modern sense but a temple of the Muses), to which the library, perhaps already under Apollonius’ direction,1 is attached. Along the hundred-foot-wide central thoroughfare known as the Canopic Way is the golden tomb of the deified Alexander. Here the genius of the Macedonian conqueror has come to rest, and his city shines not only in its architecture: A numerous fleet fills its harbor, exotic animals populate its zoological gardens, and the greatest minds of the age toil in its library. And today there will be a parade.

This parade, known to us as the Grand Procession of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, is most likely part of the Ptolemaea, a festival initiated by Ptolemy to honor his father, Ptolemy I Soter (“the Savior”), who was the city’s first king, and Alexander, who chose the location and laid its foundations in 331. Within months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy had hastened to the city and swiftly taken over. Staying relatively aloof from the in-fighting and dynastic intrigues of his peers, he shored up Egypt’s economy and exploited its natural resources. He improved farmland, agricultural practices, and mining, and introduced Greek crops and animals. Instead of waging war, like the other generals, to reclaim Alexander’s kingdom, he used his military mainly to defend what he already possessed and maintain useful alliances, though he did annex a few strategic areas beneficial for trade, such as Coele-Syria. When he abdicated in 284, his son, Ptolemy II, inherited a rich, powerful, stable, diverse, and thriving kingdom, one mostly content to compete with its rivals culturally rather than militarily. It is toward this end that the Grand Procession is now being held.

All of Alexandria’s diverse citizenry is on hand. People fill the Palace Stadium and line the thoroughfares, where officials dressed as Silenuses practice crowd control; many take up positions in the poor Egyptian district of Rhacotis to the south, and many more in the Delta, the Jewish quarter to the east. Perhaps the king himself and his chief courtiers, among dignitaries from all corners of the Hellenistic world, are watching from the elevated citadel near the Inner Palaces, where an enormous pavilion has been erected in the shade of myrtles and laurels, and furnished with golden couches, silver tripods, and marble statues. The floor is strewn with so many roses, white lilies, and other flowers that it gives “the appearance of a most divine meadow,” according to the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. Wave after wave of richly dressed figures and armed companies file past, causing intakes of breath and exclamations of amazement in a babel of Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, and various Syrian and Gaulish tongues.

Philadelphus is putting the enormous wealth and reach of his empire, its exotic profusion and massive accumulations, on display. There are a hundred and forty chariots, drawn by elephants, antelopes, oryxes, buffaloes, ostriches, gnus, and zebras; “barbaric palanquins” (Athenaeus again) loaded with Indian prisoners carrying great weights of cassia, saffron, and other spices; Ethiopians holding elephant tusks, ivory logs, and goblets of gold and silver overflowing with gold dust; over two thousand dogs, from places like India, Iran, and Albania, and two thousand sacrificial bulls; a hundred and fifty trees, “from which were suspended birds and beasts of every imaginable country and description,” followed by many other birds, including parrots, peacocks, guinea fowl, and pheasants; hundreds of statues of gods and kings, all crowned with ivy or olive leaves of gold; and upwards of fifty thousand foot soldiers and twenty thousand cavalry, flaunting Alexandria’s military might.

Even the small army of intellectuals usually cloistered in the “birdcage of the Muses,” as the Antigonid poet Timon of Phlius mockingly termed the library, has joined the crowd in Ptolemy’s pavilion. I imagine Ptolemy rising after the feast and bidding these scholars to share their work with the assembled dignitaries and diplomats. The Alexandrian native Euclid leads them through a proof from his Elementa Mathematica. Zenodotus of Ephesus, inventor of textual scholarship, discusses his principles for editing Homer and reads from his corrected Iliad. Aristarchus of Samos explains the math behind his discovery that the Sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the universe. The vivisectionist Herophilus of Chalcedon shares his conclusion that the brain, rather than the heart, is the seat of intelligence. Then come the poets: Callimachus of Cyrene declaims from his encyclopedic Aetia (“Origins”), whose lively verses, some of the most polished in Greek, explain local rituals and obscure traditions. Finally, Apollonius reads passages from his epic in progress about Jason and the Argonauts, which aspires to ground his upstart city in the mythic past. All of these writers and thinkers are part of Alexandria’s great project, but only the work of Apollonius and Callimachus reproduces, as if in synecdoche, the ambition and scope of the whole, and it is only Apollonius’ masterpiece, the Argonautica, that survives today in its entirety. Poochigian’s translation serves as an occasion to reassess the poem, in terms of both its origins and its enduring fascination.

Despite its formative influence on the Aeneid, the Argonautica found little enthusiasm among ancient critics. Quintilian, with damning faintness, called it “no contemptible work” and praised it for maintaining “a sustained middle course.” Longinus allowed that Apollonius “makes no mistakes in the Argonautica” but then asked, “Would you rather be Homer or Apollonius?” With the end of antiquity, the poem dropped out of view, attracting few readers and little interest until the nineteenth century, when Sainte-Beuve rhapsodized over Apollonius’ brilliant depiction of Jason and Medea in Book III. Unfortunately, he didn’t care for the rest of the poem, and even as he rescued it from neglect he furnished future critics with an ample vocabulary of opprobrium. “What it seems mainly to lack,” he complained, “is unity of subject and general interest.” The subject “does not lend itself to a grand national design, like that of the Aeneid; it is of no especial interest for any particular people; it dissipates itself in a host of origin-stories and incunabula . . . The poet-narrator seems preoccupied, picking his way, trying not to forget anything.”

For over a century Sainte-Beuve’s assessment went unchallenged. Whenever Apollonius was compared to other writers of epic, not just Homer and Virgil but even Valerius Flaccus and William Morris, it was to his detriment. In 1911 J. W. Mackail found the Argonautica “fundamentally wrong” and charged Apollonius with “the fumbling of a scholar”: Mackail feels him to be confused in aim, lacking in genius, and haplessly encumbered by his Homeric models. In 1928 M. M. Gillies did his best to praise the poem, but still held that Apollonius “falls between the stools of poetry and science” and that “the taint of the Museum is in the blood of all her sons, and not even the Alexandrine leopard can change his spots.” And in 1932 F. A. Wright summed up the consensus: “Every one agrees that the poem is overloaded with irrelevant details, that many of the episodes are only of antiquarian interest, that the divine machinery lacks grandeur and creaks at times very clumsily, and that Jason is a weak and insignificant hero.” Not until the 1950s did the poem begin to receive positive attention from scholars more interested in analyzing what Apollonius had written than criticizing him for what he hadn’t. Thus began the ongoing project of rehabilitating his reputation—a project that led, in the Nineties, to several translations aimed at the general reader.2 In this new translation, which he calls “a labor of love,” Poochigian joins the flotilla of Hellenists looking to proselytize for Apollonius by making his poetry as accessible and enjoyable as possible.

Every age finds in the classics a mirror of its own interests and concerns. That readers have failed to find such a mirror in Apollonius may help account for his long critical disrepute. He has been consistently censured for not meeting readers’ expectations of what epic should be. The scholars of the library are partly to blame: By so meticulously establishing a canon, they made it easy to brand the artists of their own age decadents and epigones. Apollonius’ detractors have judged him by the lights of their times. Sainte-Beuve, though he wrote of widening “the Temple of Taste,” was Frenchman enough to consider “lack of unity” one of Apollonius’ chief demerits. Mackail, firmly under the spell of the Romantics, liked only the parts of the Argonautica that he could imagine having been written by Wordsworth or Keats; he wondered what would have happened “had [the poet] trusted the Romantic impulse and let himself go.” Apollonius’ admirers have been no less susceptible to the influence of the era. For example, interpretations of Jason and his apparent weakness as a leader have varied by the decade. In the disillusionment that followed McCarthyism, Jason was a corrupt career politician, an anti-hero, his character flaws part of the meaning of the work. In the wake of the sexual revolution, he became a love-hero, successful mainly because of his sex appeal. Towards the end of the Cold War, he was seen as a sort of evangelist for empire, a cog in the Ptolemaic propaganda machine. Today, the trend is towards contextualization and multiculturalism. As far as I’m concerned, it’s neither interesting nor useful to condemn, according to arbitrary aesthetic principles, whatever in the Argonautica seems strange or different or contra expectationem; I would much rather seek to understand the poem on its own terms.

Let’s look at another passage. As Jason and crew draw near to Colchis, they encounter a number of alien races. There are the Amazons of the Doean plain. There are the non-agricultural, iron-working Chalybes (“Dawn never rises for them without toil, / more toil, unending toil in soot and smoke”). And then there are the Mossynoeci:

Odd laws and customs mark their way of life.
Everything that we do out in the open
either in council or the marketplace,
they find some way to do inside their homes,
and all the things we do inside our homes,
they do out in the middle of the street
without the least compunction. Public sex
is not disgraceful there. Like boars in heat,
they feel not even slight embarrassment
with others present but engage their women
in open copulation on the ground.
Their ruler sits inside the highest tower,
rendering personal verdicts to his subjects—
poor wretch, since, if his rulings seem unfair,
they lock him up in prison for a day
without a meal.

I quote this passage both because it’s entertaining and because it’s practically a versification of a passage in Herodotus. Compare:

Just as the climate that the Egyptians have is entirely their own and different from anyone else’s, and their river has a nature quite different from other rivers, so, in fact, the most of what they have made their habits and their customs are the exact opposite of other folks’. Among them the women run the market and shops, while the men, indoors, weave; and, in this weaving, while other people push the woof upward, the Egyptians push it down. The men carry burdens on their heads; the women carry theirs on their shoulders. The women piss standing upright, but the men do it squatting. The people ease nature’s needs in the houses but eat outdoors in the streets; their explanation of this is that what is shameful but necessary should be done in secret, but what is not shameful should be done openly. No woman is dedicated to any god, male or female, but men to all gods and goddesses. There is no obligation on sons to maintain their parents if they are unwilling, but an absolute necessity lies on daughters to do so, whether they will or not.

Elsewhere, Herodotus tells us that the “Colchians are clearly Egyptians,” and Apollonius makes it clear that he agrees (see below). In crossing the water to Aea, Jason metaphorically travels to Egypt, and his stormy love-affair with Medea is nothing less than a meeting of opposites: the urban, secular, sea-going, patriarchal Greeks, and the rural, theocratic, riverine, semi-matriarchal Egyptians.

Two characteristics of the historical Alexandria strike me as particularly germane to the Argonautica. The first is the duality of the encounter between the Greek ruling class and the Egyptian populace. Apollonius’ Alexandria was an archetypal city of culture shock. There, Greeks and Egyptians found themselves in sustained and intimate contact for the first time. Greek political institutions, cultural practices, and literary productions all had to accommodate, or at least avoid offending, Egyptian sensibilities. The Ptolemies had to fill the role of both Greek king and Egyptian pharaoh—the former political, the latter religious. They invented Serapis, who was the Egyptian deity Osiris-Apis in human form (such form being more congenial to the Greeks). The Grand Procession, though largely secular in nature and Greek in imagery, would have engaged the Egyptians, for whom ritual processions were an important part of religious tradition, and also overawed them. It was simultaneously an outreach and a warning.

The second characteristic, which sprang from the first, is a kind of universalist ambition. Alexandrian poetry, voracious of pluralia, echoed this ambition by including as many characters, voices, registers, myths, factoids, and odds and ends as it could hold. Unable to conquer the known world as Alexander did, the Ptolemies wanted to possess it; the parade, the library, the exotic collections, the stable of scholars, even the immigration policies and the linguistic polyphony attest to how far they succeeded.

Almost nobody was from Alexandria; in this respect, it fell far short of the Greek notion of ethnic purity summed up by Isocrates: “No city which recruits large numbers of citizens without discrimination from the world over should be considered happy, but rather that which preserves more than any other the stock of those who lived there from the first.” Alexandria’s Egyptian population had been forcibly uprooted and transferred from neighboring villages. Under Ptolemy I the city saw a surge of immigrants: Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and a scattering of minorities. Their attraction to Alexandria had much to do with the fact that they were allowed to live in their own neighborhoods and govern themselves according to their own laws. The city was less a melting pot than a petri dish of difference, where each culture remained separate and distinct. As the classicist Daniel Selden put it, “Alexandria was a city where to be an outlander was paradoxically the norm.” This was certainly the case for the “caged birds” of the library, almost all of whom were enticed there from abroad.

Founded in 295, the library was modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens, that beacon of universal knowledge. Demetrius of Phalerum, the library’s first president, had been a pupil of Aristotle’s, and was given (according to the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates) “vast sums of money” by Soter “for the purpose of collecting together, as far as he possibly could, all the books in the world,” with the initial goal set at five hundred thousand volumes. Greek translations from books in (among other languages) Assyrian, Egyptian, Latin, and Hebrew were commissioned, including the epoch-making Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah. Invited by the Ptolemies and tempted by their resources, luminaries flocked from all corners of the Greek world to the paradisal Brotherhood of the Muses. From Thrace on the Greek mainland and the Cycladic island of Cos, from the eastern islands of Samos and Rhodes, from all over Greek Asia Minor—Chalcedon, Byzantium, Lampsacus, Ephesus, Cnidus—and from Cyrene and Pelusium in Egypt itself, came the historians and scholars of Homer, the mathematicians and physicists, the naturalists, astronomers and geographers, the doctors and proto-humanists, all eager to join the greatest community of learning ever assembled. It must have been like winning a fellowship at a fantastically distinguished interdisciplinary center.

Whether Apollonius himself was one of these foreign scholars is a matter of speculation. One might assume, based on his epithet “Rhodius” (“the Rhodian”), that he came from Rhodes. Yet his early biographers claim that he was, like Euclid, a native of Alexandria, and that he acquired his epithet in the following way. When his first public recitation of the Argonautica met with ridicule, the young poet stormed off to Rhodes to sulk and polish his poem. Years later he returned in triumph and was dubbed “Rhodius” because of the time spent on Rhodes. It’s a nice story, and harmonizes with another colorful bit of gossip, nowadays little trusted, about a feud between him and Callimachus. Ancient biography, however, is notoriously unreliable, and Apollonius might have been a native of Rhodes after all. Whatever the case, every page of the Argonautica reflects the cacophonous multiculturalism of Alexandria, and of the library in particular.

When Gillies tells us that “the taint of the Museum is in the blood of all her sons,” he’s making the same point made by Yeats at the end of “The Scholars”: “Lord, what would they say / Should their Catullus walk that way?” The criticism is fundamentally Romantic: Poets shouldn’t be shut up in libraries, they should be running around Byronically, having sublime experiences, seducing women, and liberating oppressed countries. One can also detect a backlash against Aristotle, whose prestige leant authority to a number of erroneous and bizarre scientific theories that could have been, and eventually were, disproved by simple experiments. “Study nature, not books!” (i.e., not Aristotle’s books) was the rallying cry of those who finally shook the scales from their eyes. Today, neither perspective seems particularly relevant.

At any rate, the dense weight of scholarship and literary tradition in the Argonautica, far from being a ball and chain, contributes to its rich and fertile strangeness. Let’s look at some examples of this “Alexandrianism.” The most noticeable vein—and perhaps the strangest for a modern reader—is etiological: Apollonius often makes brief digressions on the origin of some custom or feature of the landscape. Such explanatory tales are known in Greek as aitia. I’ve already mentioned the aition of the clod in Book IV; Apollo’s involvement there links it to another in Book II. The Argonauts have just made it through the Clashing Rocks. Exhausted, they pull ashore at Thynias, where they receive a divine revelation: Apollo, in propria persona, striding north, toward the land of the Hyperboreans. His grandson Orpheus (an important member of the expedition) speaks up:

“Come now, and let us dedicate this island
to Phoebus God of Dawn and name it for him
since it was here that we have seen him passing
before us as the sunrise. We shall build
a seaside shrine and give what offerings
we can procure.”

The Argonauts then set to sacrificing and feasting. After Orpheus sings a hymn to Apollo (“Be gracious, lord, I beg you. Eternally / your tresses are unshorn, eternally.”), the Argonauts build a shrine to commemorate the event:

Still today
the shrine of kindly Harmony remains there,
the very one the heroes instituted
in honor of a venerable goddess.

When the Argonautica was written, Alexandria and the Ptolemaic Kingdom were less than a hundred years old. Etiologies like this one, along with the story of the clod and many others (by one scholar’s count, there are nearly eighty in the epic), serve to bind the Alexandrian present to the mythic past. They also enrich the narrative and deepen our sense of the breadth and fullness of time. The effect is vertiginous: The Argonautica’s present is a past dreamed by the future, where gods walk undisguised and cry out from mountaintops, and where heroes leave, on every scarp and promontory, temples and shrines still visible today.

This dizzying sense of history may be most pronounced in the passage where Apollonius discusses the Egyptian origins of Colchis, which the Greeks believed to have been founded by the semi-legendary pharaoh they called Sesostris. (They may have been thinking of Senusret III, Seti I, Rameses II, or some conflation of the three.) When the Argonauts are trying to decide what route they should take back to Greece from Aea—they have been told they must not return the way they came—Phrixus’ son Argus launches into a long digression on the Egyptian origins of civilization. He says that, “Way back before / Pelasgia was under the illustrious / sons of Deucalion,3 the land of Egypt, / mother of all the men of old, was called / the fecund ‘Misty Land,’ and River Ocean / went by the name of ever-flowing Triton.” And then

a certain king, relying
upon his soldiers’ courage, might, and vigor,
pushed through all of Europe, all of Asia,
founding settlements along the way.
Some of the cities have survived, some not.
Though many ages have expired since then,
Aea has remained right where it was . . .

The namelessness of that “certain king” allows, even encourages, Greek readers to picture Sesostris as a proto-Alexander, setting out from Egypt to conquer the world and founding Aea on the way. Egyptian readers, however, would have seen Alexander as a latter-day Sesostris, picturing his Macedonian face with an Egyptian mask. In the passage, Egypt claims cultural priority over Greece, but with the catch that the Ptolemaic occupation of Egypt now belongs to an originally Egyptian project, while all this empire-building, both Greek and Egyptian, is given a mythological and literary counterpart in the voyage of the Argo: Heading home, the Argonauts will reverse the course of Sesostris, following routes preserved by his priests to get from Colchis back to Greece. Alexander in turn will head back in the other direction, following Sesostris and conquering from Egypt to the boundaries of the known world, along the way laying the foundations for the Ptolemies. History, then, comes full circle, with Alexandria as the infant inheritor of an ancient Greco-Egyptian domination. The Argonautica, far from lacking “a grand national design,” as Sainte-Beuve asserted, or being of no interest to “any particular people,” seeks to engage both the Greeks and Egyptians of Alexandria and to help forge a unified national culture.

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If the scholarship of the Argonautica parallels, in a kind of synecdoche, Alexandria’s “universalism,” the same can be said of its polyphony. Any time Apollonius descended into the thronging streets and markets, dined with his fellow scholars in the Museum refectory, or set foot in the royal court, he would have heard a welter of voices, each inflected with the origin of its speaker. The poem echoes that array with a large collection of voices belonging to a rich and varied cast of characters. The Argonauts, that great gathering of statesmen and heroes all ready to contribute their skills, speak their mind, and occasionally pick fights with each other, no doubt resembled the Ptolemaic court, with Jason as the diplomatic Ptolemy. The foreign princess Medea gives voice alternately to adolescent lovesickness and Machiavellian cunning. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, when they get together for a chat, sound like the Real Housewives of Olympus. And Apollonius assigns speaking roles to figures who might have seemed beneath the dignity of traditional epic: Unnamed persons, referred to in the Greek as τις, “someone or other,” give voice to general disgruntlement; one of the Argo’s wooden planks issues a prophetic warning; and the moon makes an odd little speech full of resentment of Medea’s magic power over her. The poem has, in short, an ensemble cast whose range of tones and voices goes well beyond what traditional epic would admit.

Something similar can be said of the voice of Appolonius’ narrator. Homer, famously characterized by Matthew Arnold as rapid, plain, simple, and noble, set the gold standard for epic narrators. If we assume, as certain nineteenth-century critics did, that Apollonius strove to emulate Homer, we’ll have to brand him a failure. But he seems not to have been aiming for such unity, any more than Alexandria was aiming at ethnic purity. His voice, which Poochigian describes as “elastic,” at times rises to conventional epic heights but also descends to frankly comic volleys. Here he is at his most conventionally Poetic, setting the voyage in motion:

As soon
as radiant Dawn with her resplendent gaze
looked on the steep cliff face of Pelion,
and day broke fair, and breezes stirred the sea
that dashed, in turn, upon the headlands, Tiphys
awoke and roused the dozing crew and bade them
hasten aboard and man the oars.

What has always baffled Apollonius’ readers is that a poet capable of such passages also writes ones like the following, in which Jason summons the Argonauts after waking from a dream he doesn’t fully grasp:

He shouted to his comrades
far into the distance, as a lion
wandering through a forest roars to summon
his mate, and even distant mountain valleys
tremble at the sound, and all the herdsmen
and oxen shake with fear. (But Jason’s cry
was not at all upsetting to his men
because it was the bellow of a friend
calling to friends.)

Why, following a perfectly serviceable (if somewhat grandiose) epic simile, does Apollonius feel the need to butt in and let us know that Jason’s friends are not as scared of him as they would be of a lion? Does he think we’re dumb? A possible answer has to do with the Argonauts’ dire situation at this point in the narrative: Even the similes are breaking down.

One passage has struck readers as a particularly egregious example of Apollonius’ narrative ineptitude. Mackail, before quoting it, remarks, “Every now and then he pulls himself up with an obvious jerk to get back into the main subject; the effect is awkward, and according to the reader’s mood either distressing or ludicrous.” The Argonauts have dispatched “Aethalides, the posthaste messenger” to convince the Lemnian women to let them harbor on Lemnos for the night. The narrator seizes the opportunity and remarks:

Although Aethalides has long since sunk
under the silent tide of Acheron,
forgetfulness has never seized his spirit—
no, he is doomed to change homes endlessly,
now numbered with the ghosts beneath the earth,
now with the men who live and see the sun . . .
wait, why have I digressed so widely, talking
about Aethalides?

Why indeed? Assuming we’re able to restrain our inner Mackail from throwing the book across the room, we might find this passage funny—I laughed out loud the first time I read it. [I was clearly thinking of Housman’s “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy:” “Why should I mention Io? Why indeed? / I have no notion why.” cc] Apollonius seems to take the position of a bewildered reader, stepping back and exclaiming, “Wait a second, you blowhard, who cares about that guy?” But if we choose to take the question seriously, it becomes strangely moving. Compare the Seferis poem “The King of Asine,” about the void beneath a name we know only because Homer mentioned it once in the Iliad; all the king is is a word. All we know about Aethalides is his name and profession, and that might be all Apollonius knew as well. As a “posthaste messenger,” he must have spent his life traveling. Now, in death, he spends much of his time “with the ghosts beneath the earth”—that is, in the unread depths of the library. But when the poet encounters him in some obscure mythographical tome, or when we do so in the Argonautica, he takes on new life, and rejoins “the men who live and see the sun”; the name has become the man. With his “jerk to get back” to the main narrative, the poet-narrator portrays himself as a bit of a garrulous imbecile, puncturing the melancholy atmosphere with a joke at his own expense. The obviousness of the maneuver encourages our resistance and reflection; neither the humor nor the pathos of the passage would come through without the “distressing or ludicrous” lurch Mackail derides.

At the same time, Apollonius is fun. We never know what to expect from him, and thus find ourselves in the same position as the Argonauts, who get walloped with all sorts of bizarre tribulations. At one point they must steer through an obstacle course of floating islands; it sounds like navigating an asteroid field. Hera seeks help from Thetis, who rallies her fellow Nereids to the cause:

Nereus’ daughters hiked their skirts
above their gleaming knees, clambered atop
the rocks protruding from the froth of surf,
and stood in two lines, one on either side . . .
Imagine maidens standing
upon a sandy shoreline, how they roll
their gowns up to their waists, pick up a ball,
toss it around or high into the air
so that it never hits the ground—that’s how
the Nereids passed the ship to one another,
keeping it in the air, above the breakers,
always above the rocks, and all the while
sea spray kept shooting up around the heroes.

The image of maidens tossing a ball runs from Homer and Anacreon through to the fourth-century-AD frescoes near Piazza Armerina in Sicily, but nowhere else is it so unexpected and delightful. It’s easy to see why Poochigian finds the narrator’s voice as “elastic” as “endearing.” From this juxtaposition of registers and tones emerges not one speaker of Homeric authority so much as a kind of chorus, conducted in a (sometimes uneasy) harmony.

The narrator’s self-consciousness, digressions, and disintegrating similes will not be to everyone’s taste. But Mackail is wrong when he says they represent “a failure of ordinary intelligence.” Plenty of postmodern writers, from Borges to Barthelme and beyond, have used similar tricks to shake us from the “dream of fiction” (as John Gardner called it) and expose the inner workings of our favorite literary forms. Apollonius knows and subverts our expectations as he takes us “across the water” to a strange epic place we’ve never been.

If Apollonius deserves some defense from the brickbats he’s received over the years, the test of a translator is how well he brings out his author’s acknowledged virtues. Apollonius has been praised for psychological realism, mainly in his depiction of Medea’s love for Jason in Book III (Virgil’s Dido would never have been what she is without Apollonius’ Medea as a model), and for the striking beauty of certain discrete passages. Mackail quotes several lines from Book III without translating them, on the grounds that “their clear beauty and imaginative quality depend so largely on their actual form and music that a translation would be blurred and disappointing.” Let’s look at them, first in Greek and then in translation. At Hera’s request, Venus has just persuaded her son Eros to make for Colchis and infect Medea with love for Jason. Apollonius describes the path he takes down from heaven:

ἔνθεν δὲ καταιβάτις ἐστὶ κέλευθος
οὐρανίη· δοιὼ δὲ πόλον ἀνέχουσι κάρηνα
οὐρέων ἠλιβάτων, κορυφαὶ χθονός, ἧχί τ’ ἀερθεὶς
ἠέλιος πρώτῃσιν ἐρεύθεται ἀκτίνεσσιν.
νειόθι δ’ ἄλλοτε γαῖα φερέσβιος ἄστεά τ’ ἀνδρῶν
φαίνετο καὶ ποταμῶν ἱεροὶ ῥόοι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε
ἄκριες, ἀμφὶ δὲ πόντος ἀν’ αἰθέρα πολλὸν ἰόντι.

Here is Richard Hunter’s translation:

From this point the road from heaven descends, and two peaks of soaring mountains hold up the sky, heights of the earth, where the risen sun blushes red with its first rays. In his passage through the vast sky, the fertile earth, the cities of men and the sacred streams of rivers opened up beneath him; elsewhere were mountain-peaks, and all around the sea.

Presumably Mackail loved this passage in Greek at least in part because it reminded him of something out of Wordsworth or Shelley—“Mont Blanc,” perhaps. The enjambment on οὐρανίη (“from heaven”), followed by an early caesura, conveys a visual and sonic sense of descent, while the k sounds (καταιβάτις κέλευθος, “downward path”) evoke the hard edges of the road cut through bedrock. Enhanced by the next enjambment, the “sheer mountains” (οὐρέων ἠλιβάτων) ascend from the previous line’s twin peaks (δοιὼ κάρηνα), on which they depend grammatically, though mountains and sky remain tied together by sound, since both begin with the same syllable and sit right on top of each other (οὐρανίη over οὐρέων). In addition, the context (especially καταιβάτις and ἠέλιος) playfully suggests an etymology for the solid Homeric adjective ἠλιβάτων (“sheer”)—as if it meant “where the sun (ἥλιος) steps down (βαίνει).” Behind the peaks, the risen sun brightens in stately spondaic rhythms (ἐρεύθεται ἀκτίνεσσιν). From there we survey all that lies below: fertile earth (γαῖα φερέσβιος), cities of men (ἄστεα ἀνδρῶν, recalling the opening of the Odyssey), holy streams (ποταμῶν ἱεροὶ ῥόοι), peaks (ἄκριες), and sea (πόντος). Only at the end, when we reach ἰόντι, do we realize we have been following Eros in his flight.

As for Richard Hunter’s translation, it bears out Mackail’s prediction, remaining faithful to the Greek yet conveying little of its beauty. The clean, unadorned syntax catches the passage’s simplicity, but prose can hardly convey the expressive interrelationship of meter, line, and sense. For that, we need verse. Here is Peter Green’s version:

From there a vertiginous sky-borne path
runs downward: the peaks of two high-towering mountains,
roof to the world, support this vault of heaven
where the rising sun’s first rays glow blushing-red.
Down below he could see, in the course of his long flight,
now fertile stretches of farmland, teeming cities,
the lines of rivers; now mountains and the surrounding sea.

Green does nice things with enjambment, his strict use of one line of English for each line of Greek allowing him to imitate Apollonius’ enjambments with some precision, as in “runs downward.” Unfortunately, the rhythms are a different story. Like Richmond Lattimore, Green attempts to imitate the cadences of Greek hexameter but—again like Lattimore—often ends up with awkward clumps of syllables (such as the tongue-twisting “first rays glow blushing-red”) and a sort of ungainly loping (“the lines of rivers; now mountains and the surrounding sea”). In this last he is clearly trying to mimic the dactylic rapidity of line 166 (ἄκριες, ἀμφὶ δὲ πόντος ἀν’ αἰθέρα πολλὸν ἰόντι), but the effect is one more of a drunken stumble than a sprint.
Now consider Poochigian’s version:

Thence
opens the downward path; there double peaks
like pillars of the earth vault ever upward
to keep the sky from falling; there the sun,
first upon rising in the morning, ruddies
the summits with extended beam. As Eros
was coasting unobstructed through the air,
plump tilth and bustling towns and nymph-abounding
waterways passed into his view and then
strange ridges and a rounded swatch of sea.

You’ll see at a glance that this is the longest of the three translations—that’s because Poochigian stretches out the compressed Greek phrasing. It’s also the most ornate, and in my opinion the most attractive, written as it is in soaring, energetic English. In the third line, for example, Poochigian transforms the adjective ἠλιβάτων (discussed above) into a verb phrase (“vault ever upward”) and interprets the appositive κορυφαὶ χθονός (“heights of the earth”) as a simile. The result is an energy and momentum lacking in the other versions. Similarly, “unobstructed” extends the sense of the Greek (ἀν’ αἰθέρα πολλὸν simply means “through the abundant air”), but we feel the air’s abundance in a way we don’t with the others. And then “nymph-abounding” strikes me as a clear improvement on ἱεροὶ ῥόοι (“holy streams”). I must admit, however, to being somewhat uneasy with the “strange” ridges and the “rounded swatch” of sea: The language is sharp and striking, but Apollonius merely describes the ocean as being “all around” (ἀμφὶ).

I mentioned that ἠλιβάτων and ἄστεα ἀνδρῶν (“cities of men”) make us think of Homer. Apollonius was renowned as a Homeric scholar, and the Argonautica is saturated with references to Homer, on the level of episode and scene as well as word and line. Poochigian similarly enriches his translation with echoes of Milton, the Homer of English. In the passage I’ve been discussing, the verb “coast” (line 7) recalls Milton’s description—in Paradise Lost, Book III—of Satan “Coasting the wall of Heav’n on this side Night / In the dun Air sublime.” It’s a fully appropriate association for the little devil Eros. And then, in line 6, there’s “extended beam”—quite a departure from the original’s “first beams.” To me this seems a clear nod to a passage in Book II of Paradise Lost. I’ll quote it:

As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North wind sleeps, o’erspread
Heav’n’s cheerful face, the low’ring Element
Scowls o’er the dark’n’d lantskip Snow or show’r,
If chance the radiant Sun with farewell sweet
Extend his ev’ning beam, the fields revive,
The birds thir notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings.

Poochigian performs a double trick: His Miltonic borrowing layers the language in the same way that Apollonius’ Homeric borrowings layer his, while also suggesting that Milton’s model (or at least one of his models) for the passage was Apollonius. Nothing could be more Alexandrian, or more like Apollonius, than this subtle intermingling of voices and historical periods to make a scholarly point that is nevertheless of more than antiquarian interest. Among the several other passages in which Poochigian performs this trick, let me single out his description of the fall of Phaëthon in Book IV:

The ship dashed onward under sail and reached
the halfway point on the Eridanus
where Phaëthon, chest smitten by a flashing
lightning-bolt, fell, half-incinerated,
out of the chariot of Helius
into the river muck, and to this day
foul vapors rising from the smoldering wound
bubble out of the brackish slick.

The use of enjambment here echoes Milton’s description of the fall of Hephaestus-Vulcan, while the phrasing points toward the passage in which Satan is cast from heaven:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.

The allusion helps pinpoint the voice of Apollonius’ narrator as interpreted by Poochigian. While much of his prosody and syntax seem modeled on Milton, Poochigian’s diction is less so, despite the occasional deliberate echo. In the sentence above, the syntax moves with Miltonic virtuosity, but the diction is less lofty. A phrase such as “half-incinerated” sits in the line not unlike “bottomless perdition,” but in a lower register, one that brings the high events (pardon the pun) down to earth. And Milton’s relentless grandeur could never admit “muck” or “brackish slick.” Like Apollonius, Poochigian mostly inhabits a middle register, influenced by Milton but “elastic” enough to accommodate earthy “muck” as well as sublime heights.

In short, Poochigian’s translation teaches the reader with a nose for such things as much about Apollonius’ influence on Milton as Apollonius teaches us about Homer. That, however, is by no means its chief virtue. Poochigian asserts in his “Note on the Text and Translation” that the Argonautica has long “needed a verse translation in which the poetic rhythms reinforce syntactic units, as do the rhythms of the original, and in which the electricity of language we expect in poetry is sustained.” His own translation seems to me to do these things: In the passages quoted above and countless others, meter, enjambment, and sound are used to wonderfully expressive effect, and the charged language compels attention, even—or especially—in the antiquarian passages that have often proven an obstacle to enjoyment.

I do have a few small reservations. With the pedantry proper to classicists, I sometimes object to the pronunciations of Greek names as indicated by Poochigian’s meter. For example, when one reads the line “The Cyclopes were seated in it, plying,” one wants to say “CYcloPES,” but the omega of the Greek demands “cyCLOpes.” (It may be that Poochigian has his own method of determining Greek pronunciation in English; he never addresses the issue, presumably because he thought it would bore readers rather than enlighten them.) I had this problem with perhaps a third of the names, of which there are a lot. Second, while Poochigian’s metrical ear is generally flawless, he seems to have an odd quirk of treating words like “world” and “wild” as two syllables; at least, that’s the only way I can hear five beats in a line like “could see the world with distinguished men.”

Niggles aside, Poochigian has produced a lively, vivid, readable, and lovely translation, whose excellencies of diction, meter, and syntax make it by far the most Apollonian Argonautica available in English.

I could quote many favorite passages, but I’m going to limit myself to three. At the very end of Book II, the Argonauts—having gotten past the Mossynoeci and the arrow-shooting birds on the Isle of Ares, and having rescued the shipwrecked sons of Phrixus—are sailing up the River Phasis towards Aea when they see a giant eagle overhead:

The heroes spotted outspread wings toward dusk
passing above the masthead near the clouds.
The huge and churning pennons loudly whispered,
puffing the sails. No, this was not a normal
bird of the air, but bigger, and it worked
its feathered wings like smoothly polished oars.

Soon after, they hear a blood-curdling scream: It is Prometheus, howling as the eagle tears out and devours his liver. (Later, we learn that his blood, dripping from the eagle’s beak, causes an herb to sprout—one that Medea uses to make the magic potion Prometheon, which protects Jason from the fire-breathing bulls.) The magical strangeness and danger of the world is everywhere apparent, but nowhere more than in those “huge and churning pennons” of the eagle rowing through the heavens, which, like the Argonauts, is bound to violently tear something immortal from its owner.

The second passage comes in Book IV, when the Argonauts are on the island of Phaeacia. King Alcinoüs is about to decide whether to return the fleeing Medea to the Colchians or allow her to remain with Jason. It’s conventional in epic to describe the dawning of important days, and Apollonius is in rare form here:

Dawn had returned, and her ambrosial beams
scattered the dusky darkness from the sky.
The island beaches laughed, the dew-drenched pathways
laughed as they ran in from the distant plains,
and there was movement in the streets, the townsfolk
were stirring, and the Colchians were stirring
out on the farthest spit of Macris island.

This is exquisite poetry. The repetition of “laughed” and “were stirring,” not found in the original, enhances the symmetry and euphony and contributes to the passage’s verb-rich liveliness. But the thing I like most is the way the lushness overflows its context, even seems detached from it. This day is a small island of triumph in a sea of trouble. Alcinoüs has already decided that if Jason and Medea have consummated their relationship, he will let them stay together. Informed of this, the pair hastily wed, and the Phaeacian king keeps his word. Even though we know—because everyone knows, and because Apollonius foreshadows it elsewhere—of the tragic suffering in store for them, the passage sparkles with joy. Indeed, it’s too joyful for the qualified optimism of the moment: It bubbles over, its exuberance conveying a worldly wonder and abundance divorced from any sense of providence.

Finally, a simile. Midway through Book II, the Argonauts are headed straight toward the Clashing Rocks. Athena decides to help them, and hastens down “to do the crew a favor”:

When a man
goes traveling outside his fatherland
(as we long-suffering mortals often do),
no land seems out of reach, the ways and means
shine in his mind, and he can see his house
and picture traveling by path and channel
and with his swift thoughts visit now one country
and now another in imagination,
so Zeus’ daughter leapt out of the cloud . . .

It’s hard not to see in these lines the scholarly immigrant to Alexandria yearning for home, even as he travels in his imagination to all corners of the known world through the books of the library. It’s also hard not to reflect that we readers of the Argonautica have spent the entire book in just such imaginative travel. That, Apollonius suggests, is a godlike privilege—one associated particularly with Athena, patroness of Wisdom.

✥

In his Translator’s Note, Poochigian justifies his choice to translate the Argonautica into verse by referring to the character of Orpheus, the great poet who joins the crew and proves the most important Argonaut next to Jason. We’ve already seen him, after the revelation of Apollo, take the lead in building a shrine to Harmony. But he does more than that. He gets the gods on the heroes’ side by singing hymns. He teaches the Argonauts the secret rites of Electra and leads them in the Dance in Armor for Cybele. He even saves their lives three times. When the Argo sails past the Sirens, he outsings them and stops the crew from leaping overboard. When the heroes are dying of thirst among the Hesperides, he calls on the nymphs, who point the way to a spring. And when they are lost on Lake Tritonis, he suggests that they “lug / the tripod of Apollo off the ship / and set it on the shore, to leave a gift / for any local power that might guide / their homeward journey.” The god Triton appears, gives them directions, and offers Euphemus the clod that will become the island of Thira. In other words, poetic speech—here synonymous with a deep knowledge of places, rituals, and the mysteries of the divine—is powerful and efficacious, even salvific. It also harmonizes. Right at the beginning of the epic, the brute Idas starts to pick a fight with the seer Idmon, until Orpheus steps in and sings a song about the origins of the world. Once his “ambrosial voice” falls silent, Apollonius tells us that “his comrades still / leaned forward longingly, their ears intent, / their bodies motionless with ecstasy.”

It’s no accident that Orpheus is responsible for the shrine to Harmony. The Alexandrian court, the library, and the city itself must have been, like the Argo, jostling, competitive, and contentious, full of strong opinions and varied talents. Who could lead such a varied chorus in a coherent melody? Who could soothe the dysfunctional marriage of Greece and Egypt, illuminating for both parties their common origins? Who, finally, could do both at once, and make of the strange union a kind of harmony that still calls out to and unsettles us today? Orpheus the Argonaut, along with his alter ego Apollonius, and his surrogate, Aaron Poochigian.

The notion of “the Other” may strike some people as academic cant, but I find it useful, mainly because of its flexibility. A sort of empty vessel that can be filled up in different ways, it changes in relation to the point of focus. Today, we may consider the world of Apollonius “Other,” while his countrymen, if they had had the term, could have used it for the Egyptians, and the Argonauts for the Colchians.

At any rate, it seems to me that there are two ways of reacting to the presence of “Otherness” in life: You can be suspicious, shunning, and oppressive, or else curious and welcoming. I think of education as, among other things, a process of shifting into the second mode. We’re born selfish and struggle to imagine ourselves in others’ shoes, but we can grow by gradually broadening our horizons. One hopes societies will develop along parallel lines, from exclusion and oppression toward admission and acceptance. Even love, that great journey (to quote Yeats) “Into the labyrinth of another’s being,” can be figured under this sign. Small wonder, then, that we are so fascinated by the bones of Macedonian kings—Death is the ultimate Other, with ancient royalty not far behind.

Small wonder, too, that so many periods of cultural and literary ferment involve a direct confrontation with an Other. Examples are numerous, but I’ll mention three. During the Archaic period, at the time of Homer’s so-called floruit (“flourishing”), Greek art was influenced by Egypt and Assyria, and the Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician. The zenith of Augustan Rome coincided with the Roman appropriation of Greek culture and literature. And the Renaissance took root in the expanded study of Latin and, especially, Greek literature and philosophy. Similar conditions obtained in the Alexandria of the first three Ptolemies, and the literary efflorescence they produced continues to challenge us today with its sheer strangeness—a strangeness that, however, arouses our curiosity and rewards our efforts.

It’s fitting that Apollonius should at last be so excellently translated, since he himself lived in a great age of translation, when Greeks, at the Ptolemies’ encouragement, were finally beginning to show an interest in “barbarian” literature, to translate it into Greek, and to include it in the library. However, the most important translation to come out of Alexandria had nothing to do with the library. The story goes that one of the Ptolemies, at the behest of Demetrius of Phalerum, wrote to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, requesting that seventy-two Greek-speaking scholars of the Law, six from each of the twelve tribes, be sent to Alexandria for the purpose of translating the Hebrew Bible. They were lodged on Pharos Island, where for seventy-two days they brought the Pentateuch over into Greek. The text they produced, the Septuagint, marked the beginning of the end for Greco-Roman paganism and gave Hellenized Jews a foothold in the Ptolemaic Kingdom. One of these latter-day Jews, Philo of Alexandria, praised the translators as “prophets and priests of the mysteries,” and added:

Therefore, even to the present day, there is held every year a feast and general assembly in the island of Pharos, to which not only Jews but multitudes of others cross the water, both to do honor to the place in which the light of that first version shone out, and also to thank God for the good gift so old yet ever young.

It can be a great thing to cross the water, and Poochigian’s Argonauts make excellent travelling companions.

“North of Rome, the land changes. It becomes richer and more fertile, but also bolder and stranger. The rocky Apennine backbone of Italy sends out curving ribs and throws up harsh vertebrae of stone. There are high ridges of hill, with cool glens and forests among them. There are fruitful plains, often commanded by steep spurs of rock which have always made splendid natural fortresses.”

That’s how, in Poets in a Landscape, Gilbert Highet opens his chapter on Propertius, describing the landscape of Umbria in terms—though he does not think it necessary to spell this out—also descriptive of the man he’s writing about, an Umbrian by birth and a poet of inviting luxuriance and forbidding cragginess, whose chiseled lines are bouldered with impressive hefty vocables, whose knotty style stands in ambiguous relation to his alternately passionate and learned verse.

It is perhaps fair to think of the Roman love elegists as “decadent” in the manner of the poets of the (18)90s whom is anatomizing so skillfully in his current series. The elegists had a definite subversive or “countercultural” strain and felt about marriage somewhat like the Decadents felt about the Catholic church, at least as satirized by Lionel Johnson in “The Cultured Faun” (quoted by Horn):

white tapers upon the high altar, an aesthetic and beautiful young priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle scented and mystical incense, the old world accents of the Vulgate, of the Holy offices; the splendour of the sacred vestments. … But to join the Church! Ah, no!

Which is to say, the elegists longed for many of the features of marriage—devotion, duration, absolute possession, free sexual access—while rejecting the institution as too practical and restrictive and lacking in passion. Such contradictory attitudes have a perverse glamor, but are hard to sustain for long—which may be why, on the one hand, so many of the 90s Decadents ended up converting, and, on the other, love elegy only flourished for about 40 years (and Ovid, who never fully got on board, was happily married for some years before his exile).

Anyway, Propertius was an Umbrian, from Assisium (Assisi), near Etruscan Perusia (Perugia); several inscriptions like the above test to his family’s prominence in the town, which was an early casualty of tensions between Antony and Octavian, about a decade before the climax at Actium.

It’s a long story, dramatically told by Appian at Civil Wars 5.32 ff.. While Antony was off diddling Cleopatra, Octavian back in Italy was robbing Peter to pay Paul, Peter being innocent Italian landowners, and Paul, soldiers demanding the wages of their soldiering. What Octavian robbed (confiscated) was land in northern Italy; both Propertius and Vergil lost familial estates at this time. In Antony’s absence, his brother Lucius and wife Fulvia tried to defend his interests by championing the dispossessed landowners, including many Umbrians, but they were outmaneuvered, and ended up circumvallated in Perusia during the winter of 41-40 BC. The city hadn’t had time to prepare and things got bad fast. Despite several strenuous sorties, Lucius could make no headway against the besiegers and at last surrendered to avoid starvation. Octavian was going to let his soldiers plunder the town, but it burned down first, when a crazed aristocrat immolated himself in his own house and the flames caught.

Propertius was scarred by these events, which may go some way to explaining the stance of ironical aloofness he strikes toward the Augustan regime in much of his poetry. His first book, almost singularly focused on his domina Cynthia, ends with two epigrams that point to his own Umbrian roots and personal devastation. The first is spoken by a close friend, a certain Gallus, who was among the besieged; dying, he asks another soldier to tell his sister where she can find his body:

Propertius 1.21

Tu, qui consortem properas evadere casum,
miles ab Etruscis saucius aggeribus,
quid nostro gemitu turgentia lumina torques?
pars ego sum vestrae proxima militiae.
sic te servato possint gaudere parentes, 5
haec soror acta tuis sentiat e lacrimis:
Gallum per medios ereptum Caesaris enses
effugere ignotas non potuisse manus;
et quaecumque super dispersa invenerit ossa
montibus Etruscis, haec sciat esse mea.

“Soldier escaping the siege in Tuscany—
you’re wounded, but you’ll make it, unlike me—
why do you wheel at my groans with your eyes wide?
Just now I was a soldier at your side.
May you get clear and bring your parents bliss,
if through your tears you’ll tell my sister this:
that Gallus, after skirting Caesar’s men,
was cut down by a nameless ruffian;
and say, of all the scattered bones that scar
these craggy Umbrian uplands, where mine are.”

The first thing to note about this poem is that the quotation marks which surround my translation would not have been available to a Roman reader, who would have had to deduce them; initially, such a reader might have assumed that Propertius was representing himself as speaking from the grave. This would not be too far-fetched from a poet whose flame “is as much charnel as carnal” (in Steele Commager’s phrase) and who spends much of his love poetry contemplating his own demise and funeral. Some of the early diction, like miles and gemitu, could easily gloss the genre of love elegy—the elegists often refer to themselves as “soldiers of love,” and to their poetry as lovesick groaning—while saucius, “wounded,” harks back to the very first poem in the book, where it described an exemplary mythical lover, Milanion (aka Meleager), who got clubbed in the woods by a centaur while mooning over Atalanta. Connotatively, then, part of the poem’s suggestion seems to be that, while Propertius is a casualty of love, we the readers still have a chance to escape his fate. As we read on, however, we learn that the speaker is actually a certain Gallus, presumably a friend of Propertius from back home, and that he has died as a result of the Perusine War. Thus a brooding atmosphere of doom and dangerous resentment hovers closely around the triple identification of the poet, his dead friend, and his devastated home place.

It may be worth noting that, stylistically, this little poem is very much of a piece with Propertius’ first book (the so-called Monobiblos). Michael Longley has pointed out the prominence in Propertius’ early work of longer words (three or more syllables) at the ends of pentameters, while most elegy tends to use only two-syllable words in this position; here, with aggeribus, militiae, and lacrimis, three of five lines show this feature, which gives them a less polished, more rough-hewn sort of feel. However, they flaunt a highly patterned, interwoven word order. Lines 2 and 4, for example, have a synchistic arrangement, with abab adjective-noun agreement (miles saucius, Etruscis aggeribus, pars proxima, vestrae militiae), creating a Propertian iunctura in line 2, where saucius, though it agrees grammatically with miles (soldier), casts its force backwards and forwards over the surrounding Etruscis aggeribus, as if the whole landscape were wounded. These are some of the technical ways in which Propertius manages to seem at the same time both jaggedly passionate and coolly cerebral.

This epigram / epitaph, as I say, came at the end of Propertius’ first collection of poems; by his fourth and final volume, he had gone over to the Augustan project to some extent (how far is debated). Nonetheless, in the opening poem of that book he still insists on pointed mention of his home place and early calamity, even as he embarks on themes tailored to win the princeps’ approval. The following lines are spoken to Propertius by an astrologer called Horos, who divines the poet’s life story to prove his prophetic effectiveness:

Propertius 4.1b 119-134

“hactenus historiae: nunc ad tua deuehar astra;
incipe tu lacrimis aequus adesse nouis.
Vmbria te notis antiqua Penatibus edit --
mentior? an patriae tangitur ora tuae?--
qua nebulosa cauo rorat Meuania campo,
et lacus aestiuis intepet Vmber aquis,
scandentisque Asis consurgit uertice murus,
murus ab ingenio notior ille tuo.
ossaque legisti non illa aetate legenda
patris et in tenuis cogeris ipse lares:
nam tua cum multi uersarent rura iuuenci,
abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.
mox ubi bulla rudi dimissa est aurea collo,
matris et ante deos libera sumpta toga,
tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo
et uetat insano uerba tonare Foro.”

“Enough old tales—time for your horoscope.
The tears will fall, but do your best to cope.
You come from Umbria. Your line was grand—
is that a lie? Have I not guessed your land?
In valleys misted by Mevania’s stream,
where Umber spreads a scrim of summer steam
and Mount Assisi’s crowning towers soar—
those walls your genius elevates still more—
at a green age, you were compelled to clutch
your father’s bones, and sleep in a small hutch.
Your rich estate, your tilth where bullocks trod,
went at a wave of the surveyor’s rod.
When your neck shed its boyish jewelry
and you, where all your mother’s gods could see,
donned a man’s clothes, the toga of the free,
Apollo whispered poems into your ear,
and stole the thunder from your law career.”

Beyond the Umbrian highlands, Highet describes at some length the “springs of Clitumnus[, which] lie a few yards off the main highway to Assisi, just where it passes under the shoulder of a sun-browned hill:”

All that one sees at first, after walking through the farmyard, is a chain of pools of water lying calmly under sunlit trees. But, as soon as one looks into the water, one sees that it is moving: it is alive: it is being born, moment by moment, continuously. … These pools constantly flow upwards out of the ground, and onwards. One sees in them the birth of a river—or rather, perhaps, the gentle emergence into sunlight of a pure stream which has long flowed underground. … Even in the smallest inlet, a pool the size of a little table, the gravel is constantly stirring, and the surface quivers every fifteen seconds with a tiny explosion of water. The clear fluid is coming up out of the earth.

I can’t help but read into this loving description of the Clitumnus’ limpid emergence an analogy for the pure stream of Propertian poetry, a “brook taken otherwhere in song,” which has its source in the Umbrian earth of Assisi, and something, always, of the dark Umbrian terroir.

Highet also writes that “Nowadays out of every hundred thousand people who know the name of Assisi, only one or two would think of Propertius. For all the others, it is the home of St. Francis.” Lionel Johnson, ’s Decadent of the Week, was among those one or two. Unlike his great friend Ernest Dowson, who was an autodidact, Johnson was a genuine scholar and classicist, whose poems are as strewn with classical references as the hills around Perugia with soldiers’ bones. His “Men of Assisi” juxtaposes Umbria’s two famous sons in a sort of sublimation of the sexual-spiritual conflict which tormented him: his repressed homosexuality and poetic aspirations on the one hand, and on the other, his desperate longing for salvation. There is something Miltonic in the contrast. Where Milton is ostensibly celebrating the fall of paganism and the triumph of Christianity, it often feels as though he is lamenting it, though for Johnson the valence seems to me to go in the opposite direction: mired in decadence and drink, Johnson longs for Christian transcendence. Each reserves his highest praise for the thing he can’t quite grasp. At any rate “Men of Assisi” certainly has the classical “neatness and hardness” Ezra Pound observes in Johnson’s work, though the poem doesn’t conclude so much as it just stops, and works less as a standalone piece than part of Johnson’s personal hagiography:

MEN OF ASSISI.
To Viscount St. Cyres.

A crown of roses and of thorns;
A crown of roses and of bay:
Each crown of loveliness adorns
Assisi, gleaming far away
On Umbrian heights, in Umbrian day.

One bloomed, when Cynthia's lover sang
Cynthia, and revelry, and Rome:
And one his wounded hands did hang,
Whose heart was lovelier Love's dear home;
And his, an holier martyrdom.

Are the spring roses round thine head,
Propertius! as they were of old?
In the gray deserts of the dead,
Glows any wine in cups of gold?
Not all the truth, dead Cynthia told!

And round thine head, so lowly fair,
Saint Francis! thorns no longer close:
Paradise roses may be there,
And Mary lilies: only those.
Thy sister, Death, hurt not thy rose.

We to thy shade, with song and wine,
Libation make, Propertius!
While suns or stars of summer shine,
Thy passionate music thrills through us:
Hail to thee, hail! We crown thee, thus.

But when our hearts are chill and faint,
Pierced with true sorrow piteous:
Francis! our brother and God's Saint,
We worship thee, we hail thee, thus:
Praying, Sweet Francis! pray for us.

O city on the Umbrian hills:
Assisi, mother of such sons!
What glory of remembrance fills
Thine heart, whereof the legend runs:
These are among my vanished ones.

I want to end with another poem that yokes similar polarities in an Umbrian context. The author is a friend and occasional consumer of this no-news letter, the British poet Clive Watkins, whose slender oeuvre deserves far more readers than I can drum up for it. The poem below, “Paragliders,” comes from a seven-poem “Umbrian Suite” you can find in his 2014 collection from Waywiser Press, Already the Flames. It is set in the mountains around Assisi on the Feast of the Assumption, and describes an aetherial paraglider as a sort of aspirant to angeldom; this winged duality, like Marvell’s soul, “till prepared for longer flight, / Waves in its plumes the various light.” The slant rhymes (which Clive tells me were the technical impetus not just for this poem but the whole astonishing sequence, whose conclusion this is) figure the imperfect or temporary fit between body and wings, flesh and spirit—the mystical desire to go beyond physical and temporal limitations, and the impossibility of actually doing so for more than a “spot of time.” There isn’t much Propertius to speak of in Clive’s Umbria, though Francis is a pervasive presence, very much in the air, as it were. In this poem I particularly love the third stanza (“a stirring as of linen ruched and quilled”!) and the earthy conclusion—how “flickering” suggests both the lingering immanence of the flame lit in the glider’s heavenly assumption, as well as the delicate transience of her time on earth. My thanks

to Clive for letting me share it!

Paragliders
by Clive Watkins, from Already the Flames

What folk are these who have come,
by car, on foot, up the track to this high place,
gathering after their long climb
in twos and threes on that bare shelf of grass?
Look how the August sun,
gilding the scattered stones and the green blades
with ordinary light, has drawn
a fleeting glory round their quiet heads.

Before their feet the earth
falls sheer. From such a height the sunlit plain,
the little town, its complex wreath
of roads, factory, farm and wood, all turn
to intricate chequer-work:
patches of gold and umber stretch away
southward to far hills, which break
in strokes of dove-grey cloud against the sky.

Above, a rush of wings,
a stirring as of linen ruched and quilled
or a fiery exaltation of tongues –
as if, swept up from that narrow stony field
on the cool tide of the air
and borne aloft above the grassy summit
unwearying in arc and spire
our earthly freight at last might prove pure spirit.

But now another, a girl,
lays down her heavy burden on the turf
and, kneeling, rigs the blue sail
that soon will carry her out into the gulf.
Already the quickening wind
has breathed into its cells and caught her weight,
and she, close-lipped as though she scorned
to tread upon the earth, leaps up to meet

its hurrying blind embrace.
The watchers tilt their heads, a young man points,
and out into the bright abyss,
as if air and fire were her true elements,
she is drawn up. The sun
flares on the ribbed arch of her wing, on the flock
of wings that, turn and counter-turn,
beneath the vault of heaven shift and tack,

till, slanting aside, she sweeps
from the zenith out over gully and cliff through the lofts
of summer air and, moth-like, drops
softly down; and the scurrying wind lifts,
and the trees shake out their skirts,
and earth flows up to catch her where she falls
among hens and scampering children and goats,
and the dusty farm-dog yaps at her flickering heels.

Mount Subasio, Assisi: 15^th August, 2002: Feast of the Assumption

Little unites both teams in our lukewarm civil war like labor—though not the same idea of labor. When Oklahoma chose Labor omnia vincit as its state motto, no doubt the intent was pro-capitalist: Amat victoria curam, as Catullus says, victory loves hard work, spoils follow toils—pull yourself up by your bootstraps! No handouts here! Presumably this is not exactly what the American Federation of Labor or the United Brotherhood of Carpenters meant in selecting the same phrase as their slogan, not to mention the International Union of Operating Engineers or the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Fortunately, everyone is wrong, at least when it comes to Virgil’s meaning. Yet the line provides an excellent example of how readily excerption can alter the interpretation of a Virgilian phrase without in the slightest diminishing its force.

The line comes in Book 1 of the Georgics, where Virgil is describing how Jupiter ended the Golden Age by introducing iron, which proved as useful for farming as for war. Virgil opens the passage with the comment that pater ipse colendi / haud facilem esse viam voluit — “Father Jove himself did not / wish that the path of culture should be painless” — and describes at length his various dire innovations, including venomous serpents, prowling wolves, and hurricanes, “all this so want should be / The cause of human ingenuity, / And ingenuity the cause of arts” as David Ferry has it. Arts duly appear—sailing, fowling, fishing, toolmaking, woodsmanship, eventually farming; but before “Ceres first taught mortals to turn the earth with iron,” Virgil says:

labor omnia uicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.

It’s no simple matter to translate these words. Here are some versions I have to hand:

What cannot endless Labour urg'd by need? — Dryden

Yes, unremitting labour / And harsh necessity’s hand will master anything. —C. Day Lewis

Hard work prevailed, hard work and pressing poverty. —Peter Fallon

Relentless work conquered / all difficulties—work and urgent need when times were hard. — Janet Lembke

Toil subdued the earth, / Relentless toil, and the prick of dearth in hardship. — Kimberly Johnson

[A]nd everything / Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need. —David Ferry

As Richard Thomas says in his commentary, “these most crucial lines of the poem have been made to say what they do not, so that the poem may say what it does not” (92). The thing we want them to say, of course, is that all of this struggle is to and for the good, that if we work hard, we will succeed. This sentiment provides a feeling of control, as well as an ethical underpinning for social disparity. Even when we acknowledge that luck plays an outsized role in success and failure, which are never explicable by character merely, and that there are calamities no effort can obviate, we still feel, obscurely, that work is somehow good for us, that we will have our reward, in this world or the next. There is a special providence in things; life is a benevolent taskmaster who never assigns more than we can handle. Isn’t it pretty to think so.

Richard Thomas denies, and I agree with him, that Vergil says any of this, though I do believe Vergil is happy enough to be mis-taken, the way Larkin is with “What will survive of us is love,” or Frost with “And that has made all the difference.” Three points convince me of this. First, the word labor itself, while it does have the base meaning “labor, toil, exertion,” very often in classical poetry has the much more negative sense of "drudgery, hardship, fatigue, distress, trouble, pain, suffering.” Even in the Late Republican period, there was enough overlap in the meaning of labor and dolor that Cicero felt the need to distinguish them (Tusc. 2.15.351). Labor need not always have its most negative sense, but, attached to the adjective improbus, we can’t rule it out. The second point involves improbus (meaning not probus, i.e, dishonest, wicked), which, as Thomas notes, in Vergil is always a negative word, with a range from “rascally” to “unconscionably cruel” to “insatiably savage.” Nowhere does it mean anything like what it would have to—viz. “weariless” or “indefatigable”—to torture optimism from the previous three words. Finally, omnia vicit means, literally, “has conquered all things,” though “conquered” in English does not really suit. It does fit the more cheerful sense which many (like Janet Lembke and Peter Fallon) extract, viz., “has conquered all difficulties,” but this involves an unjustified narrowing of the sense of omnia. As Thomas points out, even in the Georgics there are plenty of difficulties hard work does not overcome, like storms, plague, and Orpheus’s loss. For his part, Thomas translates “insatiable toil occupied all areas of existence,” which is not beautiful but otherwise spot on.

Of the translations above, one must give the palm to Ferry. Fallon, Lembke and Day Lewis are all too partisan (pro-Labo(u)r, as it were), though Day Lewis’s real problem is the use of the future + indefinite (“will master anything”) when “has mastered everything” would set him right. Johnson’s “Toil subdued the earth” is not bad at all at preserving Virgil’s studied ambiguity, though “prick of dearth” is a somewhat dumpy phrase. Dryden’s rendering—“What cannot endless Labour urg’d by need?” is more subtle than it looks, by employing the rhetorical question as a sort of double entendre: on the one hand it is equivalent to stating that there is nothing “endless Labour” cannot do, while on the other it keeps its integrity as a question, as if one might answer, contrariwise, “Actually, quite a lot.” Ferry’s lines are the only ones that strike me as both accurate and idiomatic. The reversal of the word order across the enjambment to “everything / was toil” dispenses with the problem of vicit, while the repetition of “toil” adds heft and pathos. The only thing he doesn’t do is preserve the ambiguity—Ferry’s phrasing, unlike Johnson’s, cannot be misread in the same way as Vergil’s.

Another supremely famous line of Vergil’s which deals with ‘labor’ comes from Aeneid VI. The Sibyl is explaining to Aeneas how it might be possible for him to make it to the underworld and back. In Latin, her speech is beyond impressive. Here it is with Seamus Heaney’s translation:

'sate sanguine divum,
Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.’

“Blood relation
Of gods, Trojan, son of Anchises,
It is easy to descend into Avernus.
Death’s dark door stands open day and night.
But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,
That is the task, that is the undertaking.”

This is the journey of the hero, the philosopher, the poet, summed up in a single thundering phrase. Everyone can descend into the depths, but to come out again to the light with the riches you found there—not everyone can do that. This passage inscribed itself into the Roman imagination instantaneously and with numinous force, such that it shouldn’t be too hard to conceive the shock of reading, a couple decades later, in the Ars Amatoria:

Hoc opus, hic labor est, primo sine munere iungi;
Ne dederit gratis quae dedit, usque dabit.

“Herein lies the task,
The great labour”—to part with nothing before
She’s given herself, so she’ll give more and more
Lest she lose what she’s given already. [Trans. Michie]

For Ovid, the “great task” has become figuring out how to get laid without first plying the lady with gifts. While quite funny in context, it’s tempting to say that this scrap of literary sacrilege alone could have justified his exile in Augustus’ eyes; at the moment, I’m not too inclined to disagree! Though it was in exile, surrounded by Latinless barbarians, hopelessly spinning verses for a public at home whose applause he would never hear again, that Ovid made his truest statements about the relationship between the work of poetry and that of life:

from Tristia 5.7
Nec tamen, ut lauder, uigilo curamque futuri
nominis, utilius quod latuisset, ago.
Detineo studiis animum falloque dolores,
experior curis et dare uerba meis.
Quid potius faciam desertis solus in oris,
quamue malis aliam quaerere coner opem?
Siue locum specto, locus est inamabilis, et quo
esse nihil toto tristius orbe potest,
siue homines, uix sunt homines hoc nomine digni,
quamque lupi, saeuae plus feritatis habent.
Non metuunt leges, sed cedit uiribus aequum,
uictaque pugnaci iura sub ense iacent.
Pellibus et laxis arcent mala frigora bracis,
oraque sunt longis horrida tecta comis.
In paucis remanent Graecae uestigia linguae,
haec quoque iam Getico barbara facta sono.
unus in hoc nemo est populo, qui forte Latine
quaelibet e medio reddere uerba queat.
Ille ego Romanus uates (ignoscite, Musae)
Sarmatico cogor plurima more loqui.
En pudet et fateor, iam desuetudine longa
uix subeunt ipsi uerba Latina mihi.
Nec dubito quin sint et in hoc non pauca libello
barbara: non hominis culpa, sed ista loci.
Ne tamen Ausoniae perdam commercia linguae,
et fiat patrio uox mea muta sono,
ipse loquor mecum desuetaque uerba retracto,
et studii repeto signa sinistra mei.
Sic animum tempusque traho, sic meque reduco
a contemplatu summoueoque mali.
Carminibus quaero miserarum obliuia rerum:
praemia si studio consequar ista, sat est.

I do not toil for praise, or to ensure
life to a name far better off obscure;
the work distracts my mind, cheats misery,
and tries, with words, to con calamity. 40
What else to do, alone in this wilderness?
What other balm should I seek in distress?
I look around; it’s not a pleasant place:
no landscape ever wore a sadder face.
I see the men, if they can be so styled:
compared with wolves, they’re more grotesque and wild.
They scoff at justice; strength, not law, is lord,
and rights submit to the aggressor’s sword.
They fight the cold with baggy pants and skins,
and matted bristles shield their heads and chins. 50
In a few, vestiges of Greek are found,
though made barbaric by a Getish sound.
In all these tribes there’s no one who could summon
a single Latin word, however common.
So I, the Roman bard—Muse, don’t harangue!—
must often speak with a Sarmatian twang.
I blush to say so—in this long neglect
I grope for Latin words, and can’t connect.
I’m sure that in these pages there’s a mix
of barbarisms—don’t blame me, blame the sticks. 60
Fearing to lose my old Italian speech,
my homeland muted in me, out of reach,
I mutter to myself, and, out of dumb
desuetude forcing the words to come,
rehearse my catastrophic idiom.
That’s how I use my mind and time, and strain
to draw my thoughts from the pursuit of pain.
If poems help me forget a while my crisis,
if that’s the prize my toil wins, it suffices.

Catullus may have compared himself to a flower cut down at the edge of a field, but his genius was more like a hothouse which incubated what would become the most influential strains of classical Latin poetry in its greatest period. The proximal cause for this fecundity was his commitment to polyeideia, a watchword for “formal multifariousness” which he imported into Latin from Callimachus, though it was clearly the force of his personality, the swaggering, prickly, passionate, living presence we feel in so many of his poems, that made the technical innovations stick. His work was seminal to four great varietals of verse that came after: the Alexandrian hexameter in Latin, which poem 64 overhauled from Ennius, Lucretius and Cicero and bequeathed to Virgil, who would bring it to its acme; the invective and epigrammatic tradition, which gave us Martial; love elegy, for which his Lesbia poems are a foundational inspiration, especially his longer elegiac poems 68 and 76; and finally, the lyric tradition. Catullus was the first poet to Latinize the sapphic stanza, and had he not done so, one wonders whether it would even have occurred to Horace to try his hand at the meters of ancient Aeolia. It is no accident that in Integer vitae Horace alludes to both of the poems Catullus wrote in sapphics.

Catullus’ two poems in sapphics bookend his doomed relationship. The first translates Sappho’s most famous poem into a scene set at the beginning of his acquaintance with Lesbia, perhaps the night he met her, while the second expresses the searing anger and resigned bitterness with which the affair concluded. You can read complete translations of the first poem, and of the Sappho poem it is based on, here. The second, poem 11, is perhaps my favorite Catullus poem (it’s on a very short list anyway). It was part of the first 20 or so pp. of translation I did for the book and contains some choices I wouldn’t make today; nonetheless I feel fondly about it and have let it stet. Here is the poem:

Catullus 11
Furi et Aureli comites Catulli,
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa
tunditur unda,

sive in Hyrcanos Arabesve molles,
seu Sagas sagittiferosve Parthos,
sive quae septemgeminus colorat
aequora Nilus,

sive trans altas gradietur Alpes,
Caesaris visens monimenta magni,
Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor ulti-
mosque Britannos,

omnia haec, quaecumque feret voluntas
caelitum, temptare simul parati,
pauca nuntiate meae puellae
non bona dicta.

cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens;

nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est.

To Furius and Aurelius

You’d stick beside Catullus, your old friend,
if he takes off for India’s farthest reaches,
where the eastern ocean at the world’s end
batters the beaches;

or even for the Caspian, or Iran,
or the soft Arabs, Parthia’s archer host,
or where the Nile’s sevenfold waters span
and darken the coast;

or if he crosses the Alps to see firsthand
great Caesar’s monuments, the Gaulish Rhine,
the violent Channel, and British hinterland
beyond the brine.

Friends braced to do with me what I have to do,
where or whatever the gods’ will leads me towards,
go and address my girl; pass on these few
ungentle words:

Let her live and enjoy her crowd of pricks,
letting three hundred at once into her skirt,
not true to any, but using all her tricks
to make them spurt.

Don’t let her call me a lover or a friend;
it’s her fault that my love is fallen now
like a shy flower touched at the meadow’s end
by a passing plow.

For me the greatness of this poem lies in the surprising, even shocking, shifts in tone and register which take place throughout. It is a wild ride and when it starts you have no idea where it will end. The Furius and Aurelius whom it addresses are frequent butts of Catullus’ invective, so we might naturally assume he’ll be having a go at them here too, though they emerge seeming more like confidantes, or at least errand boys (bad to bad). The poem is not about them, nor is it about its geographical catalogue, which starts in the extreme east, with India, and ends in the extreme west, in Britain, thus tracing the arc of the sun which has set on Catullus’ love. With the fourth stanza we finally approach the point, but “ungentle words” (non bona dicta) hardly prepares us for the ferocious obscenity of the penultimate stanza, whose vivat quotes vivamus (let us live) from that poem of Catullus where he is most head-over-heels in love (my translation is here). Yet that stanza in turn completely fails to prepare us for the resignation and childlike hurt of the final image of the flower “touched at the meadow’s end / by a passing plow” — tactus (touched) is so delicate, in sense and sound. At the end of this poem, you really feel that something has ended. It has been an experience. This is the way a poem ought to move.

On Substack these days there is a lot of talk about Romanticism. Having spent most of my life (since 2003 or so) as something of an anti-Romantic, I am not sure how I feel about this trend, though there’s no doubt it’s preferable to AI slop and the pious ranting much poetry has devolved into. The motive to feed, however feebly, into this discursive stream conjures another favorite poem partly inspired by Catullus 11, an ode of Horace which I previously discussed here. There is also an ulterior motive, since I read both of these poems/translations, along with a poem of my own called Lalage inspired by them, last weekend as part of the Frost Farm conference (see ’s exuberant recap). Perhaps next to Catullus Horace will make for an instructive Classic-Romantic opposition; or if not, I can at least add a little more about the sources of the Horace ode which I couldn’t fit into the reading and haven’t yet delved into on this blog.

As an observer of his own love affairs Horace is much more wry, seasoned, detached—in other words, a Classic, as compared with the proto-Romantic Catullus (avant la lettre, of course). In one of his most beloved poems he tackles some of the quasi-Romantic tropes current in the poetry of his day—including two poems of Catullus—with cooly brilliant results. Ode 1.22, known as Integer Vitae from its first words in Latin, has long been famous for its sublime opening. It was set to a monumentally mournful tune by the German composer Friedrich Ferdinand Fleming and became a popular choice at German and Scandinavian funerals. Petrarch imitated it three times (Canzone 145, 159, and 176; some mediocre translations here, though I’m looking forward, as you should be too, to ’s new Norton translation slated for publication in 4/26), and Thomas Campion’s English version reflects the solemnity with which it was typically read:

The man of life upright,
Whose chearfull minde is free
From waight of impious deedes,
And yoake of vanitee

The man whose silent dayes
In harmelesse joyes are spent:
Whom hopes cannot delude,
Nor sorrowes discontent,

That man needes neyther towres,
Nor armour for defence:
Nor vaults his guilt to shrowd
From thunders violence; …

Good thoughts his surest friends,
His wealth a well-spent age,
The earth his sober Inne,
And quiet pilgrimage.

Campion’s is a fine poem and I’m glad it exists, though his interpretation is as off piste as his verse is on point. Horace didn’t mean a word of it; he just liked how it sounded. Here’s the ode:

Horace Odes 1.22
Integer vitae scelerisque purus
non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu
nec venenatis gravida sagittis,
Fusce, pharetra,

sive per Syrtis iter aestuosas 5
sive facturus per inhospitalem
Caucasum vel quae loca fabulosus
lambit Hydaspes.

Namque me silva lupus in Sabina,
dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra 10
terminum curis vagor expeditis,
fugit inermem,

quale portentum neque militaris
Daunias latis alit aesculetis
nec Iubae tellus generat, leonum 15
arida nutrix.

Pone me pigris ubi nulla campis
arbor aestiva recreatur aura,
quod latus mundi nebulae malusque
Iuppiter urget; 20

pone sub curru nimium propinqui
solis in terra domibus negata:
dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,
dulce loquentem.

A man whose life is whole, whose heart is clean,
Fuscus, does not need Moorish spears to seize on,
or bows, or quivers of arrows that have been
tipped with poison,

not if he makes for Libya’s sweltering sands,
or for the Caucasus, where wind whiplashes
the hostile peaks, or for the fabled lands
the Indus washes.

The proof? A wolf, as I wandered wholly charmed
by Lalage, singing of her and lost in thought
out through my Sabine woods, though I was unarmed,
took off like a shot;°

a prodigy like Apulia never spied
among its oaks and bellicose environs;
nor has Numidia, that baked and dried
nursemaid of lions.

Take me to fields that sluggish ice sheets cover,
which no trees break, no summer weather warms,
some region Jupiter’s knitted brow scowls over
with constant storms;

take me to where the sun swoops lower, faster,
so low there are no towns or houses built;
I’ll still love Lalage for her lovely laughter,
her lovely lilt.

The heart of this poem is the anecdote of the wolf, which there is no way Horace expects us to be impressed by. It is telling that Campion has no use whatsoever for stanzas 3-6, while Petrarch adapts different parts of the poem in each sonnet, but never touches the wolf. Wolves are naturally wary of humans; by running away, the wolf in Horace’s poem, assuming the poet did actually see one (which I do assume), far from an unheard-of prodigy, behaves exactly as we would expect it to. The anecdote justifies neither the grandeur of the opening nor the confidence of the conclusion. What does? The hyperbole of love, which Horace associates firmly (and parodically) with poetry—like that of Catullus, Sappho, and the Roman love elegists.

Already in Latin poetry, specifically in love elegy, “amor” in the plural (amores) refers both to experiences of love and to the poems which narrate those experiences. This ode purports to be about an experience of love but comes to be about the poetry of love. The opening stanza dissembles the presence of amor (part of why it was so impressive to the 19th century and other moralists), but its grandiose claim travesties a commonplace of love elegy. I’ll cite the elegiac precedents. Tibullus tackles the theme at 1.2 ll. 29-34:

Quisquis amore tenetur, eat tutusque sacerque
Qualibet: insidias non timuisse decet. 30
Non mihi pigra nocent hibernae frigora noctis,
Non mihi, cum multa decidit imber aqua.
Non labor hic laedit, reseret modo Delia postes
Et vocet ad digiti me taciturna sonum.

Sacred and safe we wander where we please,
we lovers, and need fear no treacheries.
For me, the torpid winter midnights pose
no threat, nor yet the rains the tempest blows.
I’ll feel no pain, if Delia’s door swings wide
and her hushed finger ushers me inside.

It also appears in Tibullus Book III (which is not actually written by Tibullus), in a poem by the so-called “Sulpicia elegist” (3.10. ll. 15-16):

Pone metum, Cerinthe: deus non laedit amantes; 15
tu modo semper ama: salua puella tibi est;

Relax, Cerinthus: god won’t harm a lover.
The girl’s protected, if you’ll always love her.

Propertius, too, is pleased to echo the same claim (3.16, ll. 11-20):

nec tamen est quisquam, sacros qui laedat amantes:
Scironis medias his licet ire vias.
quisquis amator erit, Scythicis licet ambulet oris,
nemo adeo ut feriat barbarus esse volet.
luna ministrat iter, demonstrant astra salebras,
ipse Amor accensas praecutit ante faces,
saeva canum rabies morsus avertit hiantis:
huic generi quovis tempore tuta viast.
sanguine tam parvo quis enim spargatur amantis
improbus, et cuius sit comes ipsa Venus?

A lover is holy, though, and can’t be harmed,
not if he strides by Sciron’s den unarmed;
no savages will threaten him with blows,
not if through Scythia’s wilderness he goes.
Moons show the way; stars light each jagged shelf;
Love lifts his torch and leads him on himself.
A mad dog with its slavering jaws steers clear:
the path a lover treads is free of fear.
What fiend would stain his fingers with the thinned
blood of a lover who calls Venus friend?

It seems clear to me both that Horace does not take such stuff seriously, and that the love elegists are far from his only targets. His other main targets, signaled by the sapphic stanza form, are Catullus and, through him, Sappho. I won’t explain sapphics here—read, if you want, this post about the “English sapphic,” or this archived post of Moul for an explanation.

At any rate it is no accident that in Integer vitae Horace alludes to both of the poems Catullus wrote in sapphics, the first of which, as I mentioned above, adapts Sappho to describe the beginning of his relationship with Lesbia. Here is the opening of Sappho’s original and Catullus’ version (again, read both in full here):

Sappho 31
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν᾽ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν

He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, who
ever he is, who takes his seat so close
across from you, and listens raptly to
your lilting voice

and lovely laughter…

Catullus 51
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit

dulce ridentem…

The equal of a god that man appears,
better than gods, if it’s not blasphemy,
who sits across from you, and stares, and hears
continually

your lovely laughter,

Notice that, while Sappho gives us both ἆδυ φωνείσας and γελαίσας ἰμέροεν (“lilting voice and lovely laughter”), Catullus keeps only dulce ridentem (“lovely laughter”). The ending of Integer vitae seems to rib Catullus for the omission:

dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,
dulce loquentem.

I’ll still love Lalage for her lovely laughter,
her lovely lilt.

Horace quotes Catullus’ dulce ridentem verbatim, but makes sure to add ἆδυ φωνείσας back in as the poem’s final words, dulce loquentem. Besides the lovely liquid sounds and the classic Horatian diminuendo, the goal is perhaps to usurp a little extra authority at Catullus’ expense.

Horace’s ode can also be constructively compared with Catullus 11. Their most obvious shared feature is the geographical catalogue. Catullus’ poem seems to have been composed on the eve of his leaving Rome for a while and suggests a number of possible destinations (actually, he went to Bithynia, as a staff member for the governor Memmius). Horace’s claim is more general and involves a list of threatening locales where any lover who is integer vitae scelerisque purus, whole of life and clean of crime, will nonetheless be safe. Catullus’ catalogue, as mentioned above, traces the arc of the setting sun from east to west; Horace’s perhaps reverses this trajectory in his first two stanzas, from the Mauri (in Mauretania / Morocco) to the Hydaspes (the Indus), though the concluding stanzas shift rather to a north-south axis. If Horace has twigged (which I’m not sure he did) the subtle meaning of Catullus’ sunset arc, the allusion might suggest that his own connection with Lalage, like Catullus’ with Lesbia, is not likely to last—unlike Lesbia, Lalage is not a recurring character in the Odes, and appears only here. It is like Horace to doubt the grandiose protests of love which since time immemorial have served as ploys to lure girls into the sack, even in the midst of trying the same ploy himself.

Yet the more enduring impact of Catullus’ poem on Horace’s can be seen in its movement. Horace keeps Catullus’ surprising shifts of thought, though he doesn’t try to match the shocking mix of tones. The ode’s biggest surprise is what it bullies its grand first line into meaning: not Campion’s “the man of life upright,” but merely a lover / love-poet—we must imagine that love makes us integer vitae scelerisque purus, despite knowing that love has been the cause of some pretty grievous crimes (e.g. Medea). The bully is namque, “for,” at the start of stanza 3, which presents the wolf-anecdote as an explanation/proof of the claim in the first two stanzas. The fourth stanza shifts back up into high poetical exaggeration completely out of proportion with the event it describes, thus setting up the rapturous conclusion, with its incantatory repetitions of pone and dulce and its jangling participles (ridentem, loquentem). We do not really know for sure that it is about love until amabo in the penultimate line. The poem Horace was “singing” / composing in the forest when he frightened the wolf was indeed a love poem and it was this one.

The Latin love poets all give their beloveds significant pseudonyms: Catullus’s Lesbia and Ovid’s Corinna both point to famous poets, while Tibullus’ Delia and Propertius’ Cynthia are each named with epithets connected to Apollo / Diana. The name “Lalage” is also significant, of course: it means “Babbler” in Greek (from λαλεῖν). Lalage has no independent reality in this poem and is not mentioned by Horace again. My feeling has always been that what he really loves is not so much a particular person as the beautiful babble of poetry—of Sappho and Catullus, of the sounds he makes in the poem, maybe even of love elegy to an extent (though there was no love lost between him and Propertius). The ode is a love letter to its own mode, and a criticism of it.

If forced to choose between the two poems, though more Horatian at heart, I have to give the palm to Catullus. Poem 11 is such a rollercoaster. Its lurches, from the catalogue of toponyms to non bona dicta to vivat valeatque moechis to the prat(i) ultimi flos, are felt in the gut. He is shaking our shoulders and telling us, in effect, This is what it is like to be me, now. Horace’s ode is less forceful but its quarry is larger—nothing less than the loves of the poets. The poetic appeal of its language, now grandly impressive, now musically enchanting, is everywhere inextricable from the silliness of what it is saying, and that silliness implicates its sources, which it wears on its sleeve. Horace is a little like Lysias in the Phaedrus, who tries to convince his eromenos that, as a non-lover, he is worthier of affection than a lover would be. Don’t mind us poets, we’re just a bunch of babbling idiots, Horace says, but doesn’t it all sound so nice?

There is one more little intertext for this poem which I don’t usually belabor at readings, on the principle that, if I’ve got 15 minutes, I should play only the hits. However, anyone who has read this far might be interested in a deeper cut. This Alexandrian epigram by Dioscorides (Dios. 16 GP) is also in the background of Horace’s poem. Here a eunuch priest of Cybele (called “chambermaid,” θαλαμηπόλος) encounters a lion on the road, which by divine inspiration he manages to scare off with one of his instruments of Cybele worship, the kettledrum. This poem, too, reminds us of Catullus, who also wrote a poem about a priest of Cybele (called “Attis” in his poem) who castrates himself in a religious frenzy and quickly regrets it (Cat. 63). Dioscorides’ priest dedicates his salvific kettledrum to Cybele; as he does so, he refers to it as a “noisemaker” or “chatterbox”—λαλάγημα. My suspicion is that Horace read lalagema and thought of a poem, by Sappho or Catullus if not Dioscorides, which at the prompting of Eros became Lalage.

Dioscorides 16
Greek Anthology VI.220

Σάρδις Πεσσινόεντος ἀπὸ Φρυγὸς ἤθελ᾽ ἱκέσθαι
ἔκφρων, μαινομένην δοὺς ἀνέμοισι τρίχα,
ἁγνὸς Ἄτυς, Κυβέλης θαλαμηπόλος: ἄγρια δ᾽ αὐτοῦ
ἐψύχθη χαλεπῆς πνεύματα θευφορίης,
ἑσπέριον στείχοντος ἀνὰ κνέφας: εἰς δὲ κάταντες
ἄντρον ἔδυ, νεύσας βαιὸν ἄπωθεν ὁδοῦ.
τοῦ δὲ λέων ὤρουσε κατὰ στίβον, ἀνδράσι δεῖμα
θαρσαλέοις, Γάλλῳ δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὀνομαστὸν ἄχος,
ὃς τότ᾽ ἄναυδος ἔμεινε δέους ὕπο, καί τινος αὔρῃ
δαίμονος ἐς στονοὲν τύμπανον ἧκε χέρας:
οὗ βαρὺ μυκήσαντος, ὁ θαρσαλεώτερος ἄλλων
τετραπόδων, ἐλάφων ἔδραμεν ὀξύτερον,
τὸν βαρὺν οὐ μείνας ἀκοῆς ψόφον ἐκ δὲ βόησεν:
μῆτερ, Σαγγαρίου χείλεσι πὰρ ποταμοῦ
ἱρὴν σοὶ θαλάμην, ζωάγρια, καὶ λαλάγημα
τοῦτο, τὸ θηρὶ φυγῆς αἴτιον, ἀντίθεμαι.

Chaste Atys, chambermaid of Cybele,
inspired with a bitter ecstasy,
from Pessinus for Sardis once set out
in frenzy, while the wind-blasts whipped about
his raving hair. He ventured on until
the fervor of his passion had grown still
and twilight fell, and then he ducked inside
a cave just off the road where he could hide.
A lion jumped his path, a hulking brute
brave men would tremble at. He stood there mute,
speechless with fear, till some god made him take
his kettledrum and give it a good shake.
At once, the boldest of the beasts, in fear
of that deep thunder, sped off like a deer,
spooked by the noise. ‘This chamber in the rocks,
he cried, ‘Great Mother, and this chatterbox
that scared him off, I consecrate in thanks
to you by the Sangarias’s banks.’

Today is the anniversary of Augustus’ death. As the poem says,

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so young myself.

Anyway, has a birthday coming up which it was a great pleasure pre-celebrating with her at the Frost Farm this past weekend, mostly by gorging on her virtuoso Frost-inspired cake (complete with Robert Frosting). It’s an event worth dusting off the Hellenistic birthday poem, the genethliacon, for. The earliest example we have is the 12th Iambus of Callimachus, a charming poem honoring the baby daughter of his friend Leo; in the poem, the poet conjures a parallel Olympian scene where the gods gather to celebrate the birth of baby Hebe, the goddess of youth. All the gods bring presents, but Apollo brings only a poem, which asserts that his gift is by far the best of all; no doubt Callimachus, like Apollo, saved himself some money with this one.

The Romans took over the genethliacon genre from the Greeks but adapted it to their own birthday customs, in which they donned white robes and made offerings to their birth-spirit, which for men was called a genius and for women a Juno. This is from my note on the topic in the Penguin Book of Greek & Latin Lyric Verse:

When people celebrated their own birthday, they would offer gifts of wine, flowers, incense and barley cakes at the hearth to the genius or Juno, as well as prayers for continued well-being and promises of a repeat performance next year; the offerings were bloodless, because, in the words of the third-century CE writer Censorinus, ‘When on their birthdays our ancestors made yearly offerings to the genius, they restrained their hands from slaughter and blood, so as not to deprive others of life on the day when they themselves received it’ (Birthday Book 2).

The following two epigrams constitute almost a third of the extant verse of Sulpicia, the only Roman woman poet whose work we have in any quantity. (There was another Roman poetess, also named Sulpicia, from the time of Domitian, only two of whose lines survive.) Born around 40 BC, the first Sulpicia was the granddaughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus (consul in 51 BC) and niece of Tibullus’ patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Sulpicia was in love with a young man her poetry calls Cerinthus (Greek for “bee bread”), and as you’ll see, she was very angry with her uncle, who was planning to take her out of Rome (and away from her boyfriend) on her special day. Probably Uncle Messalla only wanted to do something nice for her—maybe when she was younger she really enjoyed visiting Tuscany—but now she has other priorities and she does not hold back. There is something about the transposition of this sort of recognizably adolescent concern to the arch obliquity of the elegiac idiom which strikes my ear as imperious and intimidating—hence the superb coldness of a line like “There are itineraries nothing warrants!” Anyway, as you’ll see, Sulpicia wins in the end:

Sulpicia 2

Invisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto
et sine Cerintho tristis agendus erit.
Dulcius urbe quid est? an villa sit apta puellae
atque Arrentino frigidus amnis agro?
Iam nimium Messalla mei studiose, quiescas,
heu tempestivae, saeve propinque, viae!
Hic animum sensusque meos abducta relinquo,
arbitrio quamvis non sinis esse meo.

My birthday’s nearing – miserable day!
With city and Cerinthus far away,
I’ll have to spend it on a wretched farm.
What’s sweeter than big city life? What charm
could draw a girl to some backwoods chateau,
to Tuscan fields where frigid waters flow?
Uncle Messalla, surely your interest
in me is too officious – let it rest!
There are itineraries nothing warrants.
Kidnapped like that, I’d have my vital currents
of intellect and feeling left behind,
since you won’t let me make up my own mind.

Sulpicia 3

Scis iter ex animo sublatum triste puellae?
natali Romae iam licet esse suo.
Omnibus ille dies nobis natalis agatur,
qui nec opinanti nunc tibi forte venit.

You’ve heard!? The trip and weight are off! I’m free!
Now Rome will host my birthday jubilee!
Cheers to my birthday! Let no one neglect it,
which came when you, I think, did not expect it.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Christina Rossetti had Sulpicia in mind when she wrote her own much-beloved genethliacon. Rossetti’s poem is more colorful and whimsical than anything the tart rhetoric of a Sulpicia can accommodate, though the two stanzas are classically structured, in a kind of priamel, and Rossetti’s refrain sounds a lot like the first words of Sulpicia’s first poem: tandem venit amor, “Love’s come at last:”

A Birthday
By Christina Rossetti

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Anyway, feel free to give yourself (and me) a birthday present, either by subscribing to this no-newsletter, and/or treating yourself to a copy of my book, now available everywhere doorstops are sold!

Today The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse becomes available in the US in paperback! If you are in the US and want a copy, you can now buy one from Amazon or anywhere less evil (e.g., Bookshop.org). (I may or may not be less evil than Amazon, but you can also buy directly from me, for $30 + shipping, $36 with Media Mail, & I’ll sign it—just DM me.) The book for me is like one of those ghost-traps from Ghostbusters, except it doesn’t hold my whole soul, just fourteen years of it.

If you want to know what sorts of things you will find in it, this blog is a good place to start. But here’s an amuse-bouche from Martial. Like this post, this epigram is basically just an advertisement—Martial is telling prospective readers where they can go to buy his book:

Martial 1.117

Occurris quotiens, Luperce, nobis,
'Vis mittam puerum' subinde dicis,
'cui tradas epigrammaton libellum,
lectum quem tibi protinus remittam?'
Non est quod puerum, Luperce, uexes. 5
Longum est, si uelit ad Pirum uenire,
et scalis habito tribus, sed altis.
Quod quaeris propius petas licebit.
Argi nempe soles subire Letum:
contra Caesaris est forum taberna 10
scriptis postibus hinc et inde totis,
omnis ut cito perlegas poetas:
illinc me pete. Et roges Atrectum —
hoc nomen dominus gerit tabernae —;
de primo dabit alteroue nido 15
rasum pumice purpuraque cultum
denaris tibi quinque Martialem.
'Tanti non es' ais? Sapis, Luperce.

Each time we’ve met, here’s what you’ve said,
Lupercus: ‘I’ll rouse my boy, and bid
him borrow your book, then send him speeding
back as soon as I’m done reading.’
Okay, but why disturb the kid?
The Quirinal Pear Tree’s quite a haul,
and the stairs to my flat are very tall;
but what you want’s not far at all.
Surely you shop in the Argiletum?
There’s a bookstore facing Caesar’s Forum
with posters papering the door there
naming the poets you can score there;
I’m one of them. Ask for Atrectus –
that’s the fellow who runs the place.
He’ll hand you, from one or another case,
a Martial for five denarii –
pumice-buffed, with purple dye.
Not worth that much, you say? Smart guy.

It may be worth mentioning that a denarius was about a day’s wage for a skilled laborer. We don’t know much about the cost of books in the ancient world, but Martial commentator Peter Howell remarks that “5 denarii seems a rather high price, but then this is a smart copy.” However, you will be delighted to learn that my book is significantly less expensive than Martial’s—assuming 60K a year, the Penguin Book of Greek & Latin Lyric Verse, listed at $30, is only 1/8 of your daily wage! And you don’t even need to shlep to the Argiletum, or deal with Atrectus—Jeff Bezos has you covered. If you buy from him, you can feel good that not only will you help me recuperate my losses from fourteen years of solitary drudgery, but you can also help fund the next Constantinte-sized statue of Lauren Sanchez!

The word “paean” has entered English to refer to any enthusiastic panegyric, though originally it had specific generic connotations; here is the note from my book:

The paean, both a cry of thanksgiving (iē, iē Paian!) and a poetic genre in honor of Apollo (and related deities, like Asclepius), may have originated on Lesbos; it is also associated with warfare and prayers to be spared from harm. It was typically performed by boys. As a cult title of Apollo in his role of Healer, the name Paean goes back to the Mycenaean deity Paiawon.

The Apolline paean, masculine, orderly, and warlike, was typically contrasted with the Dionysian dithyramb, which was feminine and unrestrained. On the page they can be hard to tell apart, and even the Alexandrians could debate whether a poem was a paean or a dithyramb, though in the original context there would have been differences of music and performance: paeans were performed in marching lines, while dithyrambs were sung by the chorus in a circle. As noted above, there were several sub-genres of paean, including exclamations of gratitude for military victory and apotropaic prayers—one paean of Pindar’s prays that an eclipse not be ominous of some disaster.

Pindar’s 6^th paean was originally at least 180 lines long, about two thirds of which survive. Below (& in PBGLLV) I give the extant portion of the poem’s first triad. The occasion may well have been an Aeginetan delegation to the Theoxenia (“Guest Feast of the Gods”) at Delphi, held in March/April of each year. At this celebration, Apollo played host to other gods visiting his oracle. The Aeginetan connection is speculative, but can be inferred from the other two surviving portions of the poem, both of which tell stories of interest to Aegina: after narrating the death of Achilles and his son Neoptolemus at Apollo’s hands, Pindar begins to describe the origins of the island of Aegina in Zeus’s love for its eponymous nymph. Note that Aeacus’ sons, including Achilles, were patrons of Aegina; Pindar revisits Neoptolemus’ death at the Theoxenia, in slightly less negative terms, in Nemean 7 for an Aeginetan victor. Anyway, here’s how the poem starts—‘Loxias’ is an epithet for Apollo, meaning something like “Riddler” (from loxos = “slanting, oblique”):

Paean 6

Πρὸς Ὀλυμπίου Διός σε, χρυσέα
κλυτόμαντι Πυθοῖ,
λίσσομαι Χαρίτεσ-
σίν τε καὶ σὺν Ἀφροδίτᾳ
ἐν ζαθέῳ με δέξαι χρόνῳ
ἀοίδιμον Πιερίδων προφάταν·
ὕδατι γὰρ ἐπὶ χαλκοπύλῳ
ψόφον ἀιὼν Κασταλίας
ὀρφανὸν ἀνδρῶν χορεύσιος ἦλθον
ἔταις ἀμαχανίαν ἀ̣[λ]έξων
τεοῖσιν ἐμαῖς τε τιμ̣[α]ῖς·
ἤτορι δὲ φίλῳ παῖς ἅτε ματέρι κεδνᾷ
πειθόμενος κατέβαν στεφάνων
καὶ θαλιᾶν τροφὸν ἄλσος Ἀ-
πόλλωνος, τόθι Λατοΐδαν
θαμινὰ Δελφῶν κόραι
χθονὸς ὀμφαλὸν παρὰ σκιάεντα μελπ̣[ό]μεναι
ποδὶ κροτέο[ντι γᾶν θο]ῷ
(desunt vv. 19–49)

καὶ πόθεν ἀθαν[άτων ἔρις ἄ]ρ̣ξατο·
ταῦτα θεοῖσι [μ]έν
πιθεῖν σοφοὺ̣[ς] δυνατόν,
βροτοῖσιν δ᾿ ἀμάχανο[ν εὑ]ρέμεν·
ἀλλὰ παρθένοι γάρ, ἴσα̣τ[ε], Μο[ῖ]σαι,
πάντα, κε[λαι]νεφεῖ σὺν
πατρὶ Μναμοσ[ύν]ᾳ τε
τοῦτον ἔσχετ[ε τεθ]μόν,
κλῦτε νῦν· ἔρα[ται] δέ μο[ι]
γλῶσσα μέλιτος ἄω̣τον γλυκὺν [⏑⏑– –
ἀγῶνα Λοξίᾳ καταβάντ᾿ εὐρὺν
ἐν θεῶν ξενίᾳ.

By Zeus who rules Olympus, I implore Str. 1
you, golden Pytho, famous for
prophetic sight, and also pray
the Graces and Aphrodite, that I may
be welcome in this holy hour,
the mouthpiece of the Muses’ power.
For when I heard Castalia’s spate
run gushing from the brazen gate
unushered by men’s song and dance,
I came to liberate your clan’s 10
name, and my own, from the unmusical
abyss. As a child heeds his mother’s call,
I listened to my heart and made
the journey to the holy glade
and temple of Apollo, rife
with coronals and festal life,
where Leto’s son loves to receive
the hymns the Delphic maidens weave
here at the leaf-dark navel of the world,
pounding the ground with footsteps whirled 20
in rhythm…

...and what cause set the deathless ones at odds Ep. 1
the gods are able to apprise 51
those art and poetry make wise;
but mortals otherwise cannot find out.
You virgin Muses past all doubt
know all that is—that is your due,
your thunder-clouded father’s too,
and Mnemosyne’s—therefore
give me your ear. I long for nothing more
than honey’s sweet distillate on my tongue,
here at the gods’ guest-feast among 60
men come from far and wide to hallow
Loxias Apollo.

Pindar is one of the most Apollinian of poets, ancient or modern; most of his surviving poems (his ‘epinicians,’ or victory songs) tend to sing the particular event he celebrates into its place in a cosmic hierarchy where Olympus is at the top and Tartarus is at the bottom and some people, by virtue of political power or athletic victory, are higher up than others. Put unsympathetically, this makes him an apologist for the status quo; put sympathetically, he is a priest of gratitude and radical acceptance, an architect of meaning who “allies himself with all the currents and winds of life,” to quote Isak Dinesen, instead of tacking against them. I want to pair his poem with one by a living poet who is similarly attracted to poetic, especially syntactical, marquetry, but whose attitude is opposite: Alan Shapiro, my professor (now emeritus) over twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in Chapel Hill. The poem, “Old Joke,” is the first in his 2001 book The Dead, Alive, and Busy, from University of Chicago Press, which came out when I was a freshman and won the Kingsley Tufts Award.

I wouldn’t claim any Pindaric influence for Shapiro’s poem—its form is that of a traditional “kletic” (invocatory) hymn, and is based more on the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Nonetheless in formal terms we might note a bit of Pindarism in Shapiro’s lines, especially in the diction and syntax of the hymnic sections; philosophically, however, he couldn’t be farther from the cheerful confidence of the Greek. Much of Shapiro’s oeuvre might be characterized as a gloss on Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen”—if Pindar is an Alyosha, Shapiro is an Ivan. Which is not to say that he is anti-art: he loves and luxuriates in the trappings of the Poetic—in a poem like “Old Joke,” the signifiers of poeticism (diction, syntax, classical reference, hymnic form) mark the poetry as such and represent by a kind of synecdoche the left-hand side of the Art-Life polarity. But what his poems have to say (as opposed to their way of saying it) is always a denial of art’s power to redeem, or console, or serve as an in any way adequate compensation for the ordinary indignities of living. Shapiro flatly rejects the Horatian non omnis moriar, “Not all of me will die,” and finds no justification and little comfort in “death is the mother of beauty”—the flawed living person is always infinitely preferable to the perfect elegy. It is hard to disagree with him about that.

If all this makes Shapiro sound dour and joyless, that couldn’t be further from the truth; he’s one of the warmest, funniest, most effervescent people I’ve ever known. No doubt it’s this natural buoyancy of temperament which allows him to bear up under the weight of his philosophy; in character rather than doctrine, he joins Pindar on the side of Alyosha. It’s also his love for poetry as process, his addiction to the absorbing daily task of wrestling words into meaningful shapes, which has kept him writing so well for so long. I’m excited for his new collection, Diver, coming out next May from Unbound Editions, and a New & Selected which is still a few years away. Anyway while I share Alan’s sense that art can never really be adequate to experience, I’m grateful that he keeps on working to make his own as adequate to it as he can. (Maybe I should give a content warning, that alongside its Homericism or Pindarism the poem has some deliberately discordant material that might shock or appall certain sensibilities):

Old Joke
by Alan Shapiro

Radiant child of Leto, farworking Lord Apollo,
with lyre in hand and golden plectrum, you sang to the gods
on Mount Olympus almost as soon as you were born.

You sang, and the Muses sang in answer, and together
your voices so delighted all your deathless elders
that their perfect happiness was more perfect still.

What was it, though, that overwhelmed them, that suffused,
astonished, even the endless ether? Was it the freshest,
most wonderful stops of breath, the flawless intervals

and scales whose harmonies were mimicking in sound
the beauty of the gods themselves, or what you joined
to that, what you were singing of, our balked desires,

the miseries we suffer at your indifferent hands,
devastation and bereavement, old age and death?
Farworking, radiant child, what do you know about us?

Here is my father, half blind, and palsied, at the toilet,
he’s shouting at his penis, Piss, you! Piss! Piss!
but the penis (like the heavenly host to mortal prayers)

is deaf and dumb; here, too, my mother with her bad knee,
on the eve of surgery, hobbling by the bathroom,
pausing, saying, who are you talking to in there?

and he replies, no one you would know, sweetheart.
Supernal one, in your untested mastery,
your easy excellence, with nothing to overcome,

and needing nothing but the most calamitous
and abject stories to prove how powerful you are,
how truly free, watch them as they laugh so briefly,

godlike, better than gods, if only for a moment
in which what goes wrong is converted to a rightness,
if only because now she’s hobbling back to bed

where she won’t sleep, if only because he pees at last,
missing the bowl, and has to get down on his knees
to wipe it up. You don’t know anything about us.

Wednesday, at , posted an anacreontic drinking song by Abraham Cowley:

Poems Ancient and Modern

Today’s Poem: Drinking

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a year ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Joseph Bottum

Jody takes Cowley to task for not imitating the strict uu – u – u – – lilt of the “anacreontic” in Greek—which is to say, the airily bouncy and upbeat song measure associated with the Greek lyric poet Anacreon and the anonymous body of later poems, called the Anacreontea, composed in imitation of him. Henri Estienne (aka Stephanus) published the Anacreontea under Anacreon’s name in 1554 and for a long time they were believed to have been his work. has provided a charming exposition of the meter and a translation of Anacreontea 35 which I invite you to enjoy. Anyway, Jody’s metrical chiding of Cowley strikes me as a little unfair: in England “anacreonticks” quickly came to refer to any light, convivial poem in the style of the Anacreontea, a bill Cowley’s charming tetrameters certainly fit. As many of you will know, at least one such composition has made a mark out of all proportion with the fluffy lightness of the genre: in eighteenth-century London, a drinking club called the Anacreontic Society selected as its ‘constitutional song’ a number called ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’, which provided Francis Scott Key with the tune for the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ (of course, with different lyrics).

Anacreon had a second main meter, a stanza called “glyconic quatrains,” whose longer lines scan – – – u u – u – (a “glyconic”) while the shorter line (a “pherecretean”) drops the penultimate unstressed syllable: – – – u u – –. When Stephanus published “Anacreon” in 1554, he did so alongside the fragments of Sappho that were then known, which helped fuel the widespread wrong belief that the two were a Greek poetic power couple. The other thing that fed this belief was a misunderstanding of the following racy little squib—the “Lesbian” girl here, even in antiquity, was assumed to be Sappho:

Anacreon Fragment 358

σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρέῃ
βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως,
νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ
συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται.
ἣ δ’ — ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου
Λέσβου — τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην —
λευκὴ γάρ — καταμέμφεται,
πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.

Hitting me again today
with a purple ball, Love urges me
toward this bright-sandaled thing, to see
whether she wants to play.
But she’s a Lesbian born and bred,
and laughs at me, for my white hair,
then opens her mouth wide to stare
at another sort of head.

I’ll quote my book’s note on this poem:

It’s hotly debated whether Anacreon and his audience associated Lesbos, as we do, with female homosexuality, or perhaps with sexual voraciousness, especially fellatio, as did the Greek comedians. Thus, the ‘another sort of head’ at the poem’s end could be (A) a younger person’s dark hair, whether male or female; (B) the pubic area of Anacreon; or (C) a woman. The translation tries to preserve the ambiguity.

I want to add one of my favorite observations from David Campbell, who notes that the poem’s final word, χάσκει (gapes, gawks) appears “nowhere else in an amatory context, unless the mating habits of partridges are relevant.” I hope they are!

Though the “Lesbian born and bred” is not the real Sappho, fragment 358 is the work of the real Anacreon; but the Cowley drinking poem up at is based on one of the imitators. For the record, the meter is the variation of the “anacreontic” ( – – u – u – – ) for which offers the cheeky English equivalent “The word “Anacreontics” / Makes fun of orthodontics.” Here’s the original:

Anacreontea 21

ἡ γῆ μέλαινα πίνει,
πίνει δένδρεα δ᾿ αὐτήν.
πίνει θάλασσ᾿ ἀναύρους,
ὁ δ᾿ ἥλιος θάλασσαν,
τὸν δ᾿ ἥλιον σελήνη·
τί μοι μάχεσθ᾿, ἑταῖροι,
καὐτῷ θέλοντι πίνειν;

The earth imbibes the rain
and so do all the trees;
seas drink the streams that run;
the sun imbibes the seas;
the moon imbibes the sun.
Friend, spare the diatribe
if I also imbibe.

I haven’t posted for a month or so—I figured no one would notice but was flattered to get an email asking where the translations had gone, so somebody missed it! My excuse is that I’ve been working on the first draft of a second book for Penguin, an edition of Latin love elegy, consisting of complete renderings of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid’s Amores into heroic couplets. (For the Tibullus-heads out there, Book 3, which he did not write, is included.) My temptation now is to fill this newsless letter with notes on love elegy and its reception, as I work up the introductory material for the book; but it occurs to me I might be better off saving it for the run-up to publication, assuming I’m still doing this that far down the road. I’ll link some of my old posts on love elegy here: Propertius 1.19, 2.13 & 3.16, 2.15; Ovid Amores 1.1.

Still, I can’t resist accompanying ’s pieces on the English Decadents with some remarks on their Roman and elegiac influences. He has just given us a fabulous account of poor doomed Ernest Dowson and his sad attachment to two girls, one a 17 year-old barmaid called Lena, a docta puella on the lines of Propertius’ Cynthia — Dowson wrote to a friend that “she reads Dickens, quotes Tennyson, and says that when you have read one of R. Haggard’s novels you have read them all.” But she left him in the lurch after four months, and he fell for a younger, homelier “restaurant-keeper’s daughter” called Adelaide, whose attentions sustained him for a while though in the end this, too, failed without consummation. Do read Alan’s excellent sketch—Dowson’s poems have the clammy, airless quality of one of those absinthe bars where he clearly spent so much of his time, as well as the sweet intoxications.

The Invisible Head

Ernest Dowson: Poet of the 1890s

For Yeats, perhaps the most typical member of what he termed the “Tragic Generation” of young English writers and artists that he knew in the 1890s, several of whom barely survived the turn of the century, was Ernest Dowson. “I cannot imagine the world in which he would have succeeded,” Yeats wrote. “At best, if best it should be called, he might have e…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Alan Horn

I’m going to write about Dowson’s most famous poem, “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” whose title is taken from Horace: “I am not what I was in the kingdom of kindly Cynara.” The line comes from the opening stanza of the first ode in Horace’s fourth book. Horace, now older and retired from the “warfare of love” (militia amoris, a Leitmotif of Roman love elegy), feels a growing attraction for a boy called Ligurinus, which he fears (justly, as it turns out) will suck him back into the rough-and-tumble of eros and the lyric genre. He opens with a prayer to Venus for mercy:

Intermissa, Venus, diu
rursus bella moves? Parce precor, precor.
Non sum qualis eram bonae
sub regno Cinarae. Desine, dulcium

mater saeva Cupidinum,
circa lustra decem flectere mollibus
iam durum imperiis: abi,
quo blandae iuvenum te revocant preces.

Venus, must I rejoin your fray
after so long on leave? Please, please, don’t make me!
That man I was in the gracious sway
of Cinara is no more. Won’t you forsake me,

heartless Mother of sweet desire –
me, nearly fifty, too stiff, too long inactive,
to bow to your soft yoke? Retire
to where the young men’s prayers are more attractive!

Other mentions of Cinara’s name in Horace (in Od. 4.13, and Epis. 1.7 and 1.14) conspire to suggest that Horace associates the name with his youth—which fits for Dowson also, since (as Alan tells us) he is apparently using the name to stand for Lena. Despite his happiness, Horace moved on from Cinara, while Dowson, in proper Roman fashion, satisfied his body’s desires with prostitutes while his soul yearned for impossibilities:

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Propertius is another poet faithful to his own beloved, Cynthia, in his own fashion, and however much the scene in Dowson’s poem may have been grounded in his own life, it seems at least equally grounded in one of Propertius’ best and most striking poems. Propertius was Dowson’s favorite Roman poet, according to at least two people who knew him:

“Dowson’s friend Frank Harris commented on “his intimacy with the Latins, especially Propertius,” while another friend Victor Plarr averred that “Dowson loved his Propertius” (Longaker 1945, 227, Adams 2000, 70).” [Dan Hooley, in the Blackwell Companion to Roman Love Elegy, p. 497]

The Propertius poem Dowson was thinking of here (4.8) is the last in which Cynthia features prominently. At the end of Book 3 Propertius seemed to say goodbye to her for good, and as Book 4 proceeds, his resolve to write about Roman aetiological topics in a Callimachean style looks to be holding firm—until, from some deep part of himself, in 4.7 Cynthia’s ghost irrupts to chastise her former lover for not even attending her funeral (see Robert Lowell’s famous version, which I’m sure I’ll write about at some point). The start of the next poem, 4.8, makes it look like Propertius has righted his aetiological ship—he opens by telling us about a ritual at Lanuvium in which a virgin offers bread to a sacred snake; if the snake partakes, the virgin is really a virgin, and the harvest will be good.

Yet this ritual opening is a feint—Propertius only mentions Lanuvium because Cynthia has gone there for an assignation with someone else—a “razored poof” as I have it (vulsi nepotis). In her absence, the poet decides to have a little party and get a little revenge. I’ll quote from the middle of the poem:

Propertius 4.8 ll. 26-50

Phyllis Auentinae quaedam est uicina Dianae,
sobria grata parum: cum bibit, omne decet.
altera Tarpeios est inter Teia lucos,
candida, sed potae non satis unus erit.
his ego constitui noctem lenire uocatis,
et Venere ignota furta nouare mea.

unus erat tribus in secreta lectulus herba.
quaeris concubitus? inter utramque fui.
Lygdamus ad cyathos, uitrique aestiua supellex
et Methymnaei Graeca saliua meri.
Nile, tuus tibicen erat, crotalistria phillis,
haec facilis spargi munda sine arte rosa,
nanus et ipse suos breuiter concretus in artus
iactabat truncas ad caua buxa manus.

sed neque suppletis constabat flamma lucernis,
reccidit inque suos mensa supina pedes.
me quoque per talos Venerem quaerente secundos
semper damnosi subsiluere canes.
cantabant surdo, nudabant pectora caeco:
Lanuuii ad portas, ei mihi, solus eram;
cum subito rauci sonuerunt cardine postes,
et leuia ad primos murmura facta Laris.

There’s a girl, Phyllis, on the Aventine;
she’s a drag sober, but when drunk she’s fine.
And fair-skinned Teia, by Tarpeia’s bluff—
when she starts tippling one man’s not enough.
I thought I’d ask them over for the night:
new spice does wonders for the appetite.

Our couch was in a garden, screened from view.
Where was my spot? I lay between the two!
Summer’s for glassware. Lygdamus ladles in
a classy vintage, top-notch Lesbian.
Miletus pipes; fresh, artless Byblis lets
our roses pelt her and her castanets,
and the pinched dwarf himself, our Mr. Big,
claps to the boxwood flute and cuts a jig.

The lamps, though full, were flickering as they burned;
between courses, a table overturned;
dicing, I tried for Venus with my tosses,
but the damned Dogs kept leaping up with losses.
Deaf to the girls’ song, to their bared breasts, blind,
I balked – Lanuvium was my whole mind –
when suddenly the gates were fiercely screaking,
and the whole foyer thronged with muffled shrieking.

Dowson has reproduced this scene faithfully, in his fashion: here there are “kisses and wine,” two “bought red mouths,” “flung roses” and “dancing,” though Propertius fails to respond to the girls—he can’t stop thinking about Cynthia. Suddenly “the lamps expire,” and—here is where he and Dowson part ways—Cynthia’s ‘shadow falls,’ though not in memory only, as in Dowson’s poem, but literally. If you’d like to read the rest, I’d encourage you to pick up my Penguin Book of Greek & Latin Lyric Verse—out already in the UK and out in the US next month! (I have some copies I can sell as well if you’d like to get your hands on one early; just drop me a DM or an email.)

I’ll leave you with Richard Burton’s reading of Dowson’s poem, which has always fascinated me: it is astonishingly rapid, almost as if he found it too personally painful to linger on. Hard not to imagine, under the mask of Cynara, he sees a passion of his own.

Is there a difference between pastoral and bucolic? A simple question, which has no simple answer. Or, rather, the answer which seems truest to me is also the simplest: No. There is no real difference. “Bucolic” is a Greek word which has to do with cowherds (or “neatherds”), while “pastoral” comes from a Latin word which technically refers to any kind of herdsmen (pascor means “to graze or pasture”), though it’s usually used to mean “shepherd” instead of the more precise opilio. “Bucolic” appears as a literary or generic term as early as Theocritus — his herdsmen say things like “Let’s bucolize!” meaning “Let’s sing some herdsman-songs!” and address the boukolikai Moisai, the “bucolic Muses.” On the other hand, it’s unclear when pastoralis takes on its generic as opposed to its descriptive sense (viz., “relating to pastoral poetry” vs. “relating to the herding of sheep or other animals”). Nonetheless, it is fair to take pastoralis as the Latin translation of Greek boukolikos, as Vergil’s Eclogues translate and Romanize Theocritus’ Idylls, and use the terms interchangeably.

The mind, however, abhors a synonym and will imagine difference where none exists. I think this is what Bakhtin is talking about when he says that a word shapes “its own stylistic profile and tone” in a “dialogized process.” Previously I mentioned having read an excerpt from Discourse in the Novel with blank incomprehension, but I kept at it, and perhaps gleaned something in the end. Bakhtin says:

The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way.

“Bucolic” and “pastoral” are in dialogic relation; there is a mental territory they must divvy up between them, but the job is complicated by hundreds of years of generic development and critical disagreement. In the absence of consensus, I would tentatively suggest distinguishing them in one of two ways: first, we could look to our two figureheads, Theocritus and Virgil, and use the term “bucolic” if we consider a given work more Theocritean, or “pastoral” if it seems more Virgilian. In practice we would probably make this distinction along an axis from “earthy” to “sophisticated,” i.e., an idyll or eclogue which treats its rural subjects with a degree of simplicity and rustic realism might be classed as “bucolic,” while one which idealizes and intellectualizes might be considered “pastoral.” “Pastoral” in this sense would be seen to hold sway from the Eclogues through the 18th century, while bucolic would describe Theocritus’ pre-Virgilian imitators then go underground in the first century BCE, to emerge again in the 19th.

Alternatively, we could look to a passage from René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature and use “bucolic” to designate the “outer form” of the eclogue while “pastoral” could designate the “inner form:”

Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose—more crudely, subject and audience).

Since “pastoral” is so often called a “mode” rather than a genre—there can be pastoral eclogues, epigrams, dramas, and romances, for example—and defined in such general terms that almost anything can be made to count (e.g., Empson’s “putting the complex into the simple,” or Poggioli’s “double longing after innocence and happiness”), it might make sense to let “pastoral” refer vaguely to anything which seems “conceptually pastoral” while using “bucolic” to refer to a work which is “formally pastoral,” i.e., it employs the generic markers and motifs found in Theocritus, Vergil, and the tradition they gave rise to.

These two alternative distinctions might be useful in thinking about two contemporary entries into this tradition, Maurice Manning’s Bucolics (Harcourt 2007) and Rachel Hadas’s Pastorals (Measure Press 2025). The two books are more different than alike, though a few similarities hold: both feature more or less isolated speakers inhabiting a rural landscape while confronting their human situation. Both also employ the “slice of life” effect of traditional pastoral / bucolic, where the scenes are more exemplary than dramatic, and significance accrues more from the book’s world-building than from anything specific that happens in it. (As I discuss here, one reason for denying that the poems in North of Boston are eclogues is that Frost ups the dramatic ante on the traditional low-stakes pastoral.) The poems in these books thus do not really strive for or attain the splendid isolation of the achieved lyric, which regards the pages that happen to surround it as a matter of indifference; rather, they lean against each other companionably, each one adding a location or situation or adumbrating a mood, recording variations of inner and outer weather over time. Both books are, finally, what I might call “lyric” rather than “dramatic” pastoral or bucolic, since each presents its world through a single lyrical lens. In Bucolics, there is in fact only one human present in the entire book, a nameless field hand/shepherd engaged in a continual one-way conversation with God, while in Pastorals other people besides the poet do crop up, but they’re there more as a ‘daily new furniture of friends’ and family (to adapt Marvell) rather than active characters.

Hadas’ and Manning’s respective books fit both of the proposed distinctions between Pastorals and Bucolics above. When it comes to the rusticity or sophistication of their speakers, Manning’s book is more Theocritean and Hadas’ is more Virgilian. According to Empson,

The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way).

In truth, neither book does this, no doubt because the modern sensibility, fed so long on realist novels, has grown uncomfortable with country folks speaking like courtiers; it punctures what John Gardiner calls “the dream of fiction.” Manning’s Kentucky field hand, therefore, speaks in the patois of a Kentucky field hand—at least, he uses plenty of homely turns of phrase meant to convey rusticity, starting with the most insistent word in the poem, “Boss,” which is what his speaker calls God. Moreover, Manning’s lines are unpunctuated, making them seem both less educated and less page-bound than would otherwise be the case. Hadas’s speaker, on the contrary, being a classicist-poet-professor aestivating in a familial estate, talks like Rachel Hadas (is Rachel Hadas), seasoning her sentences with lots of quotations from poetry and lots of Latinate diction. The city, too, is much more of a presence (albeit an offstage one) in Hadas’s Pastorals than in Manning’s Bucolics, just as Rome casts a longer shadow over Vergil’s Eclogues than Alexandria over Theocritus’ Idylls. In formal terms, while Hadas is a poet of great formal dexterity, Pastorals is written in prose, calling to mind not so much Virgilian eclogues or Theocritean idylls as Renaissance pastoral romances, like the Arcadias of Sannazaro and Sydney. Manning’s Bucolics, however, are versified in mostly tetrameter iambic lines which spill in stream of consciousness down the page; formally, therefore, they have a lot more in common with the bucolic monologues of (e.g.) Idyll 11 and Eclogue 2. On these grounds at least, and relative to each other, it seems to me that both books are aptly enough titled.

There is however one glaring (albeit trivial) infelicity to the title Bucolics, which is that there are no cows or oxen anywhere (remember that boukolos means “cowherd”). There are some occasional lambs, which I suppose is why in interviews Manning refers to his speaker as a “shepherd,” but he really seems to be more of a farmer / field hand, making the book technically more georgic than bucolic. This is how poem XXV begins (all the poems have Roman numerals for titles):

I guess you’ve got a lot
of hands though I’m just one
of many Boss I’ll turn
the dirt I’ll shock the corn

As I mentioned elsewhere, Theocritus does have one ‘georgic’ poem about reapers, but general farm work is basically not bucolic activity. This bit of pedantry is doubtless of little interest to Manning, who admits to Brian Brodeur in Literary Matters that he was not really reading either Virgil or Theocritus while working on the book. In poem XIII his shepherd seems to be shoeing horses, in XLI he’s moving rocks and clearing the field for plowing, in XLIV he is probably dressing vines, in LIV he’s making hoops to repair a barrel, in LX he’s hoeing, and in LXIII he’s pitching hay. In this limited sense his book might be as accurately (though less expressively) titled Georgics.

On the other hand, Manning’s book does employ distinctly bucolic motifs, notably, the country simile. Here are a couple examples from Theocritus and Vergil. The first passage gives the opening of Polyphemus’ song in Idyll 11; the second is from an ‘amoeboean’ competition (shepherd rap-battle / flyting match) between Damoetas and Menalcas in Eclogue 3:

My Galatea, fair and shearling-soft,
firm as an unripe grape, as white as cream,
and shyer than a calf, why blow me off?
For you won’t come ashore but while I dream,
and when the dream lets go, you run away,
as a sheep flees a wolf that’s after it. [Theoc. Id. 11]

Damoetas: As lambs at wolves, ripe wheat at storms, and trees
at winds, I quail at Amaryllis’ bile.
Menalcas: As rains please seeds, shrubs goats, as willows please
expectant ewes, Amyntas makes me smile. [Vi. Ecl. 3]

There are a bunch of examples of these kinds of “country similes” in Manning’s Bucolics. Here are some:

you’re like a rooster Boss if you
had just one feather left you’d strut
around the barnyard [XXIII]

you move in every direction
at once you’re worse than
the wind Boss worse than
a rock dropped in the water [XXX]

the flower has a little night
inside it I can see it Boss
a drop of pitch a pinch of sleep
as if the flower wants the night
to last a little longer than
it does I’m like the flower Boss [LXXII]

These examples range from bathetic (the rooster) to profound (the flower, with echoes of George Herbert, who is a guiding spirit of the book) but all serve to characterize Manning’s speaker. There is another, related device which does even more work as characterization. I think of it as a variation on the country simile, albeit in the interrogative mood — the speaker pictures God in his own image, and asks him if he does or has this or that thing the speaker himself does or has:

what color is your collar Boss
is your backbone sore from bending over
when you clap your hand against your thigh
does a little cloud of dust fly off
do you wipe your face with your shirttail Boss
I’d bet my wages that you do [IV]

Naturally, these passages (and there are a bunch of them) call to mind a non-bucolic bit of Greek philosophical verse, from Xenophanes:

But if oxen had hands, or horses, or lions had them,
or could draw with their hands and make art like the art of humans,
the horses would make their deities look like horses,
the oxen would make them like oxen, and each would design
their gods with the same sort of bodies they have themselves.

Again and again Manning shows us his shepherd questioning God about his likeness to himself and struggling to wrap his mind around their differences. The manoeuvre is psychologically astute and, it seems to me, an effective expansion of the “country simile” motif.

I have more mixed feelings about the use of country diction. I don’t mind it in principle, but the more a word or phrase calls (potentially cringeworthy) attention to itself, the more I want it to defend its position with some further justification. “Boss” is the most prominent example. As you’ve already guessed, it appears a lot and I won’t say it never gets annoying. However, in my opinion it mostly works, because of a sort of double meaning: besides the primary sense of “superior,” “overseer,” “foreman,” “boss” is indeed a southern-inflected synonym for “buddy,” which carries an amused or dismissive air of ironic deference—at least, that’s how I’ve interpret it when I’ve rented a cabin in West Virginia for the weekend and the overall-wearing dude at the counter of the general store calls me “boss” when I go to buy a plastic lighter or something. Anyway, this sense of an ironic edge in “boss” tempers somewhat the shepherd’s solitary servility with a bit of rebellious human bluster.

But the rustic idioms work best when Manning is able to use the context to give them some extra resonance. For example, addressing God’s sense of humor, he says, “you sneaky devil you cutup Boss.” Boss is more an immanent than a personal God, so this light identification with the devil feels felicitous. The next poem begins “you’re the hay maker Boss” which works in three senses—he literally makes hay, but also he is a “cutup” (“make hay while the sun shines,” i.e., have your fun while you can) and he packs a punch. There are a number of further examples I could cite, but here is the end of poem LXIV, about Boss’s essential elusiveness:

I pick you up I put my hands
around you Boss I know my face
won’t fit inside the scene there’s so
much nothing Boss it makes me think
there’s nothing to it but listen now
I’m looking over you so if
I told you I was thirsty would
you shrink I wonder Boss if all
at once I swallowed you O tell
the truth how would that grab you Boss

What I admire here is the double resonance of the final question. Its idiomatic meaning is “how would you like that?” but in context the question is genuine—how would that grab you? The answer is that it wouldn’t; Boss would continue to be ungraspable.

Yet it is very easy to hit a wrong note with this kind of thing, and a number of these ‘bucolisms,’ which lack irony or extra resonance, strike me as intolerably cutesy and twee:

you can be the slowest poke
you old molasses boss [XLI]

would you trade hee-haws with a crow
would you ever sit back Boss to let
a crow go gitchy goo on you
those crows they’re always cutting up [LXX]

Everyone’s mileage will vary, and no doubt some will have less patience than I do, while others will have more. It may be that moments like these lend Manning’s speaker a bit of an air of the clod or clown (“man of rustic or coarse manners, boor, peasant”) and so opens up what Empson calls the “double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one (‘I am in one way better, in another not so good’),” which is also how Empson says Milton feels toward Adam in Paradise Lost. There is also something of the visionary to Manning’s field hand, and he occasionally rises from plaintive hectoring to something genuinely frightening:

I know it Boss it burns me now
to smell the smoke like burnt light shook
right from the burning tree is this
the kind of light you might call last
will I smell smoke before you shake
the light from me before you pinch
my little flame into a hiss

All characteristics of “bucolic” or “pastoral” aside, the single most affecting feature of this book is its decision to portray one human being and one only, in perfect isolation except for farm animals and implements, speaking constantly, rambling even, crying to the void with no response. He is in a kind of wide-open solitary confinement, and flirts, as any of us might in such circumstances, with both the ridiculous and the sublime.

Hadas’ Pastorals is a more civilized affair. It is really less of a Virgilian pastoral than a personalized book-length country house meditation in the tradition of Jonson and Marvell. This passage from Tom Thumb, quoted in Empson, was relevant enough for me to copy it into the front of the book:

Corneille recommends some very remarkable day wherein to fix the action of a tragedy. This the best of our tragical writers have understood to mean a day remarkable for the serenity of the sky, or what we call a fine summer’s day. So that … the same months are proper for tragedy which are proper for pastoral.

In Vermont, where Hadas’ country house is located, fine summer days seem mostly to be what she gets, despite occasional rains; winter happens elsewhere. The tragedy is light, a hint only, a whisper in the summer breeze, where nonetheless Hadas, 76, senses “Time’s winged chariot.” Yet, as Hadas writes, sometimes “lightness weighs heavy” (“Those Flannel Nightshirts”). The sadness is mild, but it is there, as when following a Fourth of July fireworks display a child is heard to ask, “Was that all?” Its hub is the generous, ramshackle old manse, which seems to have been part of the Hadas family all her life. For her, it is a “kaleidoscope” and an “anchor” and a “Pandora’s box of needs:”

There was the big attic, its corners piled with boxes whose ripe, half-forgotten contents promised to yield surprises. There was the bed I kept returning to, its faded quilt, the cats coming and going, now on a chair, now in the cat loft, now curled up between my beloved and me. The old house, the rain, the seasons, the years, the time, the memories. Past summers came and went like the rain, now tempestuous, now gentle as a mist. [“Orchard, Medallions, Owl”]

In the poems, which blend into each other like summer days, she describes the “scrubbed attic full of books” and the writing “table where I sit and look out through the screen at the garden.” She reflects on the different views from each window, the various way the light falls in each. From her screened porch, she watches a phoebe family, which poops on her writing table. “None of the doors in the house shuts tight.”

That still unfinished cabin, that chained hound daily baying—these are not merely scenery we pass. They’re also where we live. Take my house: it has a new red roof, but inside something’s missing. Something is always missing. And something else is present and abundant. [“Walk with Elephants”]

The house is a kind of Ship of Theseus, with every old plank swapped out more than once. In “Summer Variations II” Hadas describes, at a level of detail I find surprisingly moving, how rooms have changed over time, converted from bedrooms to studios and back, and old beds have been bought and jumped on and replaced and sent to the attic. She quotes Keats:

The careful monks patch and patch it till not a thread of the original fabric is left, but still they show it for St. Stephen’s shirt.

The house is also full of ghosts, as in De La Mare’s “The Listeners.” It passed to Hadas from her parents, both classicists: her mother was a Latin teacher and her father, Moses Hadas, was a popular classics professor and presenter and a deeper scholar than those who claim a similar public role today. Rachel reflects movingly on Moses’ life in this essay from 2001. He was an indefatigable translator of the “clean and clear” school and an energetic popularizer, who advocated teaching Classics via literary criticism as well as, or instead of, philology, and is one of the main reasons Classics departments today offer “Classical Literature in Translation” classes in addition to readings in Greek and Latin. (I wonder how he would have felt about Princeton’s 2021 curriculum change allowing students to major in Classics without ever studying the languages.) He was also a charismatic teacher whose course on Greek Drama at Columbia enchanted a 23 year-old John Ashbery, as we learn in Pastorals.

Moses and his wife are ghosts in Pastorals, albeit companionable ones. Their daughter imagines

my mother on her knees weeding, or pacing slowly, almost drifting … trailing a few blades of grass or an uprooted weed in one hand. Have I become her? … Or my father, sitting at a rickety table on the porch or in the barn, typing with two fingers—have I become him? [“Summer Variations II”]

For let us say personal reasons, I am interested in these glimpses of the famous classicist, of which we only get a few. We learn of an old bed he purchased from “Penniman’s junk store” eventually destroyed by Rachel’s son jumping on it. We hear about a book he wrote in 1960 (I’d guess this one), apparently not one of his best, which Rachel at one point struggles to read. Moses’ elusiveness may relate to his workaholism. As Rachel wrote in 2001: “Hadas's life was his work. True, he was a loving if weary father whose death when I was seventeen shook me for many years but whose life influenced mine in innumerable ways. … [M]y father knew how to work but not how to rest. Rest turned out to amount to death; but death was not a cessation.” For me, the following passage may be the most moving in the book:

I wish I’d asked my father more questions—not actuarial questions but endless other questions. I want to reach out and back over the years, to somehow stretch across the strumming silence and say “I think maybe I know. I’m in that territory now. How was it for you? How did you manage it?” If he answered me, we might be able to compare notes. But mostly I hope I’d want to stay quiet, if I could do that—stay quiet and listen. [“Endless Other Questions”]

The pages of Pastorals give evidence of both work and rest. This book is, to judge from the list on Hadas’ website, her twenty-eighth, and another is apparently due out this year from Able Muse Press. Perhaps her immense productivity was a lesson she learned from her father; it seems clear anyway that she has used her constant writing practice (as well as her poetry editorship of The Classical Outlook) to stay busy in retirement, happily avoiding the fate she ascribes to him. Yet there is also relaxation in Pastorals: its form (prose) is easy-going and compendious, accommodating daily bric-a-brac and trivialities, as when we get two paragraphs about an unspecified obligation which Hadas must pull out from over email. Its mood is by turns languid and nostalgic, rueful and grateful. It is more of a daily journal recording what occurs than an exacting distillation of an essence. Hadas seems to acknowledge this easing of intensity in a poem curiously titled “Black and White: Suspension Bridge:”

One eye blinks tell, the other winks distill. Reach out, Tell says. Build a suspension bridge of narrative experience can cross, finger-walking its hand along the railing. … Under the bridge, far below, a river is running.

All this is known already, says Distill, so you can leave most of it out. Delete. Compress. Transform.

My tastes run toward distillation, and I wish Hadas had done a bit more of it. I’d generally rather sip whiskey than brook-water unless the stream is very pure. Yet here, something in the candidness and occasional prolixity of the style makes it feel as though Hadas has opened her house to us just as it is, with dirty dishes in the sink and bird poop on the writing table. Her pastorals are homey and hospitable, and she is a thoughtful and intelligent host.

The book is not too relaxed to produce phrases and passages I admire. Two spiderwebs hanging over a brook are described as “twin systems kissing lightly in midair.” In the looks of one of Moses’s great-grandsons Hadas perceives “echoes in the bone.” And, in “Storing the Season,” she writes of making preserves, jams and applesauce, to hoard the richness of summer as what elsewhere, in a Wordsworthian vein, she calls “food for winter:”

The problem is the prodigality: apples and blackberries in profusion, both fruits by their respective natures hard to reach. Tangle of brambles, berries glossy black: even to graze them with a fingertip, you have to stretch over a jungle of thorny vines and balance on a rotting log. Rosy apples cluster like the bride in Sappho at the tip of a branch too high to reach. [“Storing the Season”]

Perhaps the first sentence might feel less cluttered if she had written “naturally” instead of “by their respective natures.” Even so there is a Heaneyesque lushness to these lines which waters the mouth. Because it’s what I do in this news-free letter, I’ll give my translation of the Sappho poem Hadas alludes to, which she reads plausibly as a fragment of an epithalamium:

105a
An apple on a bough hangs redly, sweetly,
high on the highest limb, against the sky.
The pickers leave it be, but don’t completely
leave it—they reached for it; it was too high.

It is fitting that Sappho should crop up near the end of Pastorals, so much of which is about inheritance, personal and poetic. Hadas knows well that apples are love-gifts in classical poetry, as in this epigram falsely attributed to “Plato:”

I am an apple, fruit of your lover’s praying.
Say yes, Xanthippe. We are both decaying.

They are also common in pastoral. In this passage from Vergil’s Eclogue 8, the shepherd Damon falls in love with Nysa as he and his mother take her to pick apples:

I saw you as a child—I was your guide—
with mother picking apples on our land.
I was just twelve, and able, if I tried,
to snap the bottom branches with my hand.
I saw, and I was lost. That’s when I died.

Like many a pastoral poet before her, Hadas spends plenty of time picking apples; the difference is perhaps that she uses them to make applesauce. For her,

Each apple is both end product and embryo, rich with seeds, full of promise[.] … Each apple is also a sweet synecdoche, a condensation of many apples, a distillation of past summers. [“Applesauce”]

You can say the same about the poems in Pastorals.

“I have been one acquainted with the night.”

“I have been one acquainted with the night.”

“I have been one acquainted with the night.”

One of the first things we did in my first college poetry course was go around the table repeating this line of Robert Frost’s; the catch was that everyone had to say it in a different way, like a refrain in a villanelle which comes up new each time. The most obvious reading emphasized the “I,” suggesting that Frost is launching unbidden into a mini-autobiography, or declaiming to his therapist. Another reading emphasized “been,” as if he were in a better place now than formerly—he has been one acquainted with the night, but fortunately those days are behind him. Someone else put air quotes around “acquainted,” implying, as far as I can tell, that Frost’s nocturnal knowledge is of the Biblical sort and was probably gleaned in the Red Light District—hopefully not in that drafty barn behind him. The professor’s favorite performance, however, was the one suggested by a regular vanilla de-DUM de-DUM scansion: a heavy stress on “have,” as if the poet were responding to someone who says, “But you—you wouldn’t know anything about darkness, you’re all sweetness and light.” “No, no,” Frost responds, “I have been one acquainted with the night.”

This exercise taught me about the distinction between rhythm and meter. It made me prefer, wherever possible, a ‘vanilla’ scansion—“let ME not TO the MARriage OF true MINDS,” “rocks, CAVES, lakes, FENS, bogs, DENS and SHADES of death”—but it also opened up the idea that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ways to vary the rhythm within a given pentameter line, and that the rhythm even of the same line, even of an extremely regular line like “I have been one acquainted with the night,” can vary with the interpretation of the reader / performer.

Metrics is a deep and difficult subject which I have generally shied from discussing, warned away by endless palaver on the subject at the Eratosphere website in the early Oughts. I also feel I basically know what I’m doing in reading and writing metrical poetry and prefer not to wade into trenches where theoretical and practical dexterity are mostly enemies mortaring each other into the mud. However, I was fascinated to read ’s review of Learning the Secrets of English Verse by David Rothman and Susan Spear, along with Rothman’s reply a couple weeks ago, and to realize that Robert Fitzgerald’s system of scansion is quite similar to my own, which in essence is the one I learned that first semester of college. (My teacher seems not to have studied with Fitzgerald, though they were both at Harvard at the same time.) It occurred to me that it might be useful, to myself if no one else, to explain my approach, and that doing so could help me be clearer about why, as a translator, I reject the imitation (‘mimesis’) of classical meters in English, even if my poet brain finds them interesting as both rhythmical curiosity and technical challenge.

The distinction between rhythm and meter is of central importance to the way I think about verse technique. Robert Frost again, in another poem (a rather goofy but entertaining one about a king who sells himself into slavery so that his son can be a poet), provides me with a touchstone:

Regular verse springs from the strain of rhythm
Upon a metre, strict or loose iambic.
From that strain comes the expression strains of music.
The tune is not that metre, not that rhythm,
But a resultant that arises from them.

Meter is abstract; rhythm is concrete. Meter recurs predictably; rhythm varies endlessly. Meter is found only in metrical lines, but all sentences have rhythm—prose scansion marks rhythm, NOT meter, unless there is some recurring pattern we’re supposed to pick up on. Meter is binary, operating in 1s and 2s, while rhythm has far more subtle and varied gradations—at least as many as Tim Steele’s 1 2 3 4. Tone and performance effect rhythm, not meter. The meter is what it is, whether you do it justice in performance or butcher it, but in either case your performance will have a rhythm of its own. I am no neuroscientist, and my ideas here are probably outmoded, but for me meter is a right-brain phenomenon, while rhythm is of the left.

It seems to me essential in metrical poetry that both poet and reader share the same basic template. Here is one place where I run into theoretical difficulties and deserve to be mortared by the theorists, but I imagine that we derive these templates inductively from reading hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of lines of metrical poetry. Even if no two lines have exactly the same rhythm, many of them will follow the same general pattern, which the mind grasps and abstracts into an ideal metrical form (de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM). Then, when we read a poem in a meter we know well, we divine in a flash the template the poem is going for and judge how skillfully it has been executed. It must be the writer’s conviction (or optimistic trust) that the reader/audience is also familiar with the template which allows for rhythmical expressiveness and grace in composition.

explains the Fitzgerald system as follows (I’ve condensed the quotation a bit):

The most notable and admirable feature of the Fitzgerald system is that it utilizes two tiers of analysis, laid out above the words double-decker style. The lower layer marks the metrical pattern, the higher layer marks the speech stresses. To show how this works, let us take the quintessential example of iambic pentameter as our example, the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

On the Fitzgerald system, the first thing we will do is ascertain, from the general look and sound of this line, that it is iambic pentameter. … [W]e will mark this line as such according to classical notation: “u” for an unstressed syllable, an m-dash for a stressed syllable, and a vertical bar to mark the division of feet. Thus, above the line of Shakespeare we will mark five iambs: u– | u– | u– |u– | u–|. This comprises our bottom tier. Above this scansion, we will mark the speech stresses– that is, where we actually put stress when we speak this line. This is our top tier. Primary stresses are marked with a slash, and secondary stresses with a backslash.

To this point the only difference between Fitzgerald’s system and my own appears to be the choice of symbols — on my ‘tier 1’ for metrical stress I use brevia and hash-marks ( ̆ ′) while on ‘tier 2’ I use a macron ( ¯ ) to show a heavy syllable in speech, whether or not it’s metrically stressed. Here, however, because it’s annoying and difficult to type these symbols, I will use bold font to show metrical stress (‘ictus’) (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day) and macrons for speech stress (shall Ī compāre thee to a sūmmer’s dāy).

The first thing to note about this line is that it has five metrical stresses but only four speech stresses, since nobody in speaking would emphasize “to.” I don’t have any statistics to hand, but I am pretty sure that this kind of line, with four heavy syllables and one light, metrically promoted syllable, is by far the most common kind of iambic pentameter line—I’d guess at least 50-60% of pentameters follow this pattern; indeed, the same thing happens in “I hāve been ōne acquāinted with the nīght.” The second thing to note is that, in both lines, it strikes me as pretty unimportant what you do with the first foot. Since the ‘reversed’ (trochaic) opening is the commonest and most acceptable substitution in English, I would call your choice to stress either “shall” or “I,” or “I” or “have,” a performance choice, but I would prefer to scan these feet as iambs (the ‘vanilla principle’) just to simplify matters. If you wanted to emphasize a trochaic spoken rhythm opening these lines, I would represent that as follows:

shāll I compāre thee to a sūmmer’s dāy

Ī have been ōne acquāinted with the nīght.

I’d like to look at a few other types of lines to show how my approach would handle them before returning to Fitzgerald. Four heavy syllables, five metrical beats is the most common variety of pentameter but there are plenty of other permutations. Some lines are lighter. These three:

Tomōrrow and tomōrrow and tomōrrow

The quālity of mērcy is not strāined

In the caprīciousness of sūmmer aīr

have only three heavy syllables with five metrical beats each (i.e., two promotions). It still doesn’t matter much to me whether you scan “In the” as a first foot trochee or an iamb. My preference is not to stress articles unless it’s unavoidable in some way (e.g., “to quēll dissēnsion the despōtic wāy,” a line I just made up, suggested by current events here in LA). Plenty of pentameter lines have five heavy syllables :

We fēw, we hāppy fēw, we bānd of brōthers [Shakespeare]

Yet hōpe not Līfe from Grīef or Dānger frēe,
Nor thīnk the dōom of Mān revērs'd for thēe: [Johnson]

Others are heavier. These may have more rhythmical than metrical stresses:

When Ājax strāins some rōck’s vāst weīght to thrōw
The līne tōo lābours and the wōrds mōve slōw. [Pope]

Rōcks, cāves, lākes, fēns, bōgs, dēns and shādes of deāth [Milton, PL]

These last lines, which achieve their effects by putting weight-bearing monosyllables in metrically unstressed positions, are examples of what is called metrical demotion. It might seem counterintuitive, but promotion (giving a metrical stress to a ‘light’ syllable, like “with” or “to”) speeds up a line, while demotion can slow it down or grind it to a halt (as in Milton’s line). Note that the second line in the Pope couplet above contains one promotion, on ‘and,’ and two demotions (‘too,’ ‘move’). At any rate these last examples show most clearly what Frost means when he refers to “the strain of rhythm upon a metre.” They also show the kinds of rhythmical expressiveness which are available within the confines of “regular verse.”

There is a further element which, evidently, Elijah and I would class with meter but which Fitzgerald apparently classes with rhythm: metrical substitution. In the Fitzgerald system, as Elijah explains,

the bottom tier notates how the meter is supposed to go, regardless of substitutions, and the top tier notates speech stress, which often tells not just a different but contradictory story. If the distinction between metrical substitution and rhythmic modulation were properly maintained – if trochees were marked as trochees in the bottom tier, for instance– this conflict would disappear, and we could still benefit from Fitzgerald’s welcome inclusion of speech stress notation–the top tier– in our scansion.

Sometimes the notion of “substitutions” can be squishy, especially with monosyllables, as in the openings of “Shall I compare thee” and “I have been one;” as I’ve said, I relegate such choices to the realm of speech rhythm and performance. At other times, though, substitutions are inevitable and, in my opinion, should be noted as such. This is effected either through extra syllables or polysyllables, whose stress is fixed and only rarely can be altered through metrical means (as when Coleridge all but forces us to say “also” or Hardy makes “starlit Stonehenge” borderline iambic). There’s no way around the trochaic (or ‘reversed’) first foot in

“Bētter to reīgn in Hēll than sērve in Heāv’n” [Milton, PL]

and I will brook no argument about it. Similarly ineluctable (though far more unusual) is the fifth foot trochee in this line of Stevens:

elātions when the fōrest blōoms; gūsty
emōtions on wēt roāds on āutumn nīghts [Stevens, “Sunday Morning”]

You can’t say gusty; you have to scan it as a trochee. (Note, though, in the following line that I treat the old pyrrhic spondee / double iamb as a rhythmical, rather than a metrical, feature, promoting “on” and demoting “wet.”) The next line, from Wordsworth, can be scanned regularly if you contract ‘tow’rs’ to one syllable and demote ‘domes,’ but I’ve always read it with a very aggressive third-foot dactyl:

Shīps, tōwers, dōmes, thēatres, and tēmples līe [Wordsworth, Westminster Bridge sonnet]

(If you say ‘theatres’ the substitution is less jarring but arguably more awkward and produces a fourth foot anapest.) One can also substitute by adding extra unstressed syllables, what Frost calls “loose iambic:”

By rīdĭng thĕm dōwn ōvĕr ănd ōvĕr ăgāin [Frost, “Birches”]

To annotate this thoroughly I have to write in the brevia, which are annoying to type but not an issue on a black or whiteboard. There can be questions of elision. In

Tūrning and tūrning in the wīdĕnĭng gȳre [Yeats, “The Second Coming”]

should we say ‘wīdĕnĭng’ or ‘wīd’ning’? I prefer the former, for mimetic reasons, since the anapest introduces some of that centripetal collapse the poem is talking about, though the possibility of elision makes the rough start a little easier for Yeats to get away with.

A few scattered remarks before I dip into the classics kitty. First, Elijah notes in his review that he thinks “there’s potential for the Fitzgerald system to be profitably combined with the Steele system.” I wonder if he would agree that this is what I am suggesting? It is pretty easy to convert my metrical notation into Tim Steele’s four levels of stress: a syllable that’s bold with a macron is a 4, not bold with a macron is a 3, bold with no macron is a 2, and with a simple breve (neither bolded or with a macron) is a 1. Second, I would note that this kind of two-tiered system is only really helpful in accentual-syllabic verse. In highly accentual verse—an unmixed ‘loose iambic,’ rather like the line from “Birches” above—it may only really make sense to mark beats and off-beats, unless you feel the ghost of ‘strict iambic’ hovering, as usually in Frost. It is hard not to feel, however, that a metric without promotions and demotions loses something—you can stretch and contract the line like an accordion, but you can’t choke it like a rocky stream or whisk it clean, as with a sudden breeze (“in the capriciousness of summer air”). That is, it seems to me, with an increase in “freedom,” there is a concomitant reduction of expressiveness.

The metrical instrument, then, works by a tension (strains of music) between the notional pattern and the reality of rhythm. The tools of rhythm, which allow poets to play with and against the pattern, are promotion, demotion, and substitution. Readers are gratified when our expectations are fulfilled and surprised when they’re subverted. Surprise creates emphasis, which the surprising element should be significant enough to sustain—as in the Wordsworth line from “Westminster Bridge,” the stumble on “theatres” registers a subconscious ambivalence, connected as I think to the speaker’s contempt for the falsity of urban life.

For this sort of thing to work, both writer and reader need to have possession of the pattern. If the pattern is exceedingly rare, which a poet can’t expect readers to be familiar with, the scope for variation is reduced; rhythmical uncertainty will muddy the pattern. Take this couplet from Swinburne:

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?

Rhythmically, where should we put the stresses? “Love, what ailed thee to leave” is clear enough, as is “lovely, we thought, with love” but what about “life that was made”? Is it “life that was made” or “life that was made”? The second line is perhaps clearer, but there is certainly the possibility of misreading it, if the accentual-syllabic pattern is strong in our minds, “What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?” This is what Swinburne intended:

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?

I know this because the poem is titled “Choriambics” and is in an aeolic meter used by Sappho, Alcaeus and Horace. Here is Horace’s most famous poem in the meter with a translation I’ve done in a Swinburnian vein. I’ll scan both, using bold font to indicate ictus (long syllables / stresses):

Horace Ode 1.11

tú né quaesíeris (scíre néfas) quém míhi, quém tíbi
fínem dí déderint, Leucónoe, néc Babylónios
temptáris números. út mélius quícquid érit páti,
séu plúris híemes séu tríbuit Iúppiter últimam,
quáe núnc oppósitis debílitat pumícibus máre 5
Tyrrhénum. sápias, vína líques ét spátio brévi
spém lóngam réseces. dúm lóquimur, fúgerit ínvida
áetas: cárpe díem, quám mínimum crédula póstero.

Don’t ask things we are not given to know—what sort of end the gods
Have in store for us both, Purity dear, banking on Babylon’s
Star charts: better by far that we endure fate as it comes to us,
If great Jupiter’s plan slates us for more winters, or this is it,
Which now hurls the fatigued ocean against Tuscany’s stoical
Headland. Wisdom is taste! Filter the wine, pruning your overgrown
Long-lived hopefulness back. While we converse, Time with ungen(e)rous speed
Escapes. Harvest today! Futures are false; swear off posterity.

It’s even easier with my translation than Swinburne’s poem to point to places where scanning the words according to the Latin pattern will seem forced: “what sort of end the gods,” for example, or “better by far that we endure fate as it comes to us” would be the more obvious readings of those lines. What I want to do instead is point to the Latin, where I have not only marked syllable lengths (the ictus) in bold, but painstakingly added in acute accents to show word stress. You will notice, I think, that while ictus and accent often coincide (néc Babylónios, Iúppiter últimam, fúgerit ínvida, crédula póstero—obeying what William Harmon used to call the “principle of fundibularity,” i.e., that a metrical line is like a funnel, more varied at the beginning, more regular at the end), they diverge just as often, e.g., in this whole line,

quáe núnc oppósitis debílitat pumícibus máre

which now wears down the sea against the opposing cliffs

where the restless alternation of length and stress may convey something of the propulsive battering of wave on rock. Whether or not one can always, or even often, locate some expressive effect in the clash of ictus and accent, it remains a constant and enlivening feature of all Latin and Greek poetry (in Greek the accent is pitch rather than stress), and compares in English poetry to the tension or strain between rhythm and meter which I’ve been discussing.

If I’ve done my job here then hopefully the conclusion I’m driving towards will be obvious. Récherché classical meters like the Greater Asclepiad (as in Swinburne and Horace above) or the Alcaic strophe or the elegiac couplet do not work well in English not only because their rhythms are a stretch for our heavily monosyllabic language (though this is often true), but because their paradigms are generally too little known too allow for expressive rhythmical variation. The meter must be hewed to religiously, which at best may hypnotize us but will soon grow tedious, as in the Swinburne (not to mention Evangeline). Alternatively, if we read such rhythms as free verse, we may find them “jazzy,” or “taut,” or “muscular,” or somehow compelling, but we are assured of missing much, just as someone who listens to a metrical poem read in a language he does not understand may feel something indelible has been communicated, only he’s not sure quite what. In either case we are missing out on the interplay of gratification and surprise in which the full expressiveness of metrical poetry resides.

Horace Ode 1.11 (non-choriambic version, from PBGLLP)

Don’t ask—it’s not for us to know—what end the heavens will bestow
on you and me, Leuconoe; ignore all that astrology
from Babylon. It’s better just to bow to what will be and must,
no matter if Jupiter will send more winters, or this one’s the end
that wears out the Etruscan sea against the rocks relentlessly.
Be wise; have taste; let the wine decant, and prune back your extravagant
hopes for forever. Life is brief. While we sit talking, Time, that thief,
escapes. Don’t let your life delay until tomorrow: pluck today.

A poet acquaintance pointed out this Latin poem of Samuel Johnson’s on another platform, which on a lazy afternoon as the school year winds down I thought I would take a stab at translating. The poem is surprisingly Romantic, and may have a personal meaning which led Johnson to resort to the relative obscurity of Latin:

In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae Diffluentem

Errat adhuc vitreus per prata virentia rivus,
Quo toties lavi membra tenella puer;
Hic delusa rudi frustrabar brachia motu,
Dum docuit blanda voce natare pater.
Fecerunt rami latebras, tenebrisque diurnis
Pendula secretas abdidit arbor aquas.
Nunc veteres duris periere securibus umbrae,
Longinquisque oculis nuda lavacra patent.
Lympha tamen cursus agit indefessa perennis,
Tectaque qua fluxit, nunc et aperta fluit.
Quid ferat externi velox, quid deterat aetas,
Tu quoque securus res age, Nise, tuas.

On the Stream that Flows from Stowe Mill, Lichfield

The mirror’d stream still roams its grassy glade
Where often as a child I swam and play’d;
I thrash’d about in vain with clumsy strokes
My father’s patient lessons sought to coax.
Tree branches clasp’d above, and made a screen
Of daily dark where water flow’d unseen,
But axes smote those shadows long ago,
So distant eyes can see the naked flow.
Without fatigue, the everlasting spill,
Veil’d then, but now expos’d, is purling still.
Nisus, you too your carefree course pursue,
Whatever Time may alter, or undo.

“Nisus,” according to a note that will mean more to Johnson scholars than to me, may refer either to Edmund Hector or Bennet Langton. Johnson calls him “Nisus” after the character from Book IX of Vergil’s Aeneid — he and Euryalus are two lovers who, ambitious for glory, volunteer to sneak through the siege of their camp at night to take a message to Aeneas, but after much carnage are caught and killed; apparently the fact that Nisus dies very shortly after Euryalus has led some to believe, rather fancifully, that Johnson is predicting his addressee will outlive him.

However that may be, the last couplet is the heart of the poem. Johnson tells ‘Nisus,’ “You, too, stay your course, free from care, no matter what swift time may bring in from outside, or wear away.” One might have expected Johnson to compare the river’s flow to time, but instead, the river appears as an analogy for the forward motion of Nisus’ life, and by extension Johnson’s, while time’s passage is revealed by the changes in the landscape (the trees cut down in the fourth couplet). The key word is securus — why should Nisus be told to be “carefree?” Naturally, it is possible that there is something going on outside the poem, in Nisus’ life, which Johnson is telling him not to worry about. Yet I think the poem wants us to connect securus with childhood as much as the river, as if Nisus and Johnson played together there in boyhood, when they were both securi, all the curae being the province of their fathers. Thus we understand that the essential man flows on unchanged from youth to age, while the world changes around him. The secret to aging, according to the poem, is perhaps to maintain a childish insouciance through it all.

It will be observed that in my translation I have allowed myself some period-appropriate orthography and syntax, especially in the last couplet, which resorts to an inversion I would never typically employ. I am not sure if my version quite manages a Johnsonian style, but it is an attempt at a smoother metric than usual for me. The idea of translating Johnson into faintly Johnsonian English, while perhaps obvious, is inspired by a truly masterful performance of the same trick, A.E. Stallings’ rendering of A.E. Housman’s Latin elegy to Moses Jackson. Housman and Jackson were undergraduates together at St. John’s in the late 70s and early 80s, and Housman’s unrequited love for him forms the subject of probably my favorite Tom Stoppard play, The Invention of Love. In 1903, when the poem was published (squirreled away in the preface to Housman’s critical edition of one of the obscurest of Roman astronomical didactic poets, Manilius) Housman was professing Latin in London, while Jackson served as a headmaster in India, where he had been for fifteen-odd years. At any rate the juxtaposition with Samuel Johnson’s poem makes it hard to escape the suspicion that both poets turned to Latin because they wanted to say something too personal for the publicity of English:

Sodali meo M. I. Jackson, harum litterarum contemptori

Signa pruinosae variantia luce cavernas
noctis et extincto lumina nata die
solo rure vagi lateque tacentibus arvis
surgere nos una vidimus oceano.
Vidimus: illa prius, cum luce carebat uterque,
viderat in latium prona poeta mare,
seque memor terra mortalem matre creatum
intulit aeternis carmina sideribus,
clara nimis post se genitis exempla daturus
ne qui forte deis fidere vellet homo.
Nam supero sacrata polo complexaque mundum
sunt tamen indignam carmina passa luem,
et licet ad nostras enarint naufraga terras
scriptoris nomen vix tenuere sui.
Non ego mortalem vexantia sidera sortem
aeternosve tuli sollicitare deos,
sed cito casurae tactus virtutis amore
humana volui quaerere nomen ope,
virque virum legi fortemque brevemque sodalem
qui titulus libro vellet inesse meo.
O victure meis dicam periturene chartis,
nomine sed certe vivere digne tuo,
haec tibi ad auroram surgentia signa secuto
hesperia trado munera missa plaga.
En cape: nos populo venit inlatura perempto
ossa solo quae det dissolvenda dies
fataque sortitas non immortalia mentes
et non aeterni vincla sodalicii.

To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson, Scoffer at this Scholarship
trans. A.E. Stallings

As we went walking far and wide
Through silent fields and countryside,
We watched together star signs brim
And rise above the ocean’s rim,
And planets too, that fret with light
The icy caverns of the Night.
These constellations we now mark,
When we were not, in formless dark,
A poet, centuries before,
Would watch from the Italian shore
Drop in the sea, and mindful Earth
Had made him mortal from his birth,
He set on high his music’s bars
Among the everlasting stars,
To those to come, clear warning sign
To place no faith in the divine;
For sacred to the pole unfurled
Above, and compassing the world,
These songs yet suffered sad disgrace
And almost sank without a trace:
Though to our strand this wreckage came,
It scarcely owned its author’s name.
Mine not to exhort the gods
Or stars that vex our mortal odds,
But love of virtue quick to fade
Makes me seek fame with human aid.
A man, I chose a man to stand
At this front page and my right hand—
Who thrive or perish in my pages,
Brief friend, your name should last the ages.
I send these lines to you who went
Where stars rise in the Orient,
From here where constellations sink
Below the ocean’s western brink.
Take them: for that day will come
To add us to the canceled sum
And give our bones to earth to rot
(For we have no immortal lot,
And souls that will not last forever)
And the chain of comrades sever.

Virque virum legi — “A man, I chose a man.” These three Latin words quite baldly lay bare the essential tragedy of Housman’s life: “Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say…” At any rate it’s not for nothing that Stallings, whose first name is not Alfred, has chosen to publish under the initials “A.E.” Her love for Housman’s poetry is marrow-deep, and she has absorbed his rhythms and phrasings so thoroughly, I’m tempted to say she has restored this poem to something like its ur-form, the poem Housman would have written had he not sought the privacy of Latin; it makes a sort of companion piece to “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.”

To tease out all of the allusions in Housman’s poem, to Ovid’s exile poetry, love elegy, and Catullus, would take its own post; but I want to focus on the obvious allusion to Horace at the end. Non aeterni vincla sodalicii, as Stallings well recognizes, clearly refers to the ode Housman famously proclaimed “the most beautiful poem in Latin,” Horace Ode 4.7, of which Housman’s own rendering seems to me an all-time high point in the history of poetic transubstantiation:

infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum
liberat Hippolytum,
nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro
vincula Pirithoo.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

If you don’t know this translation of Housman’s, you should go read it right now, or listen to William Maxwell read it (same link); if you do know it, you might be interested in taking a look at Samuel Johnson’s version, which was new to me, and which in some ways (the jaunty tetrameter and classicizing, almost clinical impersonality) feels more Housmanesque than Housman’s own. Actually the juxtaposition of these two makes me think Housman was channeling his through Thomas Grey, and that there is something about the extra space of Housman’s heroic quatrains and the yearning Romantic color of his phrasing which elevates his rendering among the masterpieces of translation. This quatrain of Johnson’s, for example, has all the flippant wit of Housman’s Terence (“Malt does more than Milton can…”):

Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.

By contrast Housman’s version carries Grey’s sense (“But who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey…”) of the richness and brevity of life:

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

Johnson’s lines may make us laugh, but Housman’s will make us cry. At any rate, here is Johnson’s Horace:

Horace Ode 4.7
trans. Samuel Johnson

The snow dissolved no more is seen,
The fields, and woods, behold, are green.
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,
The spritely nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year’s successive plan
Proclaims mortality to man.
Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,
Spring yields to summer’s sovereign ray,
Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,
And winter chills the world again.
Her losses soon the moon supplies,
But wretched man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is naught but ashes and a shade.
Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.
Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fixed your doom,
Or eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or virtue shall replace on earth.
Hippolytus unjustly slain
Diana calls to life in vain,
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of hell that hold his friend.

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions – nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

— Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Madame Roger des Genettes, 1861

As an example of what Flaubert was talking about, we might take the famous little squib attributed to the Emperor Hadrian, composed in highly resolved iambic dimeters:

animula vagula blandula
hospes comesque corporis
quae nunc abibis in loca?
pallidula rigida nudula
nec ut soles dabis iocos.

Sweet little soul, wayfarer,
my body’s guest and friend,
where, where will you descend
stiffer paler barer
now your old jokes are at an end?

Hadrian’s wistful epicurean melancholy falls just before the end of Flaubert’s timeline (Marcus Aurelius was his second successor) and conveys every bit of the aloneness Flaubert describes. This is not a man who believes either in the pagan hell (though its shadow haunts his imagination) or the transcendent Christian promise (which is nothing to him). The diminutives with which he couches his address (five of the six words in lines 1 and 4) put him at an ironic, patronizing distance from his own soul. There is faint mockery at the idea that it will be going anywhere once it leaves his body, but also sweetness, as if speaking to an adored child. I feel certain this speaker would agree with Frost that “earth’s the right place for love;” like the everyman in Grey’s Elegy, he will not leave life without casting “one longing, lingering look behind.”

Two connected features make this poem what we call “untranslatable” (at least in English): the diminutives and the grammar of line 4. Though there aren’t many examples in Latin poetry of baby talk, I don’t doubt this was one of the main contexts in which Romans used diminutives; others include addresses to lovers, friends, and pets, as well as objects of contempt and derision. The “untranslatable” thing is that in Latin both the noun and adjective that modifies it can be made diminutive. So animula means “little soul,” but is larded with modifiers — vagula, blandula, perhaps pallidula and nudula (see below)— which also make the same slightly babyish mouth noises, underlined by the jingle. Unfortunately, the translator can’t really say “My little soul, little wanderer, little lisper, … a little pale, a little naked” — so many “littles” would overbalance this tiny poem. There seems to me no real way to bridge this grammatical gap, between a thing Latin can do and English can’t; perhaps Spanish and Italian are a different story.

The second major issue facing translators of this poem, which is also an editorial issue, touches the interpretation of line 4: does the adjective string pallidula, rigida, nudula modify animula or loca? Do not be deceived by the punctuation above—the question mark following loca is a decision made by an editor, not the author. This editor believes (and my translation follows him) that pallidula, rigida, nudula modify animula — a pale, rigid, naked little soul. However, if we move the question mark forward a bit, the adjectives now will have to go with loca, “places:”

quae nunc abibis? in loca
pallidula rigida nudula
nec ut soles dabis iocos.

This means “Where will you go now? To places a little pale, inflexible, a little naked.” If you imagine the original without punctuation, as it was conceived, then you can see how it is able to have it both ways, such that both the soul and its destination blend into each other, and take on the same sad colorless, lifeless qualities. Unfortunately, in English, this effect is not really available to either the editor or the translator; we must choose.

As Flaubert suggests, in existential terms Hadrian stood alone; however, in the field of modern literature, his famous last words have had many fellow travelers. No doubt the well known issues of translation, along with the diminutive length, have made his little poem a particularly alluring prize. I’m going to quote two “big name” versions, but this site presents forty-three, and other scholarly papers I can’t dig up at the moment more than double that number. These two are by Lord Byron and Stevie Smith, the latter of whom apparently first encountered Hadrian’s original in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean:

George Gordon, Lord Byron:
Ah! Gentle, fleeting, wav’ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?
No more, with wonted humour gay
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

Stevie Smith:
Little soul so sleek and smiling
Flesh’s friend and guest also
Where departing will you wander
Growing paler now and languid
And not joking as you used to?

My favorite part of Byron’s version is the way he emphasizes the two three-word runs of the Latin, by putting one at the beginning (“Gentle, fleeting, wav’ring”) and the other at the end (“pallid, cheerless, and forlorn”). “Forlorn"—the very word is like a bell, and I find it an apt conclusion. In general, though, his version strikes me as rather wordy — “wonted humour gay” is too Miltonic for this poem, and I dislike the portentous “Ah!” with which he opens. Smith’s version by contrast has Hadrian’s childlike simplicity and an appealing trochaic rhythm. “Sleek” is a particularly striking choice, made mostly for the alliteration (she gets “vagula” into “wander” in line 3). I find myself however let down by the rhythm of her concluding line—the full trochee, which doesn’t quite line up with the wrenched meter of ‘alSO’ in line 2, denies resolution in a way you could argue is mimetic, but which I find unsatisfying. (One might note my own final line is a beat longer than the others, which I hope gives it a feeling of finality.)

It might also be noted that neither Byron nor Smith translated nudula (a little naked). In finding the adjective strange, they are in good company—plenty of scholars, suspecting nudula to be corrupt, have amended to nubila (cloudy), which works best with loca, though it’s not nonsensical with animula either. To me anyway, it seems reasonable to imagine that the soul, when it has left the body, should be “a little naked” as compared to when it was in it, which is all I can say for my own “barer,” suggested (obviously) by the rhyme with “wayfarer.” I might also mention that I have tried to catch the grammatical rhyme of pallidula rigida nudula via the jingly comparatives stiffer paler barer — if it works (which it may not!) it is a small shot at poetic fidelity through a literal departure.

If you recognized the Flaubert quote with which I began, you will have guessed why I quoted it: it was the avowed inspiration for the best book I’ve read so far this year, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. She writes in her Afterword that she came across Flaubert’s sentence and copied it down in 1927, then carried it with her for over twenty years until she finally wrote the book. She also notes that “This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F.,” which I can only assume refers to Flaubert.

The entire book is ravishingly beautiful. It also appears to be scrupulously based on the available sources—a true work of historical re-animation. It seems that Hadrian really did write his memoirs, apparently in the form of letters to his first successor, Antoninus Pius, and we even have a short excerpt from the beginning. It seems like this passage hadn’t been published when Yourcenar wrote her book, but even if she had it to hand, it seems to me perfectly justifiable that her Hadrian addresses his memoirs to Marcus Aurelius, his second successor, rather than Antoninus: in her version, one great philosopher prince writes to another, composing an Epicurean autobiography to be weighed against the other’s Stoic Meditations. Being much more of an epicurean than a stoic myself, my sympathies are with Yourcenar’s Hadrian.

Yourcenar ends her book with her own prose rendering of Animula vagula blandula. In context, it is extraordinarily moving. The whole final section of the book depicts Hadrian learning to die. His watchword is patientia: patience, or suffering. Twice he attempts to commit suicide and is thwarted, and settles into a watchful waiting, in which he becomes a connoisseur of his own pain, trusting to the wisdom of his dying body as he trusted it while it lived.  πάθει μάθος is his slogan as much as Aeschylus’s. He writes:

My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters; this body with swollen hands and livid nails, this sorry mass almost half-dissolved, this sack of ills, of desires and dreams, is hardly more solid or consistent than a shade.

Throughout his death agony, Yourcenar depicts Hadrian as Christlike; he does not wish to leave the citizens of Rome with “the hideous picture of a man racked by pain who cannot endure one torture more.” He accepts his cross, but bears it for an earthly end, the good of the empire. It is fitting that his final farewell should be a version of his own words:

Petite âme, âme tendre et flottante, compagne de mon corps, qui fut ton hôte, tu vas descendre dans ces lieux pâles, durs et nus, où tu devras renoncer aux jeux d’autrefois. Un instant encore, regardons, ensemble les rives familières, les objets que sans doute nous ne reverrons plus… Tâchons d’entrer dans la mort les yeux ouvertes…

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again. … Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes. …

Hadrian dies alone, and Yourcenar’s achievement is to make that death as redemptive as any strictly mortal act can be.

There is one other passage I want to quote before signing off. (I’m exercising restraint here, since in my regular note-taking I copied or typed out around 30 passages, about 2000 words total.) I thought of this one first in the context of “Hope and History,” the theme of this year’s Sierra Poetry Conference, which I attended not long ago. To me, Yourcenar’s passage does a better job than Heaney’s famous lines of suggesting what sort of hope history actually justifies—not a tidal wave of justice, but occasional intervals of order. It also glosses a sense in which Hadrian was not — is not — alone, in which not only his fictional memoirist, but even, in a smaller way, his translators have touched his hand a moment on our life’s journey into the unknown and participated in his “intermittent immortality:”

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

I wrote a while back on William Johnson Cory’s famous translation of Callimachus, his ignominious exit from Eton, and the benefits of learning Latin in school only to forget it (“the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions”). I’ve just happened upon a poem of his which I am rushing to share because it is right on theme for this blog and I’m late this week - I will be posting a bit less for the foreseeable future, as I try to finish my next book of translations of Latin Love Elegy. Anyway Cory’s poem is called “Mimnermus in Church” and is rather a JV version of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning:”

Mimnermus in Church

You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forgo,
This warm kind world is all I know.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend's remember'd tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But O, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

Not quite “Death is the mother of beauty.” The conclusion is no doubt influenced by Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” where however the argument is more interesting because it is reversed: you should love me better, Shakespeare says, because I am old and getting older every day:

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The archaic elegist Mimnermus strikes me as an odd mouthpiece for this poem, but also interestingly points up what I like least about it: Cory’s poem is (as someone said of Richard Wilbur, in an anecdote I half remember from Greg Williamson) “too damn happy.” Mimnermus does indeed relish the pleasures of the flesh, but he seems to me anyway more appalled by the indignities of aging than rhapsodic over the joys of youth. His first fragment is his most famous:

τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης,
τεθναίην ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι,
κρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή,
οἷ᾽ ἥβης ἄνθ εα γίγνεται ἁρπαλέα
ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξίν: ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸν ἐπέλθῃ
γῆρας, ὅ τ᾽ αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ κακὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ,
αἰεί μιν φρένας ἀμφὶ κακαὶ τείρουσι μέριμναι,
οὐδ᾽ αὐγὰς προσορῶν τέρπεται ἠελίου,
ἀλλ᾽ ἐχθρὸς μὲν παισίν, ἀτίμαστος δὲ γυναιξίν,
οὕτως ἄργαλέον γῆρας ἔθηκε θεός.

What life, what pleasure, without golden Love?
Let me drop dead when I have had enough
of secret trysts, love-gifts and the love-bed,
flowers of youth whose joys are harvested
by men and women. But when the pain sets in
of age, deforming even handsome men,
cruel worries always wear us down for spite;
we get no pleasure looking on the light;
women do not respect us; boys are cold.
That’s how bitter the god made getting old.

Mimnermus’ obsessive theme is thus not love of love but dread of decrepitude. He would envy no modern poem more than Larkin’s “The Old Fools:” “Why aren’t they screaming?” indeed. Almost all of his extant verse (which is not much) worries over this theme. One couplet expresses a wish not to live past sixty; another glosses what for him will have been the archetypal horror story, that of Tithonus (who bunglingly wished for immortality without wishing for eternal youth and wizened into a grasshopper):

Τιθωνῷ μὲν ἔδωκεν ἔχειν κακὸν ἄφθιτον ὁ Ζεὺς
γῆρας, ὃ καὶ θανάτου ῥίγιον ἀργαλέου.

Zeus gave Tithonus an everlasting curse:
old age, at least as bad as death, and worse.

A third poem casts a sympathetic eye to the sun, and sees nothing but a dogsbody day-laborer. Yet Mimnermus’ most satisfying fragment is the second. It takes off from one of Homer’s greatest lines (“As are the generations of leaves, such are the generations of men”) and makes a stark, melancholy statement about the brevity of life, without ever urging us to seize the day. Unlike “Mimnermus in Church” it does not bother to suggest that the fleeting pleasures of life can make any kind of substantial counterweight to the inevitable decline. Both poems take a tragic view of life, but the speaker of “Mimnermus in Church” shrinks from facing how tragic his view is. He finds no attraction to the “chilly stars” or “sexless souls” of angels, but he also seems to have almost convinced himself that, if he only holds onto his lover hard enough, he will never have to let him go.

ἡμεῖς δ᾽ οἷά τε φύλλα φύει πολυανθέος ὥρῃ
ἔαρος, ὅτ᾽ αἶψ᾽ αὐγῇς αὔξεται ἠελίου,
τοῖς ἴκελοι πήχυιον ἐπὶ χρόνον ἄνθεσιν ἥβης
τερπόμεθα πρὸς θεῶν εἰδότες οὔτε κακὸν
οὔτ᾽ ἀγαθόν: κῆρες δὲ παρεστήκασι μέλαιναι,
ἡ μὲν ἔχουσα τέλος γήραος ἀργαλέου,
ἡ δ᾽ ἑτέρη θανάτοιο: μίνυνθα δὲ γίγνεται ἥβης
καρπός, ὅσον τ᾽ ἐπὶ γῆν κίδναται ἠέλιος:
αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δὴ τοῦτο τέλος παραμείψεται ὥρης,
αὐτίκα δὴ τεθνάναι βέλτιον ἢ βίοτος:
πολλὰ γὰρ ἐν θυμῷ κακὰ γίγνεται: ἄλλοτε οἶκος
τρυχοῦται, πενίης δ᾽ ἔργ᾽ ὀδυνηρὰ πέλει:
ἄλλος δ᾽ αὖ παίδων ἐπιδεύεται, ὧν τε μάλιστα
ἱμείρων κατὰ γῆς ἔρχεται εἰς Ἀΐδην:
ἄλλον νοῦσος ἔχει θυμοφθόρος: οὐδέ τίς ἐστιν
ἀνθρώπων ᾧ Ζεὺς μὴ κακὰ πολλὰ διδῷ.

We are like leaves born in the teeming spring,
basking in sunlight, swiftly burgeoning;
like them, for an arm’s length of time, we live
happy and young, and what the gods will give
we don’t suspect. Presences wrapped in gloom
are always near, one holding out the doom
of age, another, death. And youth won’t last;
its fruit, like one day’s worth of sun, dies fast.
And when this season dwindles and is gone,
it’s better being dead than living on.
For troubles swarm the heart: one man will blow
his savings, and lose everything but woe;
another man wants children most of all,
and, wanting them, goes down to Hades’ hall;
disease destroys a third. For Zeus the king
gives everyone a share of suffering.

In contrast to Cory, Thomas Hardy catches the essence of Mimnermus in this famous, bitter little poem:

I look into my glass

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Is North of Boston—the book widely and rightly regarded as Robert Frost’s breakout masterpiece, on which his first claim to true originality rests—a book of eclogues? Dana Gioia, in his recent and highly recommended Poetry as Enchantment, says No. He writes:

The eclogue is a polished poetic conversation or monologue by one or more rustic speakers in an idealized pastoral setting. A lyric form, it characteristically presents neither significant action nor sharply individualized characters, but relies on musicality and linguistic charm. By contrast, Frost’s poems are lean narratives which unfold in conversation by two or more sharply drawn characters in highly realistic settings. They avoid the overt musicality of Virgil or Spenser. There is also nothing antiquarian about Frost’s dramatic narratives, which are more rooted in realist fiction and theater than in neo-classical pastoral verse. (88)

There is not much here to object to, beyond the conclusion. Gioia wants to argue for the originality of Frost as a narrative poet, an aspect of Frost’s achievement which he maintains has gone under-appreciated because it cuts against the Modernist grain. Generally, Gioia observes, critical arguments for Frost are arguments for his Modernist bona fides. The Serious Critic must convince us that Frost is a Serious Poet by connecting him to the other indubitably Serious Poets writing at the same time. In this game, popularity is a liability, and narrative skills beside the point.

I am sympathetic to this line of approach and to the project of healing the gulf between popular and critical success. Gioia wants to offer a seat at the grown-ups’ table to writers so benightedly simple that they can be read with pleasure by ordinary people, without recourse to a bristling commentarial apparatus. Yet even he, who is perfectly happy to let modern poets be unfashionably clear and straightforward, balks at the outmoded eclogue. Gioia’s essay suggests that he sees the genre as “retrograde,” and that, if Frost’s originality is to be proven, his perpetration of eclogues must be denied.

For my part, I think it’s pretty clear that Frost did write eclogues, and in a highly original way. Frost himself never hid that the Virgilian eclogue was his starting point in North of Boston. According to his biographer Lawrence Thompson, the working title for the volume was New England Eclogues, though Frost rejected it on the grounds that not all of the poems fit the Virgilian mould. In his preface to the Expanded Edition, he wrote that the book “was written as scattered poems in a form suggested by the eclogues of Virgil . . . Some of them are a little nearer one act plays than eclogues but they seem to have something in common that I don’t want to seek a better name for.” Frost, then, was happy calling these poems “eclogues.” Next to his own testimony, we probably don’t need the assessments of early reviewers like Ezra Pound, who in Poetry Magazine labeled North of Boston’s poems “New England eclogues,” or this anonymous early reviewer:

Robert Frost is what the bucolic Virgil might have been, had Virgil, shorn of his Latinity and born of Scotch-New England parentage, spent most of his life where thermometers remain near and often below zero for three months of each year. If Mr. Frost had lived in classical Italy or Greece, he would probably have tended sheep.

As it was, though, Frost’s rustic activities tended more toward the agricultural than the bucolic, which accounts for one of the major divergences between his eclogues and Virgil’s—Frost wrote georgic eclogues, while Vergil’s were pastoral.

This point demands some explanation. Unlike “bucolic” and “pastoral,” which refer to cowherding and shepherding respectively, neither the Greek word “idyll” (eidyllion) nor its Latin translation ecloga imply any particular subject matter. Eidyllion is the diminutive of eidos (the word Plato uses for his Forms) and refers, at best guess (the term is obscure), to “a polished little piece,” while ecloga suggests, according to Lewis & Short, “a selection, consisting of the finest passages, from a written composition.” As I wrote in my Penguin Book of Greek & Latin Lyric Verse, there is no obvious reason why the word ‘idyll’ should have been applied to Theocritus’ poetry and his alone, though such was indeed the case; but its bucolic associations derive from his characteristic subject matter, not from any connotations intrinsic to the word itself. In the same way, ‘eclogae’ became associated with bucolic / pastoral when Vergil employed it to translate Theocritus’ unusual Eidyllia.

What makes Theocritus’ Idylls “idylls” is obscure, though if I were to guess, I would say it has to do with the presentation of a lyrical song or songs (hymn, encomium, lament, or ‘amoeboean’ song, that is, the bucolic rap battle or flyting bout) inset into some more conversational, though still versified, frame or context. Such a frame might be provided by the poet (as, for example, in Idyll 11, the Lament of Polyphemus, which Theocritus prefaces with an address to his friend Aratus), or by a play-like dialogue, as in Idyll 1, between Thyrsis and an unnamed goatherd. Sometimes all three elements are present—narrative framing, conversational dialogue, and exchange of songs, as in Idyll 7. Most of the idylls take this form and all of Vergil’s eclogues (with the possible exception of 4) adopt it. What the idylls are not is exclusively bucolic—there are urban playlets, mythical poems, hymns, love poems, even a georgic. Vergil, in fashioning his eclogues, selected for Theocritean bucolic and excluded the rest. Frost, for his part, has stated how inspiring he found the conversational quality of the eclogues: he said that “he first heard the speaking voice in poetry in Virgil’s Eclogues.” At any rate, in North of Boston, he has performed a similar act of selective imitation not unlike Vergil’s own: he has zeroed in on certain elements of Vergilian eclogue (frame, monologue or dialogue, conversational verse) while eliminating the inset song and pastoral protagonists. And Frost knew farmers, not shepherds, so his eclogues are georgic.

As noted above, the ‘georgic eclogue’ is not unprecedented, even if Vergil’s oeuvre (who wrote the pastoral Eclogues first, and then the didactic Georgics) suggests the two are mutually exclusive. Theocritus’ georgic poem, Idyll 10, depicts two reapers, Milon, a harsh, unsentimental foreman, and Bucaeus, a moony young thing swooning over a girl in the manner of bucolic shepherds. Milon upbraids Bucaeus for his lackadaisical work, Bucaeus responds querulously, and eventually admits the reason: he’s in love! After a bit of banter, they trade songs, also in the manner of Theocritus’ shepherds: Bucaeus sings a little ditty in praise of his crush Bombyca, while Milon offers a jocular reaping song. The interlude over, he tells Bucaeus to get back to work. Here’s the poem:

Idyll 10: The Reapers

Milon: Bucaeus, what’s wrong, buddy? Why this moping?
You can’t cut your swath straight, like you used to,
or keep up with the next guy. Look, you’re straggling
like an old sheep whose toes have caught a thorn.
What will you do this afternoon or evening
if you can’t even mow your row this morning?

Bucaeus: Milon, chip off a tough block, you late-reaper,
haven’t you ever yearned for someone absent?

Milon: Never. What good is ‘yearning’ when you’re working?

Bucaeus: Haven’t you spent one sleepless night for love?

Milon: No, and I hope not to. Hard to retrain
a dog once he’s picked up a taste for guts.

Bucaeus: Well, I’m in love. Have been for ten days now.

Milon: Your wine must come in jarfuls! Mine’s scant and sour.

Bucaeus: Sure, that’s why no one’s hoed my yard in months.

Milon: So who’s the kid who’s got you in this muddle?

Bucaeus: It’s Polybotas’ girl, the one who piped
for reapers lately at Hippocion’s.

Milon: The gods are just! You asked for it; you got it.
Now you can spoon all night with a praying mantis! 20

Bucaeus: You’re making fun. Wealth’s not the only blind god—
remember reckless Love. Don’t put on airs.

Milon: I’m not! But you, just drop that corn, and sing
some sweet love-ditty for the girl, to make
the work go lighter. You always were a singer.

Bucaeus: My slender girl, Pierian Muses, sing,
for all you touch soon sets to blossoming.
Lovely Bombyca, they call you Syrian,
skinny and sunburnt; I call it ‘honey-skin.’
Dark are the hyacinth and violet,
but theirs are the first blooms wreath-makers get.
Clover has goats, and goats have wolves, beguiled;
cranes chase the plow; you’re the one drives me wild.
If I were rich as Croesus was of old,
we two would stand for Cypris, cast in gold,
you with your pipes, an apple or a rose,
I wearing brand-new shoes, and brand-new clothes.
Lovely Bombyca, your voice is a bouquet,
your feet, white dice, your moods—well, I can’t say.

Milon: Our boy’s a poet—we had no idea!
Look how he tuned the manner to the matter,
and me with this big beard, and all for nothing!
Well, try this song, by the divine Lityerses:

Fruitful Demeter, lavish of your bounty,
make our toil easy and our harvest plenty.
Bind up those piles, boys, so no one can say,
“These men are weak as fig-wood; dock their pay!”
The stalks you cut should face the north or west,
since that’s the way the cornstalks plump the best,
and nobody should stop at noon to sleep—
it’s then the corn is easiest to reap.
Start up the reaping when the lark awakes,
stop when he sleeps; high heat is time for breaks.
Frogs have it good, boys! They don’t need to call
for “Drinks! More drinks!” Their pond has got it all.
More lentils, cook, you skinflint! Or it’s fitting
for you to cut your thumb off cumin-splitting.

Now that’s the sort of thing that men should sing
who labor in the sun. That starveling love
of yours, Bucaeus—save it for your mommy,
to croon some morning when she’s sleeping in.

I’m not aware that Frost ever acknowledged Theocritus’ influence in the way he acknowledged Vergil’s. But one can say of this poem what Ezra Pound says of The Code from North of Boston — that it “has a pervasive humor, the humor of things as they are, not of an author trying to be funny.” I’ve long felt there might be an analogy worth drawing between Frost’s folksy New England dialect and Theocritus’ Doric (the “Slower Lower” Greek dialect). The thought also occurred to Thomas Rosenmayer (in a book on Theocritus and his descendants):

Frost’s pastoral diction furnishes an ironic parallel; it is colloquial but not provincial or rustic or dialectal. His poems do, however, show a certain folksiness, a tobacco-chewing drawl, that sets them apart from the elegance of Theocritus’ surfaces, and in a sense renders them more dialectal. Theocritus’ speech, in spite of its clean-cut simplicity, is his own creation… (The Green Cabinet, 51)

Frost does use the occasional rustic-poetic archaism, in the manner of Vergil, where the sprinkling of outmoded usages has a colloquial flavor. I’m thinking of lines like “Off he goes always when I need him most” from Death of the Hired Man or “What had how long it takes a birch to rot / To do with what was in the darkened parlor?” from Home Burial or “Never you say a thing like that to a man” from The Code. (I am willing to take Frost’s word for it that people he knew might actually have said things like this.) It is also worth pointing out at least one likely allusion to Vergil’s Eclogues in the first line of The Mountain:

The mountain held the town as in a shadow.

which harks to the end of Eclogue 1:

Et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

and now woodsmoke—look there—is rising
from the far chimneys, and the falling shadows
the mountains cast are growing ever longer.

Finally, in thinking of Frost and the Eclogues, it is hard not to bring up the lines from Death of the Hired Man about Harold, the former work-partner turned professor of the dying dogsbody Silas:

Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin.
He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying
He studied Latin, like the violin,
Because he liked it—that an argument!

In speaking for Harold, Frost is also plainly speaking for himself.

As I mentioned above, Dana Gioia wants to vindicate Frost of the eclogue because the genre feels “retrograde.” So much scorn had been heaped on the (English) Augustan eclogue over the course of the 19th century (see Ruskin’s withering criticism of Pope in my last piece) that by the 20th it was no longer a living poetic form, only a corpse to be dissected by critics for the purposes of definition. In resurrecting the genre as he did, Frost was doing what Callimachus had done in the 3rd century with Hipponax and Pindar, or what Catullus had done in the first with Callimachus, or what Horace had done after him with Sappho and Alcaeus—he had found what he called, in a tribute to EA Robinson, the “old-fashioned way to be new.”

Frost’s eclogues are alive because they are not mere schoolboy imitations; he is not doing finger exercises, or trying to prove to anyone that he can write “proper pastoral”—he doesn’t care whether we read his “dramatic narratives” as eclogues or not. They are alive, first of all, because, rather than regurgitating pastoral clichés, Frost has filled them with matter from his own experience, which was georgic, not bucolic. They are alive, second of all, because the divergences Gioia notes between Frost and Vergil—that Frost’s rustic world is not idealized, his characters are more sharply drawn, his action more significant—constitute a legitimate modern if not modernist criticism of traditional pastoral. Frost’s taste for realism can be traced back to the Romantics and, e.g., Wordsworth, whose poems in the pastoral mode dispense with a lot of the traditional trappings of the genre, to paint country people in a truer light than pastoral had previously done. Partly this trend relates to a rejection of the Augustan tendency to seek universality in generic types rather than minute particulars, that Romantic desire “to see the universe in a grain of sand” which is still with us. Frost’s preference for “significant action,” too, seems to me a natural criticism of the typical slackness of pastoral drama—why present the action dramatically if there isn’t any real action to speak of? That Frost, taken by Vergil’s talkiness and sheer beauty, and under the influence of his own failed efforts at writing plays and short stories, should have overhauled the eclogue far enough that we can legitimately debate whether the poems he wrote were in fact eclogues, seems to me a classic case study of how retrospection leads to innovation; how traditions are maintained and passed on by being transformed into something new.

I could go on—I’m particularly uncomfortable implying that Vergil’s Eclogues are as toothless as the average Renaissance imitation, as if there were no real-world significance in the plights of Meliboeus and Moeris, both driven from their farms by Augustus’ land confiscations (their drama may be muted but the pathos is real)—but this has already gotten long. I want to close with a passage I encountered in John Gardiner’s Art of Fiction when I was a student which has stuck with me. According to Gardiner,

The artist’s primary unit of thought—his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work—is genre. … Novelty comes chiefly from ingenious genre-crossing or elevation of familiar materials. … Genre-crossing of one sort or another is behind most of the great literary art in the English tradition.

I might add “personalizing” to this list, as Vergil personalized Theocritean bucolic by translating it into Latin and the area around Cremona and his native Mantua and embroiling it in contemporary events (especially in Eclogues 1, 4 and 9). Theocritus, on the other hand, does indeed seem to have invented bucolic through the “elevation of familiar materials” (viz., the humble songs of Sicilian herdsmen) into learned hexameter poetry. Frost both personalized Vergil’s eclogues, by transplanting them to hard-scrabble New England, and crossed them with the modern short-story and one-act play to create his “New England eclogues.” Far from “retrograde,” looking back where no one is looking in order to write what no one else is writing seems to me the essence of originality. It is the “old-fashioned way to be new.”

Theocritus’ first Idyll contains a lament for the ox-herd Daphnis, who has died. It is sung by a shepherd named Thyrsis, at the request of an unnamed goatherd: “But, Thyrsis, sing the ‘Suffering of Daphnis;’ / you’re a true master of the country song.” The song is accordingly presented as a poetic composition, not a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling; nor does it give us any reason to conclude that Thyrsis knew Daphnis personally—his song could as easily be an exercise on the patron saint of pastoral as a lament for a friend. This is how it starts:

῎Αρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι φίλαι ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς.
Θύρσις ὅδ᾽ ὡξ Αἴτνας, καὶ Θύρσιδος ἁδέα φωνά.
πᾷ ποκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἦσθ᾽, ὅκα Δάφνις ἐτάκετο, πᾷ ποκα Νύμφαι;
ἢ κατὰ Πηνειῶ καλὰ τέμπεα; ἢ κατὰ Πίνδω;
οὐ γὰρ δὴ ποταμοῖο μέγαν ῥόον εἴχετ᾽ ᾿Ανάπω,
οὐδ᾽ Αἴτνας σκοπιάν, οὐδ᾽ ῎Ακιδος ἱερὸν ὕδωρ.
ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι φίλαι ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς.
τῆνον μὰν θῶες, τῆνον λύκοι ὠρύσαντο,
τῆνον χὡκ δρυμοῖο λέων ἔκλαυσε θανόντα.
ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι φίλαι ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς.
πολλαί οἱ πὰρ ποσσὶ βόες, πολλοὶ δέ τε ταῦροι,
πολλαὶ δ᾽ αὖ δαμάλαι καὶ πόρτιες ὠδύραντο.
ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι φίλαι ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς.

Thyrsis: Muses, strike up, strike up the country song.
I, Thyrsis of Aetna, sweet-voiced Thyrsis, speak:
Where, where were you, Nymphs, during Daphnis’ fever?
In Tempe and Peneus? Pindus’ peak?
For you weren’t near Anapus’ mighty river, 70
on Aetna, or by Acis’ sacred creek.
Muses, strike up, strike up the country song.
For him the wolves, for him the jackals howled;
grief-stricken lions in the thickets growled.
Muses, strike up, strike up the country song. 75
There by his feet the bovine herd converges;
the steers, calves, bulls, and heifers low their dirges.
Muses, strike up, strike up the country song.

Reading this, we can well believe that predators howled and growled and herds lowed while Daphnis lay sick; what we accept less easily is the poem’s word that the wolves and jackals howled “for him;” the lions were “grief-stricken;” the ruminants lowed “dirges.” It is easy to recognize here what Ruskin (in Modern Painters, III.12) labeled once and for all the “pathetic fallacy” and associated with poetry of the second rank:

Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness — that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.

Ruskin speaks of the “peculiar dignity” of limiting expression “to the pure fact,” and assails Pope for cold-heartedness, hypocrisy and affectation when he has a heartsick swain address his shepherdess (from Summer, or Alexis):

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
And winds shall waft it to the powers above.

Ruskin’s main criterion is evidently naturalness—fallacies which sacrifice accurate description to emotional truth get a more or less grudging pass, though they reflect a “weak” mind and character, whether the poet’s or the speaker’s. He prefers writers who avoid fallacy altogether, who “feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly,” though he also allows for a kind of mentally disordered speech caused by visionary inspiration; but for the species of skillful insincerity which elaborates a conceit at the expense of relevance and credulity, he reserves his greatest contempt.

I understand that Ruskin’s criticism has been met in various ways — that I.A. Richards, for one example, grounded use of the pathetic fallacy in psychology while excising the moral element of Ruskin’s critique, while Northrop Frye, for another, found its roots in mythical animism. Applied to the Theocritean passage above, the latter approach at first blush seems more promising, since the speaker is in the grip of strong emotion. Then, too, Daphnis is a kind of semi-divine figure and may have about him something of the fertility god—the centerpiece of Thyrsis’ lament is an extended exchange between him and Aphrodite which could peg him as a sort of understudy of Adonis. Something supernatural may in fact be going on.

If so, that might also be the case in similar passages from Bion’s Lament for Adonis, though not in Moschus’ Lament for Bion, or Vergil’s Tenth Eclogue, both of which honor poets who were decidedly historical:

Quae nemora aut qui uos saltus habuere, puellae
Naides, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?
Nam neque Parnasi uobis iuga, nam neque Pindi
ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe.
Illum etiam lauri, etiam fleuere myricae;
pinifer illum etiam sola sub rupe iacentem
Maenalus et gelidi fleuerunt saxa Lycaei.

Which forests penned you, Naiad girls, while Gallus,
mistreated, wasted with a lovesick fever?
It wasn’t Mount Parnassus or the Pindus
or Theban Aganippe’s springs that held you.
The laurels even, even the tamarisks
mourned, and the piny height of Maenalus
mourned him prostrate beneath that lonely cliff,
and Mount Lycaeus’ snow-capped summit mourned.

Cornelius Gallus was a friend of Vergil and, at one point, Augustus (they later fell out) though not a pastoral poet—he was instead the inventor of love elegy, whom Vergil transposes into his own bucolic Arcadia. Is Vergil misreading and misapplying the motif from Theocritus, where it has animistic justification, as if it were merely a generic marker?

Maybe. Theocritus’ work gave birth to a whole cascade of conventional motifs which to epigones like us look like signposts of genre, though the progenitor is often stranger and more elusive than the progeny. In this case, the mysteries around Daphnis—was he an invention or a known quantity? if the latter, what was he known for or as? how far did Theocritus’ poem conform to or differ from what his readers would have known about him? &c.—make it hard to interpret what exactly Theocritus was up to. The dramatic framing adds a further layer of difficulty. In Thyrsis’ song, should we read the pathetic fallacy unironically: viz., both Theocritus and Thyrsis want to convey that Daphnis had a special connection with nature, that the animals really did mourn him? Or is the irony dramatic: Thyrsis believes it, but Theocritus doesn’t, undermining Thyrsis’ reliability? Look at this bumpkin Thyrsis, Theocritus would be saying then, who actually thought the lions and cows were sad about this nobody called Daphnis! What a joke! Or does Thyrsis also mean the fallacy ironically—in which case it stands as a sort of sophisticated compliment to Daphnis, which nonetheless undermines itself, acknowledging both what Ruskin would call “the pure fact,” that we are all country bumpkins here and none of us matters much, as well as our hopeless wish that things were otherwise, that the world we love and would mourn to lose could conceivably feel the same way and mourn to lose us?

To me, the last interpretation seems the more plausible and interesting, as well as more in keeping with the genre of pastoral, or at least with the utopian urbanite dream it soon became. Is it a sign of mental and moral weakness to be compelled by such daydreams? No doubt Ruskin would affirm that it is. But I wanted to suggest something else that might be at stake in the pastoral elegiac fallacy beyond the naturalism he demanded, something I think closer to the aim of classical poetry: ceremoniousness.

John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Forms and Citizens” makes a compelling case for three institutions which might at first seem to be anti-utilitarian hindrances and stumbling blocks to personal gratification: manners, ceremonies, and (poetic) form. In each case, Ransom posits a subject—the lover, the mourner, and the poet—and an object—the beloved, the dead one, and the poem. Each time, it might seem most natural and efficient for the subject merely to approach its object in a straight line: in the first place, we should imagine the caveman bopping the cavewoman on the head and dragging her by the hair; in the second, we should picture a funeral of one, or a hermit weeping to the hills; in the third, the poet simply speaks from the heart and says what she means, not slant but straight. In all three situations, when the third, institutional term is brought in, it comes between the subject and object and forces the former to go as it were the long way round to get what they want. Now the lover has to go a-courting, and make a display of manners, to win the approval not only of the beloved, but of the beloved’s family and friends; the mourner must put on a funeral at some expense and with some combination of liturgies and speeches the deceased can neither here nor appreciate, while the poet has to recast what may be a quite elemental sentiment—“I love you,” say, or “I miss you”—into an elaborate verbal game, such as a sonnet, sapphic, or sestina. All three of these situations Ransom represents with an odd little diagram as follows (I will give the second one, public mourning, as most relevant to this discussion):

The arrows, which you can’t really see in my stupid reproduction, point from the mourner to the ceremony and the ceremony to the loved one. Ransom comments:

The religious society exists to serve the [mourner] in this crisis. Freed from his desolation by its virtue, he is not obliged now to run and throw himself upon the body in an ecstasy of grief, nor to go apart and brood upon the riddle of mortality, which may be the way of madness. His action is through the form of a pageant of grief, which is lovingly staged and attended by the religious community. His own grief expands, is lightened, no longer has to be explosive or obsessive. A sort of byproduct of this formal occasion, we need not deny, is his grateful sense that his community supports him in a dreadful hour. But what interests us rather is the fact that his preoccupation with the deadness of the body is broken by his participation in the pageantry, and his bleak situation elaborated with such rich detail that it becomes massive, substantial, and sufficient.

The pathetic fallacy in the pastoral elegy is first and foremost part of a funeral pageant. It is not material that the ones being mourned (Daphnis, Gallus) are represented as still alive—the dying poets are allowed a last aria by analogy with the swan as the whole bucolic world comes to pay its respects. In each case, the grief of nature serves as a background from which its divine mourners emerge: Theocritus mentions Hermes, Priapus, and Aphrodite, while Vergil brings in Menalcas, Apollo, Silvanus and Pan. Their function is not merely or simply encomiastic. Both Priapus and Pan offer pointed criticism, while Aphrodite gloats over Daphnis like a conquered foe, which he may well be—elsewhere (in Idyll 7), we learn that he is wasting away for love of a girl called Xenea. The speech Vergil puts in Pan’s mouth is especially beautiful and answers Ruskin’s desire for the “pure fact:”

"Ecquis erit modus?" inquit "Amor non talia curat,
nec lacrimis crudelis Amor nec gramina riuis
nec cytiso saturantur apes nec fronde capellae."

“When will this end?” he said. “Love doesn’t care
for you; Love’s never had his fill of tears,
no more than fields can have their fill of water,
or bees of thyme, or she-goats of green shoots.”

These pastoral elegies are in the end less personal than communal expressions of grief, “lovingly staged and attended by the community” as Ransom has it. The community they conjure is one of poetry or art, which in its own world is imbued with an Orphic connection to nature and honored by the gods which it invented. The point is to stage a ceremony for the dead one among the community of which he was an esteemed member, in a gesture which, it is hoped, will prove “massive, substantial and sufficient.”

The tradition of pastoral elegy is a long and rich one and it is not for this post to investigate how well these thoughts account for it. Instead, I want to point to two modern poems which I think sit squarely in the tradition and suggest how it can still be viable in verse which registers as (more or less) “modern.” One of them is Auden’s famous “Funeral Blues;” the other is Donald Justice’s “Variation for Two Pianos.”

In “Funeral Blues” Auden gets around Ruskin’s naturalistic objection by couching his lament in the imperative. He does not assert that the world is participating in his grief, he only orders it to, no doubt in vain:

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

The stanza is exquisitely modulated, grand in its canvas, whimsically up to date (for Auden anyway) in its detail—its airplanes, crepe bows and black-gloved traffic policemen charmingly “make it new.” Psychologically the whimsy of this may suggest distraction or the poet’s attempt to distract himself; tonally it allows him not only to get away with the mawkishly sincere third stanza, but to intensify its impact by the contrast. If the whole poem were like that third quatrain it would have been forgotten as soon as written; but the contrast with the campy triviality of stanza 2 makes the painful directness of 3 hit home. The fourth quatrain returns to the grand canvas of the second, with the grieving world as a reflection of the mourner’s grief, but gone now is all that modern bric-a-brac, replaced by elemental images: stars, moon, sun, ocean, wood. The verbs however are homely, as if the great world were merely a house to be cleaned out, vacated, demolished—“pack up” and “dismantle” are my two favorite things in the poem (along with the image of those “black cotton gloves”). The last line’s devastation is a sentiment worthy of the pastoral lover, whose typical posture is utter despair:

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

This poem combines the personal and communal with an effect that is, for me at least, “massive, substantial, and sufficient.”

An exegesis of Auden’s poem which google coughed up claims that the stunning shift from stanza 2 to 3 is a product of the first two quatrains having been “rescued” and repurposed from a failed play about the death of a mountaineer; the sparer, less decorative stanzas were written later. If so, Auden has dispensed with the convention that a pastoral elegy should be written by a singer about a singer; but Donald Justice has honored it in his touching pastoral elegy, which is a kind of shortened villanelle:

Variation for Two Pianos
for Thomas Higgins, pianist

There is no music now in all Arkansas.
Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Movers dismantled the instruments, away
Sped the vans. The first detour untuned the strings.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

Up Main Street, past the cold shopfronts of Conway,
The brash, self-important brick of the college,

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Warm evenings, the windows open, he would play
Something of Mozart's for his pupils, the birds.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

How shall the mockingbird mend her trill, the jay
His eccentric attack, lacking a teacher?

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.
There is no music now in all Arkansas.

The poem takes place between the modest simplicity of its one refrain—“Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos”—and the sweeping pathetic fallacy of the other—“There is no music now in all Arkansas”—though the poem leans toward modesty, lacking the whimsy and flair of Funeral Blues’ first two stanzas. Even the choice of “Arkansas” in the grander of its two refrains (rather than some larger, more impressive political entity) lends the poem a pastoral humility. “Dismantled” in line 3 may be a nod to Auden’s poem, as indeed the unprepossessing description of the little town of Conway in ll. 6-7 recalls Auden’s second quatrain, in a quieter vein. Nonetheless, it is with the modestly Orphic conceit of Higgins as music teacher to the birds that the poem offers the pianist its warmest compliment in the key of loss:

How shall the mockingbird mend her trill, the jay
His eccentric attack, lacking a teacher?

In the clacking consonants of that last line, we can hear the birds reverting to their natural, untutored harshness, not, perhaps, without a note of mourning for their vanished maestro, as they cry “Lack, alack.”

Carpe diem may have been Horace’s phrase, but Latin poetry’s most memorably stated argument for seizing (or “plucking”) the day comes from Catullus’ most famous poem, poem 5:

Catullus 5 (ll.1-6)

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

My Lesbia, let’s live and love!
And what the crabbed old crows are mouthing
we’ll hold as worth – oh, less than nothing!
Suns in succession set and rise,
but we, when our brief daylight dies,
must sleep one everlasting night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then
a hundred, then another thousand,
another hundred then, and then
a thousand, then a hundred more;
then after many, many thousands,
we’ll jumble the numbers up, lose count,
and foil the jealous fogeys’ jinxes
by muddling the true amount.

The first six lines of this poem, which echo through later poetry, are memorable for a number of reasons: partly because of their sheer exuberance—they’re full of juice and joy, as Father Hopkins might say—which the jaunty meter of phalaecian hendecasyllabics perfectly suits; partly because of what we know about Catullus and the brevity both of the relationship he celebrates here, and of his life, for which his short-lived, intense affair with Lesbia feels like a metaphor; but mostly because of the elision in line 6:

NOX EST PER petuUUna DORmiENda

Something about the way those ‘oo’ sounds run together in ‘one perpetual’ night suggests the dark continuum or vacuum in which the individual self (una) is swallowed up and dissolved in the undifferentiated perpetual. This is one of the single most memorable lines of Latin poetry and that elision is a big part of why.

The second half of the poem is quite a bit less catchy than the first, perhaps because its content is less universal. The idea of account books being muddled or jumbled up (like shaking an abacus) so that no jealous busybodies can find out the exact number of kisses, which they could then use to “jinx” the happy couple with the evil eye, is far from self-evident in the Anglophone world. It’s no wonder that Thomas Campion omitted it entirely from this adaptation of poem 5, where Catullus’ nox pepetuuna becomes the “ever-during night” of Campion’s refrain:

My Sweetest Lesbia
By Thomas Campion

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heaven’s great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armor should not be;
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of love.
But fools do live, and waste their little light,
And seek with pain their ever-during night.

When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph, come
And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb;
And Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crown with love my ever-during night.

To my ear Campion’s courtly pentameter couplets lend his poem a dignified, stately slowness which feels rather removed from the dash and bounce of Catullus’ hendecasyllables—I hear a better analogy in the tetrameters of Marvell or Jonson’s Songs to Celia. Campion’s versification is much more suited to the evocative couplets of Propertius, to whom he turns after the Catullan opening. Instead of money-and-hex metaphors Campion in his second stanza re-works a memorable passage from near the end of Propertius 2.15, in which exulting over a sexual conquest gives way to wistful reflection. The passage runs:

Propertius 2.15 (ll. 41 ff.)

qualem si cuncti cuperent decurrere vitam
et pressi multo membra iacere mero,
non ferrum crudele neque esset bellica navis,
nec nostra Actiacum verteret ossa mare,
nec totiens propriis circum oppugnata triumphis
lassa foret crinis solere Roma suos.
haec certe merito poterunt laudare minores:
laeserunt nullos proelia nostra deos.

If everyone desired a life like mine,
and bedded down beneath the weight of wine,
there’d be no warships, and no swords stained red;
Actium’s waves would not roil with our dead,
and Rome, beset by Romans everywhere,
wouldn’t be worn out tearing at her hair.
One thing the future ought to praise me for:
no gods were outraged by my sort of war.

The fourth line in Campion’s second stanza, “Unless alarm came from the camp of love,” while not based specifically in this elegy, uses the militia amoris (‘warfare of love’) trope common in love elegy and reveals Campion’s thoroughgoing saturation in this poetry. The last stanza, too, resounds with elegiac (and perhaps Horatian) echoes, though it is based less on any specific passage of Propertius than on the several more or less fevered imaginings of the poet’s own death scattered throughout the elegies. This passage from 1.7 (using Goold’s text) is a likely enough candidate:

Propertius 1.7 (ll. 11-14, 23-4)

me laudent doctae solum placuisse puellae,
Pontice, et iniustas saepe tulisse minas;
me legat assidue post haec neglectus amator,
et prosint illi cognita nostra mala.
nec poterunt iuvenes nostro reticere sepulcro
'ardoris nostri magne poeta iaces.'

To be a cultured lady’s one true love,
bearing her unjust threats, is praise enough;
I hope the outcast lover reads me next,
and profits hearing how I, too, was vexed.
Then visiting my tomb young men will cry,
“Great poet of our passions, there you lie!”

One Ovidian (or perhaps Marvellian) touch in Campion’s poem comes in the antepenultimate line, when he imagines triumphant lovers (like the one in Prop. 2.15) who “with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb.” Ovid was the love elegist least apt to swoon over muggy imaginings of his own death, as Propertius did ten times an hour; it would be more like Ovid — though his phrasing would be less decorous than Campion’s “sweet pastimes” — to imagine lovers using his grave for an assignation. After all, he did write (2.10):

but let me die in Venus’ labile throes,
melting with pleasure as my spirit goes;
and let some eulogist be moved to claim,
‘This fellow’s death and lifestyle were the same.’

How much can poetry bear the burden of inspiration? The burden, I mean, of being not inspired, but inspiring, in a way not facile or transparent or ridiculous? Poems are perhaps on their firmest footing in elegy and lament—“the sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”—when the happy change of spring (say) sends the mind forward to winter and inevitable death. With description poets are also on solid ground, as with satire and invective; even the articulation of philosophy, while perhaps not the most natural use of poetry, seems a safer bet than affirmation, which is hard to win through to, across the thorny concessions and qualifications it requires. Self-help and poetry are different departments, and yet, what poet doesn’t want to help selves, her own and others’? What poet doesn’t want to set down those occasional feelings of expansiveness and the unwarranted bravura confidence that things will actually somehow work out—and in the process, to lodge a line, as Robert Frost said, where it will stick?

The title “Hope & History” was the theme of a poetry conference I attended last weekend. I had a great experience and loved poking around the Grass Valley thrift shops in between readings, but that’s not what this post is about. The phrase comes from a piece which was one of Seamus Heaney’s major stabs at the above—at saying something uplifting in the face of the succession of emergencies called history. The source text is generally treated as a short lyric poem called “The Cure at Troy,” though actually this is the title of a rather longer (though still not long) version of a Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes; Heaney’s phrasing has definitely “stuck,” in large part thanks to Joe Biden, whose love of the passage is informed by his own Irish Catholic heritage. It’s obvious why politicians, whose job is to peddle hope, might love these lines—but are they good poetry?

THE CURE AT TROY

Human beings suffer
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Heaney is hardly the only Irish poet of his generation to use the Greek classics as a mirror for current events. (There is a book I’d like to get my hands on which discusses Irish adaptations of Greek tragedy.) Michael Longley’s Whitbread-winning Gorse Fires came out around the same time as The Cure at Troy and is similarly interested in the figure of Odysseus. For both poets, the classics function (to borrow Adrienne Rich’s metaphor) as a pair of “asbestos gloves” which help them take up materials otherwise too hot to handle. According to the publisher’s blurb, in poems like “Homecoming,” “Laertes,” “Anticleia,” “Argos,” and “The Butchers” (a brutal gut-punch), Longley’s interest in both the humanly tender and violently murderous side of Odysseus’ homecoming connects to the “ambiguities of life in Northern Ireland.” Such epic distancing becomes a major strand in Longley’s work, most famously in his great 1994 poem Ceasefire.

Ceasefire is a better poem than Heaney’s chorus, because it doesn’t varnish over the pain of reconciliation with grand abstractions. Priam says, simply and irrefutably:

‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

Heaney, on the other hand, gives us a metaphorical “rhyme” between Hope and History — a fancy way of saying that, sometimes, things turn out as you hoped they would — and a “tidal wave / Of justice” which produces a “sea change.” Troy, as the party responsible for the war, did indeed experience something like a “tidal wave of justice” when the Greek armies obliterated it, but the metaphor, which should mean that the island will be swamped like Atlantis (those are pearls that were his eyes), is rather less in tune with the Irish tenor, where we are vaguely swept along to a “further shore” “on the far side of revenge.” The imagery seems to cohere, in that it all has something to do with the ocean, but doesn’t bear much weight—not unlike the eye-rolling assertion that two words rhyme which manifestly don’t. Heaney also tells us, otiosely, “No poem or play or song / Can fully right a wrong”—but can they do so mostly? partially? at all? Why not (e.g.) “No poem or play or song / Can make up for a wrong”? The understandable desire to say something grand and uplifting gets the better of Heaney here and there.

Yet Heaney’s lines are not without power, either, especially when listened to (rather than read) at the high point of a tragedy. Nor are they mere Pollyanna-ism: the first stanza acknowledges the suffering of Philoctetes — “hard” is used to describe him several times in the play, both by Neoptolemus (“contrary, hard and proud”) and by himself (“once bitten is hard-bitten”) — while the second concretely evokes the Irish conflict on both sides, the Republican hunger-strikers and the Unionist police widows. By my lights, the best line is “Call miracle self-healing,” which gestures toward epic “double determination” (the idea that actions have both divine and psychological motivations) and finds the numinous within the natural—it is indeed miraculous what humans can survive and move past.

My actual favorite lines in the play come in the middle of it, and are spoken by Neoptolemus, after he has cozened the bow out of Philoctetes’ hands. The poor guy has spent the last ten years on the deserted island of Lemnos, dragging around a snake-bitten foot and using his mighty MacGuffin of a weapon to hunt small game while seething with hatred for Odysseus, who left him there in the first place, when the smell of his wound and his cries of pain were sickening the rest of the army. Now that a prophecy has declared him and his bow indispensable for the sack of Troy, Odysseus has returned with Achilles’ son Neoptolemus—not the virulent Pyrrhus of Virgil’s Aeneid but a nobler, more idealistic specimen—whom he coaches in deception. Neoptolemus wins Philoctetes’ trust by ranting against Odysseus, just as Odysseus told him to, and offering him a berth on his ship home. The grateful Philoctetes reciprocates by letting him hold the bow, as Heracles had once gifted the bow to him for the mercy of lighting the pyre that put him out of his misery. Turning it over in his hands, Neoptolemus says:

οὐκ ἄχθομαί σ᾽ ἰδών τε καὶ λαβὼν φίλον:
ὅστις γὰρ εὖ δρᾶν εὖ παθὼν ἐπίσταται,
παντὸς γένοιτ᾽ ἂν κτήματος κρείσσων φίλος.

I am not sorry that I found you and have gained your friendship, since whoever knows how to render benefit for a benefit received must prove a friend more valuable than any possession. [tr. Jebb]

The Greek is more interesting than Jebb’s translation suggests. “Whoever knows how to render benefit for a benefit received” is accurate, but given Philoctetes’ torment, it is hard not also to take παθὼν in its basic sense of “suffering” as well as “experiencing:” this would give “whoever knows how, having suffered well, to act well,” making a pointed contrast between Philoctetes and Neoptolemus, who is acutely aware he is not “acting well” (εὖ δρᾶν). In the third line, κρείσσων can also be rendered “mightier,” which is relevant when the κτῆμα under discussion is Heracles’ invincible bow. Neoptolemus claims that the friendship of Philoctetes is more powerful than the mightiest bow, the guarantor of victory at Troy; and yet Neoptolemus betrays his κρείσσων φίλος for the sake of that κτῆμα. The lines set up his eventual conscience-clearing return of the bow. Heaney’s version, even more than Sophocles’, expresses Neoptolemus’ awe at Philoctetes’ gift and at the commerce of kindness which Pindar would have called χάρις:

There’s a whole economy of kindness
Possible in the world; befriend a friend
And the chance of it’s increased and multiplied.

Something in the astonished spirit of this reminds me of Berryman’s “long wonder that the world can bear & be,” while the third line makes me think of David Lynch’s loopy certainty that, if only a critical mass would start practicing TM, war would disappear. Neoptolemus’ sentiment is genuine, but undermined by the falseness of his position; the poignancy of the lines derives from the way the shining utopian vision they articulate is contradicted by their ironic context.

It is also possible that Heaney’s chorus is less sanguine in context than it appears out of it. If Neoptolemus’ “economy of kindness” were in fact “possible in the world,” we would expect that, when he returns the ill-gotten bow, Philoctetes, too, would answer generosity with generosity, and willingly depart for Troy; but this is not what happens. Philoctetes begins and ends with refusal, and only the direct order of Heracles can reverse his decision. He is so wedded to his wound that it takes a literal divine intervention for him to accept the chance for healing he is offered. Does the fact, therefore, that his cure is, quite unmetaphorically, a miracle make this a hopeful or pessimistic take on the political deadlock in Ireland at the end of the 80s? Heaney tells us to hope, and to believe, but presumably not to hold our breath.

The Cure at Troy is a fine version of Sophocles’ play and an excellent case study in the classics as “news that stays news.” Its strength is in the portrayal of Philoctetes not as a Republican or a Unionist but as anyone who has been so twisted by ill-treatment that he prefers to harm the other side rather than help himself. Its main weakness, as far as I can tell, is a lack of clarity as to the balance it calls for between justice and forgiveness. Heaney is quite vague about how, exactly, to get to the “far side of revenge.” In Heaney’s play (but not in Sophocles’ Greek) Heracles instructs Philoctetes to sack Troy, but to “shun / Reprisal killings when that’s done.” What, in the Irish context, is to be sacked? On whom is the tidal wave of justice to fall? It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around an end to the cycle of Dike, of sectarian tit for tat, which does not involve, at some point, letting go of legitimate grievances—turning the other cheek rather than taking an eye for an eye. There is a Christian undercurrent to The Cure at Troy which is of course entirely absent from Sophocles, and which makes it seem fitting—perhaps a true rhyme of hope and history—that when, in 1998, eight years after The Cure at Troy was written, most of the unrest did finally come to an end, as if by miracle, on Easter weekend. This fact may point to the true staying power of Heaney’s lines—that history has added its authority to theirs.

I had been planning to write about sapphics—in fact, was in the middle of writing about them (yes, I move slowly)—when Victoria Moul’s post on the same subject popped into my inbox last week. She, with the help of Nimrod Journal, introduced me (and no doubt at least some of you) to a fine poem by Tyson Hausdoerffer in true English sapphics, that is, a version of the quantitative Greco-Roman form adapted to our qualitative (stress-based) metrics.

Since Victoria in her piece expounded the “rules” for Greek & Roman-style Sapphics in English, I’ll direct anyone with questions to her, and delete, with relief, the swampy expository paragraphs I had been slogging through, which included this specimen of metrical doggerel, exempli gratia:

Don’t be scared of playing with English Sapphics;
it is not too difficult keeping rhythm,
though to write good poetry’s always hard, no
matter the language.

As Victoria observes, line 1 with its second-foot trochee (scared of) is more Greek in style, while lines 2 and 3, with heavier fourth syllables (not too difficult, write good poetry), are more Roman / Horatian. I might add that there is some question about the Greek sapphic whether its earliest practitioners regarded it as a quatrain with a short fourth line or a tercet with a long third line; at any rate, a harsher enjambment (as above) between lines 3 and 4 is in the spirit of Sappho’s handling.

There’s no way of knowing if Sappho “invented” her eponymous stanza or merely used it so often and well that her name stuck to it. Her contemporary Alcaeus also wrote poems in Sapphics, without (as far as one can tell from what survives) any specific reference to her. I suspect that the stanza preceded both of them, whether as a popular tune in the air or a bit of religious liturgy; my pet theory is that both poets mostly (if not exclusively) used it for hymns and prayers, in something like the way Isaac Watts buffed the folk ballad into the common measure of the Anglican hymnal.

In general, I am bearish on Greco-Roman meters in English; some of them (the ones with runs of three or more long or short syllables) are flatly impossible, while others (those with, say, strings of two or more consecutive choriambs) require a syllabic gymnastics at odds with the genius of the language; and even doable examples, like the alcaic and elegiac couplet, will still confound more readers than not. The Sapphic, however, is an exception. It has a robust tradition in English (check out THIS vintage Eratosphere thread from Joseph Bottum of Poems Ancient & Modern) and is technically feasible—yes, it takes some sweat to make each line start on a beat or to avoid weak line-endings, but with patience it can be pulled off naturally enough (witness Hausdoerffer’s poem). Here is another of my favorite examples, “Locker Room Etiquette” by the late Craig Arnold, first brought to my attention by AE Stallings, on THIS similarly vintage Eratosphere thread (scroll down a little).

I mention AES because my real goal here is not to talk about “strict” Sapphics (like Hausdoerffer’s poem) but “adapted” Sapphics, like Stallings’ wonderful recent poem in the LRB, “Anosmia,” which inspired this post. This ‘adapted Sapphic' goes 5-5-5-2 and often rhymes. It’s the form I used to translate Sapphics in the book — see this post for examples. Trochaic openings, mid-line dactyls and feminine endings are welcome but not required. Here is Stallings’ poem, which describes Covid-related smell-loss (Anosmia, a good Greek medical term):

Anosmia
by AE Stallings

Without it, what is lemon, what is mint? –
Coffee and chocolate, caffeinated brown.
Ghosted by a sense that takes no hint,
I feel let down.

It’s hardly tragedy that I can’t tell
The milk’s gone off, eggs rotten. It’s no joke
With other things though – no internal bell
That signals smoke

(The toast burned or the house on fire). Sweet
I have, and bitter, I have sour and salt,
But without smell, no flavour is complete.
There’s no … gestalt.

It’s something I’d predict of old, old age,
This weaning from the welter of the world
The better, perhaps, to leave it. I’m no sage,
I’d rather the impearled

Jasmine flowers – fragrance of the stars –
Light up the brain’s grey matter, and the hurt
Of memory, the human musk of ours
In an unwashed shirt.

‘To have a nose for’– isn’t it a skill,
A wry intelligence, a kind of knack?
What thought trails do I lose, untraceable,
What wisdom lack?

I miss the laundry scent they call ‘unscented’.
Like a depression, it makes it hard to write.
What is is less, less there, half uninvented,
And I, not quite.

But there are days I almost have a whiff:
I slice a lemon open for the crisp
Sun-saturated redolence, and sniff
And stand in the eclipse.

With every slightly off-kilter stanza choice, one should ask why this poem is in this form. Hausdoerffer tells us why he chose Sapphics when he mentions her by name in stanza 3, in relation to the Greek adjective poikilos — though he also sneaks in an implicit allusion, with the “apples gleaming out of reach in the autumn sun” in the last stanza, which nods to her fragment 105a:

An apple on a bough hangs redly, sweetly,
high on the highest limb, against the sky.
The pickers leave it be, but don’t completely
leave it – they reached for it; it was too high.

Stallings also alludes implicitly to Sappho in her third stanza — “Sweet / I have, and bitter,” which picks up the Lesbian’s famous coinage glukupikron, “bittersweet” or “sweetbitter.” Yet the real reason for the form is the sense of something missing which the foreshortened fourth line imparts. That something is of course smell, the penumbra of taste, its indescribable “gestalt,” to which the poem is an encomium in absentia. We are clued in to this form-content connection in the very first stanza, where the fourth line both establishes the pattern of “let down” and connects it to the specific anosmic “let down” it adumbrates.

Stallings’ poem wistfully evokes the lost sense by naming a number of instantly recognizable scents, whiffs of what Duns Scotus called ‘thisness’ (haecceitas)—lemon and mint, “impearled // jasmine flowers,” “the human musk of ours in a dirty shirt,” “the laundry scent they call ‘unscented.’” “Sage” in stanza 4 is not entirely scentless, though it is used scentlessly. (“Thyme/time” is another fragrant pun which might be wafting undetectably in the poem’s atmosphere.) The loss of smell forebodes the loss of self; the poet has already begun to disappear. “This weaning from the welter of the world” is a gorgeous and heart-breaking line which casts our mortal departure as a gradual, maternal sort of process; it puts me in mind of Thomas Grey’s great stanza, after which Richard Wilbur titled a similarly touching valediction of his own:

But who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,
Left the bright precincts of the joyful day,
Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?

I particularly love the final stanza. The phrase “crisp sun-saturated redolence” less evokes a lemony scent than it replaces it with a different kind of sensuosity, a fullness in the mouth, whose sibilants and liquids practically start me salivating. Stallings waits until the very end to break her metrical pattern. She has lengthened the final line to a trimeter, as if this penultimate feat of verbal imagination has gotten her one step closer to the heroic quatrains the poem would heal to with olfaction restored. The final simile is ingeniously synesthetic—the yellow of the lemon conjures the brightness of the sun in eclipse, while the dark center visually suggests the absent sense. At the same time, and for the only time in the poem, Stallings denies us an exact rhyme, giving us instead a lapsus linguae sort of metathesis, with “crisp / eclipse,” bringing us as it were one step forward and a half step back. No, she seems to say, words and imagination are no replacement for the five senses; they are not adequate, but they are something—just as living on in poetry is not life, exactly, but is also not nothing.

I can think of a few, though not many, other poems in this stanza which might justify my idea that, whether or not it alludes to Sappho, the curtal fourth line is suggestive of a sudden or premature ending of some kind. Two sound examples include “Tarantula, or the Dance of Death” by Anthony Hecht, about the Medieval dancing plague, and Richard Wilbur’s early poem “The Walgh-Vogel,” about the Dodo (the name means “nasty bird” in Dutch and is what the Dutch sailors who first discovered the Dodo dubbed it). Instead of those elder statesmen I’ll quote one by Matthew Buckley Smith of Sleericketts notoriety, who has written several poems in this stanza in his astonishing book Mid-Life. This one describes the breast-feeding of his daughter on a university campus among monuments chiseled with proud, disregarded names (one of which, lurking somewhere behind the rich 19th C donors and the poem itself, might be Sappho’s). The curtal stanza suggests the hard, often sudden stop at the end of each generation, while the syntax, which runs unbroken from the beginning of the poem to its end, suggests the continuous thread of life connecting each generation to the one before and the one to come:

Posterity
by Matthew Buckley Smith

The great remembered man whose name is stone
Over the double doors where students pass
Today is remembered for his name alone,
On the way to class,

By those whose names, being something less than great,
Someday will be remembered even less,
By others, also young and running late,
In different dress,

And then, as now, sunlight will mark the lawn
And August will sigh the syllable of fall,
Considering the generations gone
Scarcely at all,

As scarcely as we consider those to come,
Among our busy thoughts of work and rest,
As scarcely as the seeding in the womb
Considers the breast,

Which you, no longer shy, bare to the day,
Here on this quiet campus garden bench,
For our girl, who soon enough will thirst in a way
We cannot quench.

I have begun revisiting the work of one my favorite writers, someone I almost never see discussed and concerning whom I have never really encountered any comparable enthusiasm to my own, unless it was on the part of Ernest Hemingway, who, after winning the Nobel Prize, stated that he would have been “happier” if it had gone to her (or Bernard Berenson, or Carl Sandburg). She replied that Hemingway’s endorsement meant more to her than two Nobels, except for the money. I’m talking, of course, about Isak Dinesen, aka the Baroness Karen von Blixen, memorably portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 1985 Best Picture winner, Out of Africa. Presumably her star was higher in the 80s than it is now.

I don’t know the book Out of Africa well, not yet anyway. I fell in love with the tales and, somewhat in spite of myself given certain views, with Dinesen’s sentences, her voice. Her biographer Judith Thurman well describes her inimitable sound in a passage on Dinesen’s portrayal, in Out of Africa, of Berkeley Cole (Michael Kitchen in the film): Cole, she writes, speaks

with the courtly irony that was a quality of her own voice as a storyteller, and with the same indefinable but quaint accent, which gives the impression it has come from a grander and more corporeal language—the language of the past. (191)

I love that “indefinable but quaint accent” of her prose, how musically and decorously it harmonizes with the magic of her stories, and proves a vehicle capacious enough for charming anecdotes and weighty ideas. A Dostoevsky of the fable, Dinesen pits her young Revolutionaries, hyggelich Danish bureaucrats, old world aristocrats and ebulliently ascetic artists against each other in a sort of Nietschean dialectic which she leaves it to the plot to sort out.

I hope to write more about her sooner or later, but for now only wanted to note a passage from one of her letters to her brother Thomas, quoted in Thurman’s biography, in which she quotes (slightly embellished) a fragment from the Greek lyric poet Anacreon. In my translation, the poem runs:

413
μεγάλῳ δηὖτε μ´ Ἔρως ἔκοψεν ὥστε χαλκεὺς
πελέκει, χειμερίῃ δ᾽ ἔλουσεν ἐν χαράδρῃ.

Love like a smith
hit me with
his massive hammer yet again,
then took me to a freezing stream
and dropped me in.

Here is Dinesen’s letter to her brother:

I don’t think that … one gets a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there within you, and it will come as certainly as death. I can speak from my own experience. When I was very young I fell very deeply in love—in 1909 it was—and really believed I would never feel that way again; then nine years later, in 1918, I did, and much, much more strongly and deeply than before. I once read the translation of a little Greek verse, which I so often think of in this regard:

Eros struck out, like a smith with his hammer
So that the sparks flew from my defiance.
He cooled my heart in tears and lamentations,
Like red-hot iron in a stream.

This is my experience of it, and not at all as the yielding tenderness that one hears described. Just you wait; that hammer will certainly be raised for you again.

The fragment is quoted in Out of Africa as well, as a comment on the farm blacksmith Pooran Singh, whom Dinesen sees in mythical, quasi-Yeatsian terms, as a kind of ascetic artist-charlatan, like herself:

But Pooran Singh himself, raging above the forge, kept his halo as long as he was on the farm, and I hope as long as he lived. He was the servant of the gods, heated through, white-hot, an elemental spirit. In Pooran Singh’s blacksmith’s shop the hammer sang to you what you wanted to hear, as if it was giving voice to your own heart. To me myself the hammer was singing an ancient Greek verse, which a friend had translated:

“Eros struck out, like a smith with his hammer
So that the sparks flew from my defiance.
He cooled my heart in tears and lamentations,
Like red-hot iron in a stream.”

Two pages later, Dinesen tells a story of an old madam in a brothel in Singapore who has a parrot which speaks many languages, but loves to recite a poem in one which she does not recognize. She asks a Danish sailor if he might listen to the poem and, if he recognizes it, translate it. The poem turns out to be a famous bit of (pseudo-)Sappho, of which you can read Armand d’Angour’s translation here:

The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very enarly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

“The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,
And midnight is gone,
And the hours are passing, passing,
And I lie alone.”

The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.