Portrayal of Horace by Giacomo Di Chirico
Goethe’s
famous mountain lyric, “On every summit,” (see yesterday’s post) reminded me of
a now even more famous “poetic”
encounter in the mountains of Crete during World War II between a German general and his British
guerrilla captor, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. In a scene right out of Jean Renoir’s
La Grande Illusion, both men, thrown
together on a wild crag, recall Horace’s ode 1.9 about Soracte, the limestone
ridge 28 miles north of Rome now called Monte Soratte.
Similarly
steeped in Latin, the general and the literary vagabond discover that they both
can recite the poem from memory.
The Latin
text can be found here.
Here is
Dryden’s independently memorable translation:
Behold yon mountain's hoary height
Made higher with new mounts of snow:
Again behold the winter's weight
Oppress the labouring woods below'
And streams with icy fetters bound
Benumbed and cramped to solid ground.
With well-heaped logs dissolve the cold
And feed the genial hearth with fires;
Produce the wine that makes us bold,
And spritely wit and love inspires;
For what hereafter shall betide
God (if 'tis worth His care) provide.
Let Him alone with what He made,
To toss and turn the world below;
At His command the storms invade,
The winds by His commission blow;
Till with a nod He bids them cease
And then the calm returns and all is peace.
Tomorrow and its works defy;
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by
To put them out of Fortune's power;
Nor love nor love's delights disdain –
Whate'er thou getts't today, is gain.
Secure those golden early joys
That youth unsoured with sorrow bears,
Ere with'ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years.
For active sports, for pleasing rest.
This is the time to be posesst;
The best is but in season best.
Th'appointed hour of promised bliss,
The pleasing whisper in the dark,
The half-unwilling willing kiss,
The laugh that guides thee to the mark,
When the kind nymph would coyness feign
And hides but to be found again –
These, these are joys the gods for youth ordain.
I don’t know if Goethe ever read Horace’s ode, but I would be
very surprised to learn that he hadn’t, given his obvious debt to the tradition
of lyric poetry in Latin and, perhaps even more, to the Greek lyric poets whose
work Horace deliberately imitated. The Soracte ode, for example, is written in
a stanzaic metrical scheme invented by, or at least named after, the poet Alcaeus, a sixth-century B.C. native of
Lesbos and possible lover of Sappho.
Wine and love were apparently frequent subjects for Alcaeus. He
survives in quoted fragments and lucky survivals found in papyri preserved in
Egyptian rubbish dumps of the later Roman empire.
At any rate, its fairly clear that the Soracte ode was meant to
be read as a Latinization of traditional Greek motifs, gracefully shifting from
winter cold to a celebration of domestic warmth, wine and the amorous pleasures
of the moment, indulged without guilt,
before the inevitable winter of life blows in.
We can only guess as to whether Horace had a specific Greek poem
in mind, but his decision to write the ode in alcaics was a definite homage to the
poetic manner of Alcaus and Sappho, who used the same meter. It was also a technical
stunt to recreate the prosodically
diverse lines of the Greek form in Latin.
Two millennia later, Tennyson took up the challenge in his
“Milton.” Its four alcaic stanzas offer a Victorian echo of this archaic mode:
O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice
of England,
Milton,
a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the
deep-domed empyrean
Rings
to the roar of an angel onset—
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom
profuse and cedar arches
Charm,
as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued
the stately palm-woods
Whisper
in odorous heights of even.
Tennyson was
deliberately showing off his skill with a metrical scheme entirely foreign to
English lyric poetry. Goethe, on the other hand, made the intricate simplicity
of Greek lyric poetry his own, unostentatiously. Germanizing its mix of
technical sophistication, compression and simplicity of feeling.
Most lyric poetry in
English makes no such attempt to reflect the lyric poetry of antiquity. Ours is
a freer, broader way of doing things, without exotic meters clogging the direct
expression of feeling cloaked transparently in the native rhythms of iambic
pentameter. Even Milton, who wrote plausible poems in Latin, wrote his epics in
iambic pentameter, not in the dactylic hexameter of Homer and Vergil.
Longfellow, unfortunately, could not resist the temptation to try his hand at
the ancient meter in his cringemaking Evangeline:
This is
the forest primeval. The murmuring pines
and hemlocks,
Bearded
with moss, and in garments green, indistinct
in the
twilight,
Stand
like Druids of eld, with voices sad and pro-
phetic,
Stand
like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their
bosoms.
Loud from
its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neigh-
boring ocean
Speaks,
and in accents disconsolate answers the wail
of the
forest.
Goethe, however, even in
the emotionally somber, personal mood of his “Hiker’s Night Song II,” fits naturally into the classical mode of
lyric poetry, the tradition exemplified in its brevity and sharp emotional
contrast by this short poem of Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC):
When you lie on a soft couch by the fire in winter,
Well-fed, drinking sweet wine and munching chickpeas,
Be sure you ask the man next to you:
What’s your name, Sir? Where are you from? How old?
Where were you, when the Mede came?
Food and wine and a fire are fine things, but don’t forget the
horrors of the Persian invasion. Thirty-four words, a Goethean tension of peace
and death in the smallest space.
Ironically, enough, this cameo survives not for its beauty and
concision, or the way it shifts from elaborated mellowness to bluff, colloquial
speech. No, it’s because of the chickpeas.
Xenophanes 18 has come down to us as part of a catalogue of
fruits, berries and nuts in the Deipnosophistae
of Athenaeus, a vast compendium of lore about food and dining compiled in Roman
Egypt. If it weren’t for the chickpeas (erebinthous),
Athenaeus wouldn’t have been interested.
