Horace; Poets, Latin -- Biography; Rome -- History -- Augustus, 30 B.C.-14 A.D. -- Biography; Rome -- Intellectual life
Cowper translated two Odes and
imitated two more, not without happy touches, but with insertions
and omissions that lower poetry into commonplace. Of Calverley's few
attempts three are notably good; a resounding line in his "Leuconoe"
(I, xi):
Which flings now the flagging sea-wave on the obstinate sandstone reef,
is at once Horatian and Tennysonian; and his "Oh! where is all thy
loveliness?" in the later Ode to Lyce has caught marvellously the minor
key of tender memory which relieves the brutality of that ruthless
flagellation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's more numerous "Bay Leaves" are
fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest man who far from care
and strife" well transfers to English the breathlessness of Horace's
sham pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators Bulwer Lytton
catches now and then the careless rapture of his original; Sir Theodore
Martin is always musical and flowing, sometimes miraculously fortunate
in his metres, but intentionally unliteral and free. Conington is
rigidly faithful, oftentimes tersely forcible; but misses lyrical
sweetness. Perhaps, if Marvell, Herrick, Cowley, Prior, the now
forgotten William Spencer, Tom Moore, Thackeray, could be alchemized
into one, they might combine to yield an English Horace. Until eclectic
nature, emulating the Grecian sculptor, shall fashion an archetype from
these seven models, the vernacular student, with his Martin and his
Conington, sipping from each alternately, like Horace's Matine bee
(IV, ii, 27), the terseness of the professor and the sweetness of the
poet, may find in them some echo from the ever-shifting tonality of the
Odes, something of their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling
wistfulness; may strive not quite unsuccessfully, in the words of
Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable.
ON THE "WINES" OF HORACE'S POETRY
The wines whose historic names sparkle through the pages of Horace
have become classical commonplaces in English literature. "Well, my
young friend, we must for once prefer the Falernian to the _vile
Sabinum?_" says Monkbarns to Lovel when the landlord of the Hawes Inn
at Queensferry brings them claret instead of port. It may be well
that we should know somewhat of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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