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Horace and Hopkins: The Point of Balance in Odes 3.1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Rosemary M. Nielsen  and
Robert H. Solomon
Rosemary M. Nielsen
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Robert H. Solomon
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

In May of 1868, less than two years after Gerard Manley Hopkins left the English Church to become a Roman Catholic and after eight months spent teaching at Newman's Oratory School in Birmingham, the classical scholar burned nearly all of his poetry; he called the act ‘the sacrifice of my innocents’. Austin Warren describes Hopkins as feeling caught through his life between conflicting desires to be a pdet and to be a saint. This strain and the anxieties it produced appear in his later poems, such as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘Heaven Haven’, and in his journals and letters. In the latter he describes the emotional effect he wanted poems to have upon readers: some poems must, Hopkins asserted, ‘explode’ within the reader. Intensifying the psychological reaction of the readers of literature was one of Hopkins's aims when he created poetry, just as it was a goal when he wrote redactions of the speeches in Shakespeare's tragedies or when he chose from among variant readings for Greek drama. In September 1868, when he entered the priesthood as a Jesuit, Hopkins began a new life of personal intensity and, perhaps to his own surprise, a second poetic career. But a number of poems survived the destruction. One is his translation of Horace's Odes 3.1, the longer of the only two extant translations of complete Latin poems. As with A. E. Housman's sole surviving translation of a Latin ode, Horace's 4.7, this one reveals a profound identification with Horace, a subtle understanding of the original poem, and an intense revelation of the mind of the English writer during the period of translating. The emotional intensity, technical virtuosity and psychological richness of the translation make Hopkins's version of 3.1 a significant poem for scholars of English and classical poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1985

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References

Notes

1. Mariani, Paul L., A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Ithaca and London 1970), 39Google Scholar. In 1878 Hopkins wrote ‘What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors …’ (The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Abbott, Claude Colleer [London 1935], 14Google Scholar.)

2. Warren, Austin, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the Kenyon Critics (Norfolk, Conn., 1945), 14Google Scholar.

3. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Abbott, Claude Colleer (London 1955), 90Google Scholar. The term ‘explode’ is briefly discussed by Bender, Todd, Gerard Manley Hopkins (Baltimore 1966), 161Google Scholar. Lattimore, R., ‘On Classical and English Poetry’, Phoenix 6 (1952), 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes Hopkins's verse as producing an ‘almost painfully violent impact’ upon the reader.

4. Mariani (n.1 above), 42.

5. Pöschl, Viktor, ‘Die Einheit der ertsen Römerode’, HSCP 63 (1958), 336Google Scholar, sees from the first word of the second stanza ‘die Atmosphäre der Angst’.

6. Two particularly useful studies of the motif are those of Whitehorne, J. E. G., ‘The Ambitious Builder’, AUMLA 31 (1969), 28–39Google Scholar, and Pearcy, Lee T. Jr., ‘Horace's Architectural Imagery’, Latomus 36 (1977), 772–781Google Scholar.

7. But see Tracy, H. L., ‘Thought-Sequence in the Ode’, Phoenix 5 (1951), 108–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar, whose description of the ode as a linear progression of thought implies that enjambment is one of a group of devices that link and provide symmetry and balance.

8. Williams, Gordon, The Third Book of Horace's Odes (Oxford 1969), 31Google Scholar, defends the first stanza as ‘integral in the sense that it provides a personal opening which is picked up by the equally personal ending (41-48) … a characteristic form of “ring-composition”’

9. Williams (n.8 above), 30.

10. Necessitas is reminiscent of pallida Mors who in Odes 1.4.13f. personifies Death the equalizer; she beats aequopede. See Henderson, W. J., ‘Political and Legal Imagery in Horace's Odes’, in Pro munere grates: Studies presented to H. L. Gonin, ed. by Kriel, D. M. (Pretoria 1971), 73–90Google Scholar.

11. For a different organization of the ode's structure, see ‘Horace's First Roman Ode’, in Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus, ed. Woodman, Tony and West, David (Cambridge 1984), 83–94Google Scholar. Woodman divides the poem into four parts: stanzas 1-4; 5-6; 7-10; and 11-12. In his view, the ode ‘is directly relevant to the politics of the Augustan age” and makes ‘an important contribution to the emperor's side’ on the issue of building reform (94).

12. Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, A Profile of Horace (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 93Google Scholar, calls the doubling of two kinds of master relationships in lines 33-40 ‘de trop’. The overdone and incorrect pairing may, in fact, be another example of building, here of two images, that challenges our sense of symmetry and propriety.

13. A. Minarini, ‘Atra Cura (Hör. Carm. 3.14.13s.)’ Bolletino di Studi Latini 9 (1979), 43–51Google Scholar, regards cura as a constant preoccupation of the Horatian lyric.

14. Solmsen, Friedrich, ‘Horace's First Roman Ode’, AJP 68 (1947), 350–351Google Scholar.

15. For a thorough treatment of the vates figure and his relationship to female inspiration, see Lieberg, Godo, ‘Horace et les Muses’, Latomus 36 (1971), 962–988Google Scholar. In our opinion, the role of vates, like that of sacerdos, is adopted unsuccessfully by the speaker in 3.1, who implies more doubt, imprecision and dissatisfaction than an oracular voice ought to.

16. Witke, Charles, Horace's Roman Odes (Leiden 1983), 20Google Scholar.

17. ‘No megalomaniac threateners of cosmic harmony, they [Orion, Tityus and Pirithous] are, like the lustful in Dante, lesser sinners …’ (Holoka, James P., ‘Horace, Carm. 3.4: The Place of the Poet’, CB 52 [1976], 44Google Scholar). Witke (n.16 above), 20, also sees the confusion of mythological reference as a deliberate effect to show the speaker's ‘disinterest and hence distance’.

18. Fraenkel, Eduard, Horace (Oxford 1957), 264Google Scholar, prefers to translate odi ‘I will have nothing to do with’ because expression of ‘personal likes and dislikes’ would be inappropriate in ritual contexts.

19. ‘In fact the first Roman Ode so closely resembles Satires 1.1 as to seem almost a transposition of that satire into an heroic key.’ (Silk, Edmund T., ‘The Gods and Searchers for Happiness: Notes on Horace's Repetition and Variation of a Favorite Topos’, YCS 19 [1966], 243Google Scholar.)

20. Silk calls attention to the irony of audita by rendering the entire phrase ‘a poet's message that has hitherto fallen upon deaf ears’, in ‘Toward a Fresh Interpretation of Horace Carm. 3.1’, KCS 23 (1973), 132Google Scholar.

21. Quinn, Kenneth, Horace: The Odes (London 1980), 241Google Scholar, finds two themes in 3.1: first ‘the illusory nature of power’ and, second, ‘the superiority of the simple life over the life of luxury’.

22. Pearcy (n.6 above), 780, n.13, observes that ‘most of the Egyptian monuments now extant in Rome … were brought to the city after 23 B.C.’

23. Encyclopaedia of Religion, ed. Forlag, J. G. R. (New York 1964), I.464Google Scholar.

24. By contrast, ‘trireme’ itself jars as an overdone conveyance, for late references to boats on the Bay of Naples, for example, include the more modest civilian craft, such as lembis (Ammianus 28.4.18) and navibus (Symmachus, Ep. 8.23.3). We are grateful to Mr. Jeremy Rossiter for these citations.

25. Coincidentally, the terminology of modernist poetry enters Williams's description of the progression of images in Horace (n.8 above, 32): ‘The poet allows the basis moral to lose its own identity and function simply as an underlying principle which, as the reader can see on reflection, serves to organize the stream of images [italics ours] in the poet's mind’.

26. ‘Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa render'd almost word for word without rime according to the Latin Measure, as near as the Language will permit.’

27. From ‘No Worst, There Is None’.

28. From ‘God's Grandeur’. See also ‘Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord’.

29. See ‘God's Grandeur’ for the image of crushed drops of oil. See also ‘The Habit of Perfection’ and the ‘circle-citadels’ in the poem ‘The Starlight Night’.

30. See Bender (n.3 above), 97-123, in a chapter entitled ‘Non-Logical Syntax: Latin and Greek Hyperbaton’.