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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore," readers are presented with a rich tapestry of verse that showcases the lyrical and emotive style characteristic of Moore's work. His poems intricately weave themes of love, nature, and national identity with a romantic sensibility that reflects the literary milieu of early 19th century England and Ireland. Moore's innovative use of form and rhythm, along with his ability to evoke deep emotional resonance, makes this collection not only a significant contribution to Romantic poetry but also a reflection of the socio-political landscape of his time, particularly the burgeoning Irish nationalist sentiments. Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was an Irish poet, singer, and political satirist whose artistic endeavors were often informed by his experiences and the tumultuous history of Ireland. Educated at Trinity College Dublin, Moore was deeply influenced by the cultural revival of Irish traditions and music. His background as a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant society imbued his work with a unique perspective on national identity and personal longing, elements that permeate his poetry and resonate with universal themes of human experience. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in Romantic literature, Irish history, or poetry that transcends time. Moore's ability to articulate complex emotions and national sentiments makes this volume both poignant and engaging. It invites readers to explore the beauty of language and the depth of feeling, making it an essential addition to the literary canon. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents the complete poems of the Irish poet Thomas Moore, gathering under one cover his translations, lyrics, narrative poems, ballads, satires, epistles, and occasional pieces. Drawn from volumes issued across his career, it brings together sets as distinct as Odes of Anacreon, Irish Melodies, National Airs, Sacred Songs, Legendary Ballads, and the longer romances Lalla Rookh and The Loves of the Angels, alongside political verse from the Twopenny Post-Bag and related sequences. Where Moore provided prefaces, advertisements, or performance notes, these are retained to illuminate purpose and context, while the organizing principle remains fidelity to the poet’s complete verse.
It is, above all, a compendium of genres. The reader encounters artful translations from Greek and Latin, songs calibrated to existing airs, romances and tales in verse, devotional and patriotic hymns, travel rhymes, epistolary lampoons, fables, dramatic prologues and epilogues, and music-room texts devised for glee, chorus, and melologue. The Odes of Anacreon and Songs from the Greek Anthology converse with translations from Catullus; Irish Melodies, National Airs, and Sacred Songs speak to Moore’s role as lyricist; Rhymes on the Road and Poems Relating to America register the poet as traveler; while the Twopenny Post-Bag and the Fudges volumes display his nimble satire.
Music is the matrix of Moore’s art. Even when not written to a tune, his stanzas move with songlike cadence, polished rhyme, and a fondness for refrain and symmetrical structure. Across this breadth runs a consistent emotional palette: the tenderness of intimate address, the ache of dispossession, the convivial lift of the glass, and the moral bite of civic indignation. Classical poise and romantic color coexist in his imagery, whether he turns to Hellenic exempla, oriental settings, or Irish landscapes. The result is a voice at once urbane and heartfelt, quick to charm, and equally quick to pierce complacency with wit.
Nowhere is that union more visible than in Irish Melodies, with companion sets National Airs and Sacred Songs. Here Moore adapts traditional tunes and international melodies to new lyrics, preserving musical character while articulating memory, love, and national feeling. The sequence includes pieces that have long outlived their occasions, among them The Harp That Once thro’ Tara’s Halls, The Meeting of the Waters, Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms, The Minstrel-Boy, and ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer. Their enduring circulation reflects not only melodic grace but the poet’s gift for clear sentiment shaped with elegance.
The long poems broaden this lyrical compass into narrative and tableau. Lalla Rookh assembles linked romances set in imagined Eastern scenes, while The Loves of the Angels contemplates celestial beings enamored of mortal beauty. Legendary Ballads returns to classical story in compact episodes such as Cupid and Psyche, Hero and Leander, and Cephalus and Procris, and Poems from the Epicurean distills songs associated with Moore’s prose tale. Evenings in Greece and the fragment Alciphron experiment with performance, blending dialogue, song, and descriptive verse. In each, ornamented surfaces serve feeling and idea, pairing opulence of image with a lucid melodic line.
Moore’s satirist stands beside his songster. The Twopenny Post-Bag, The Fudge Family in Paris, and The Fudges in England mount verse correspondences that mimic private letters to expose public habits and pretensions, while Corruption, Intolerance, The Sceptic, and kindred pieces argue in rhyme against abuses of power and fashion. Fables for the Holy Alliance and the many shorter squibs and parodies collected under satirical groupings dramatize diplomatic and domestic controversies without sacrificing lightness of touch. Rhymes on the Road and Political and Satirical Poems extend this commentary to travel and current events, fixing a lively record of his age.
The gathering begins with apprenticeship and erudition and returns often to those sources. Odes of Anacreon and Songs from the Greek Anthology show Moore absorbing and revoicing antique measures; translations from Catullus and fragments of college exercises testify to early craft. Poems Relating to America and such pieces as A Canadian Boat Song mark the transatlantic turn of his youth, while A Melologue upon National Music and the Set of Glees exhibit collaboration with performance. Read together, these various strands reveal a poet whose unifying signatures are melody, clarity, and civic feeling, and whose work continues to circulate wherever song endures.
Historical Context
Thomas Moore (1779–1852), educated at Trinity College Dublin amid the aftershocks of the 1798 rebellion, arrived in London in 1799 as Ireland entered the Union with Britain (1801). His debut, the Odes of Anacreon (1800), answered the late Georgian craze for Hellenic lightness—wine, love, and song—filtered through elegant translation rather than strict philology. The vogue for classical conviviality, nurtured in clubs and drawing rooms, gave Moore an urbane platform and audience. Early Greek imitations and versions from the Anthology aligned him with a broader Romantic classicism that sought ancient feeling through polished lyric grace, a mode that would underwrite his lifelong fusion of music and poetry.
In Regency London Moore thrived in salons and theatres where domestic music was a social currency. His Juvenile Poems and a stream of love lyrics arose within a booming market for sheet music, recitation, and polite song. Collaboration with performers and composers trained him to write for the voice—brief stanzas, memorable refrains—which later framed his politics in singable terms. The cultural economy of publishers and musical engravers, centred in London and Dublin, shaped both form and circulation. Moore’s early erotic grace, indebted to Anacreontic models, met metropolitan taste while establishing the humane, conversational register that made his verse adaptable to parlour, platform, and press.
The poems relating to America grew from Moore’s appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty in Bermuda (1803) by his patron, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, later Earl of Moira. Visiting the United States and Canada in 1804, he encountered republican manners, slavery, indigenous dispossession, and sublime landscapes from the Mohawk to the St. Lawrence. Storms at sea, river travel, and the social paradoxes of the young republic informed his meditative nature lyrics and pointed satires. When a deputy in Bermuda defaulted, Moore faced crippling liability and withdrew to Paris in 1819. This transatlantic detour sharpened his outsider’s eye and reinforced themes of exile, mobility, and moral ambivalence.
Between 1808 and 1834 Moore issued the Irish Melodies, wedding traditional airs—circulating through Edward Bunting’s collections—to polished lyrics arranged chiefly by Sir John Stevenson and later Henry R. Bishop. Composed after the Act of Union and in the shadow of the 1798 rising and Robert Emmet’s 1803 revolt, these songs smuggled political memory into drawing-room culture. Pieces such as The Minstrel-Boy, The Harp that once thro’ Tara’s Halls, and ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer became diasporic anthems. Their success, sustained by concerts and piano culture in Dublin, London, and beyond, fashioned Moore as Ireland’s unofficial bard and shaped public sentiment on identity and loss.
Contemporaneously he broadened his musical nationalism through National Airs (from 1818) and Sacred Songs (1816), alongside the Melologue upon National Music. These projects reflected a Romantic belief that tunes carry collective history, while aligning with cosmopolitan tastes for Spanish, Venetian, Russian, and Swiss melodies. As debates over Catholic Relief intensified and culminated in Emancipation (1829), Moore’s devotional lyrics—Come, ye disconsolate; Sound the loud timbrel—offered ecumenical sentiment shorn of sectarian edge, suited to home performance. By merging antiquarian curiosity with the parlour’s intimate stage, he helped fix the nineteenth-century association between national feeling, moral sensibility, and the voice accompanied by the domestic piano.
The narrative romances drew on Orientalist scholarship and imperial horizons. Lalla Rookh (1817), published by Longman for an unprecedented advance, stitched Persian and Indian tales into a travel-frame that matched Britain’s expanding knowledge of Asia; it became a European bestseller. The Loves of the Angels (1823) stirred theological controversy by mingling scriptural lore with erotic allegory, while The Epicurean (1827) set late-antique Alexandria within a sensual, philosophical reverie. Evenings in Greece and the Alciphron fragment reflect philhellenism energized by the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) and the circle around Lord Byron, whose friendship with Moore helped publicize and complicate their shared Romantic celebrity.
Moore’s satirical vein shadowed the Napoleonic aftermath and Reform era. The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) lampooned the Prince Regent and ministers such as Castlereagh through faux-correspondence; The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) skewered tourist cant and postwar reaction; and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823) indicted Metternichian repression. Later squibs, written through the 1830s, tracked Catholic Emancipation (1829), the Reform Act (1832), tithe conflicts, and Irish Orangeism, often addressing bishops, bankers, and “Captain Rock” politics with nimble rhyme. Operating within a punitive libel culture yet buoyed by a burgeoning cheap press, Moore fashioned political song into a popular, portable instrument of critique.
Networks of patronage and publicity sustained Moore’s renown. Close to figures like Samuel Rogers and Lord Byron, he witnessed the sensational destruction of Byron’s memoirs in 1824 and later edited the poet’s Letters and Journals (1830), acts that fixed him within Romantic cultural memory. The same years saw fierce disputes with music publishers and long tours of readings that linked London, Dublin, and provincial Britain. By mid-century, as Ireland reeled from Famine, Moore’s earlier songs of loss, liberty, and home had entered popular tradition. Read across this collection, they register how an Anglo-Irish Catholic navigated empire, reform, and celebrity through the disciplined art of song.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore
This collection traces Moore’s evolution from playful classicist and love-lyricist to nationally engaged bard and razor-edged political satirist. Across it runs a signature fusion of melody and rhetoric—harp-like lyricism, classical and oriental color, and a gift for turning private feeling and public grief into memorable song.
Odes of Anacreon (with Remarks and numbered Odes I–LXXVIII)
Moore recreates the Greek poet’s world of wine, roses, and quicksilver desire, balancing lightness of touch with meticulous classical craft. The tone is urbane and musical, turning convivial hedonism into polished miniatures that celebrate beauty, friendship, and the fleeting hour.
Songs from the Greek Anthology
Brief, gemlike adaptations render ancient epigram into supple modern song. Desire, parting, and playful wit are distilled with economy, showing Moore’s ear for classical clarity and lyrical compression.
Juvenile Poems (including Fragments of College Exercises and early lyrics)
These early pieces explore flirtation, friendship, and literary self-fashioning, testing Anacreontic ease against sentimental reflection. Their airy grace and occasional satire prefigure Moore’s later blend of music, romance, and social observation.
Poems Relating to America
Composed during Moore’s transatlantic sojourn, these verses chart seascapes, rivers, and new-world encounters while weighing liberty against hypocrisy. The tone moves from rapture at natural sublimity to pointed, sometimes uneasy, cultural critique.
Irish Melodies (with Preface and complete songs)
Moore weds traditional airs to new lyrics of love, loss, and national memory, transforming Ireland’s harp into a voice of both tenderness and resistance. Lyrical, elegiac, and dignified, the sequence fuses domestic feeling with public history, making song a vessel of cultural survival.
National Airs (with Advertisement and complete songs)
A cosmopolitan counterpart to the Irish Melodies, these pieces set various nations’ tunes to words celebrating love, friendship, and festal life. The mood is bright and portable, with music as a common language bridging borders and tempering melancholy with grace.
Sacred Songs
Devotional lyrics translate scriptural motifs into intimate prayer and choral uplift, favoring clarity and consolation. The idiom is simple and song-like, seeking moral light amid grief and exile.
A Melologue upon National Music (with airs, choruses, and stage pieces)
Part performance-piece, part essay-in-music, this work stages an argument that national character lives in its melodies. Alternating speeches, glees, and airs dramatize how song carries memory, identity, and shared feeling.
Legendary Ballads
Reimagined myths and romances—Cupid and Psyche, Hero and Leander, and more—are told in lucid narrative verse. The tales balance wonder and moral sentiment, using classical scenery to reflect on constancy, fate, and the testing of love.
Ballads, Songs, etc.
A broad cabinet of drawing-room lyrics and narrative sketches moves from flirtatious sparkle to pathos. Their tuneful phrasing and neat conceits show Moore’s craft in compressing plot and emotion into singable form.
Unpublished Songs
Intimate and polished, these pieces refine familiar Moorean themes—secret vows, sudden jealousy, and the solace of melody. The tone is confiding and light-footed, treating love as both game and ordeal.
A Selection from the Songs in: Boat Glee; Cupid's Lottery
Occasional stage and social pieces that prize catchiness, chorus, and convivial momentum. They showcase Moore’s knack for ensemble rhythm and theatrical sparkle.
Miscellaneous Poems
Occasional epilogues, portraits, and reflective verses display Moore’s agility with society wit and moral aside. The miscellany reveals a craftsman equally at home in graceful compliment, playful satire, and meditative pause.
Translations from Catullus and Tibullus (with imitations)
Latin love-lyrics are revoiced with modern tenderness and urbane polish. Moore keeps the originals’ candor while smoothing their edges into song-like English cadence.
Poems from The Epicurean
Lyric interludes to Moore’s Egyptian romance evoke temples, processions, and nocturnal desire. Richly pictorial and mystical, they weigh sensuous beauty against philosophical longing.
The Summer Fête (with dedication)
An elegant tableau of high society where music, spectacle, and flirtation mask currents of vanity and feeling. The verse moves with ballroom grace, amused yet observant about fashion and fame.
Evenings in Greece
Dramatic scenes and songs imagine Hellenic life as a living festival of art, love, and memory. Classicism here is theatrical and melodic, using dialogue and chorus to animate cultural nostalgia.
Alciphron: A Fragment (Letters I–IV)
An epistolary reverie where travel, philosophy, and aesthetic longing entwine. The voice is reflective and sensuous, sketching a Greece as much imagined as seen.
Lalla Rookh
An oriental romance weaving linked tales of love and disguise through jeweled settings and political undercurrents. Opulent imagery and musical cadence carry themes of fidelity, identity, and idealism.
The Loves of the Angels (with Preface)
A visionary parable in which celestial beings confront human passion and the limits of desire. The tone is ornate and contemplative, blending scriptural symbolism with romantic yearning.
Rhymes on the Road (Introductory and Extracts)
A travelogue in verse that turns landscapes and salons into occasions for wit, reminiscence, and self-mockery. Observational sparkle mingles with lyrical homesickness and literary gossip.
Corruption; Intolerance; The Sceptic (with Prefaces)
These polemical poems arraign political rot, sectarian bigotry, and fashionable disbelief with pointed rhetoric. Moore balances indignation with moral suasion, pressing for liberty of conscience and civic virtue.
Twopenny Post-Bag (with Intercepted Letters)
A suite of mock-letters lampooning Regency grandees and court intrigues under the guise of found correspondence. Epistolary playfulness sharpens the satire, pairing social mimicry with topical bite.
Satirical and Humorous Poems
Topical squibs, parodies, and Horatian turns take aim at ministers, money-markets, and clerical pretensions. The style is quick, punning, and theatrical, turning headlines into rhymes with sting.
Political and Satirical Poems
Occasional pieces mourn public tragedies and lash abuses, mixing elegy with civic anger. Moore’s verse moves from solemn tribute to combative address, retaining musical poise amid controversy.
Fables for the Holy Alliance (with Preface)
Animal and allegorical tales recast post-Napoleonic power politics as moral fable. The light narrative surface conceals sharp lessons about tyranny, diplomacy, and national rights.
The Fudge Family in Paris (with Preface)
An epistolary comedy of travelers whose letters expose pretension, fashion, and political cant abroad. Voices clash amusingly, letting satire emerge through character rather than direct invective.
The Fudges in England (with Preface)
The family returns as home critics, chronicling English parties, pamphlets, and parliamentary poses. The format lets Moore skewer national foibles with elastic metre, gossip, and theatrical flair.
The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore
ODES OF ANACREON
(1800).
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE.
WITH NOTES.
TO
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
THE PRINCE OF WALES.
SIR—In allowing me to dedicate this Work to Your Royal Highness, you have conferred upon me an honor which I feel very sensibly: and I have only to regret that the pages which you have thus distinguished are not more deserving of such illustrious patronage.
Believe me, SIR, With every sentiment of respect, Your Royal Highness's Very grateful and devoted Servant,
THOMAS MOORE.
REMARKS ON ANACREON
There is but little known, with certainty of the life of Anacreon. Chamaeleon Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in the general wreck of ancient literature. The editors of the poet have collected the few trifling anecdotes which are scattered through the extant authors of antiquity, and, supplying the deficiency of materials by fictions of their own imagination, have arranged what they call a life of Anacreon. These specious fabrications are intended to indulge that interest which we naturally feel in the biography of illustrious men; but it is rather a dangerous kind of illusion, as it confounds the limits of history and romance, and is too often supported by unfaithful citation.
Our poet was born in the city of Teos, in the delicious region of Ionia, and the time of his birth appears to have been in the sixth century before Christ. He flourished at that remarkable period when, under the polished tyrants Hipparchus and Polycrates, Athens and Samos were become the rival asylums of genius. There is nothing certain known about his family; and those who pretend to discover in Plato that he was a descendant of the monarch Codrus, show much more of zeal than of either accuracy or judgment.
The disposition and talents of Anacreon recommended him to the monarch of Samos, and he was formed to be the friend of such a prince as Polycrates. Susceptible only to the pleasures, he felt not the corruptions, of the court; and while Pythagoras fled from the tyrant, Anacreon was celebrating his praises oh the lyre. We are told, too, by Maximus Tyrius, that, by the influence of his amatory songs, he softened the mind of Polycrates into a spirit of benevolence towards his subjects.
The amours of the poet, and the rivalship of the tyrant, I shall pass over in silence; and there are few, I presume, who will regret the omission of most of those anecdotes, which the industry of some editors has not only promulged, but discussed. Whatever is repugnant to modesty and virtue is considered, in ethical science, by a supposition very favorable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should be much more strongly entertained where the transgression wars with nature as well as virtue. But why are we not allowed to indulge in the presumption? Why are we officiously reminded that there have been really such instances of depravity?
Hipparchus, who now maintained at Athens the power which his father Pisistratus had usurped, was one of those princes who may be said to have polished the fetters of their subjects. He was the first, according to Plato, who edited the poems of Homer, and commanded them to be sung by the rhapsodists at the celebration of the Panathenaea. From his court, which was a sort of galaxy of genius, Anacreon could not long be absent. Hipparchus sent a barge for him; the poet readily embraced the invitation, and the Muses and the Loves were wafted with him to Athens[1q].
The manner of Anacreon's death was singular. We are told that in the eighty-fifth year of his age he was choked by a grape-stone; and however we may smile at their enthusiastic partiality who see in this easy and characteristic death a peculiar indulgence of Heaven, we cannot help admiring that his fate should have been so emblematic of his disposition. Caelius Calcagninus alludes to this catastrophe in the following epitaph on our poet:—
Those lips, then, hallowed sage, which poured along A music sweet as any cygnet's song, The grape hath closed for ever! Here let the ivy kiss the poet's tomb, Here let the rose he loved with laurels bloom, In bands that ne'er shall sever. But far be thou, oh! far, unholy vine, By whom the favorite minstrel of the Nine Lost his sweet vital breath; Thy God himself now blushes to confess, Once hallowed vine! he feels he loves thee less, Since poor Anacreon's death.
It has been supposed by some writers that Anacreon and Sappho were contemporaries; and the very thought of an intercourse between persons so congenial, both in warmth of passion and delicacy of genius, gives such play to the imagination that the mind loves to indulge in it. But the vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamaeleon, and Hermesianax, who are the source of the supposition, are considered as having merely indulged in a poetical anachronism.
To infer the moral dispositions of a poet from the tone of sentiment which pervades his works, is sometimes a very fallacious analogy; but the soul of Anacreon speaks so unequivocally through his odes, that we may safely consult them as the faithful mirrors of his heart. We find him there the elegant voluptuary, diffusing the seductive charm of sentiment over passions and propensities at which rigid morality must frown. His heart, devoted to indolence, seems to have thought that there is wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness in mere wealth. The cheerfulness, indeed, with which he brightens his old age is interesting and endearing; like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which be attributes to himself so feelingly, and which breathes characteristically throughout all that he has sung. In truth, if we omit those few vices in our estimate which religion, at that time, not only connived at, but consecrated, we shall be inclined to say that the disposition of our poet was amiable; that his morality was relaxed, but not abandoned; and that Virtue, with her zone loosened, may be an apt emblem of the character of Anacreon.
Of his person and physiognomy, time has preserved such uncertain memorials, that it were better, perhaps, to leave the pencil to fancy; and few can read the Odes of Anacreon without imaging to themselves the form of the animated old bard, crowned with roses, and singing cheerfully to his lyre.
After the very enthusiastic eulogiums bestowed both by ancients and moderns upon the poems of Anacreon, we need not be diffident in expressing our raptures at their beauty, nor hesitate to pronounce them the most polished remains of antiquity. They are indeed, all beauty, all enchantment. He steals us so insensibly along with him, that we sympathize even in his excesses. In his amatory odes there is a delicacy of compliment not to be found in any other ancient poet. Love at that period was rather an unrefined emotion; and the intercourse of the sexes was animated more by passion than by sentiment. They knew not those little tendernesses which form the spiritual part of affection; their expression of feeling was therefore rude and unvaried, and the poetry of love deprived it of its most captivating graces. Anacreon, however, attained some ideas of this purer gallantry; and the same delicacy of mind which led him to this refinement, prevented him also from yielding to the freedom of language which has sullied the pages of all the other poets. His descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas, not the words. He is sportive without being wanton, and ardent without being licentious. His poetic invention is always most brilliantly displayed in those allegorical fictions which so many have endeavored to imitate, though all have confessed them to be inimitable. Simplicity is the distinguishing feature of these odes, and they interest by their innocence, as much as they fascinate by their beauty. They may be said, indeed, to be the very infants of the Muses, and to lisp in numbers.
I shall not be accused of enthusiastic partiality by those who have read and felt the original; but to others, I am conscious, this should not be the language of a translator, whose faint reflection of such beauties can but ill justify his admiration of them.
In the age of Anacreon music and poetry were inseparable. These kindred talents were for a long time associated, and the poet always sung his own compositions to the lyre. It is probable that they were not set to any regular air, but rather a kind of musical recitation, which was varied according to the fancy and feelings of the moment. The poems of Anacreon were sung at banquets as late as the time of Aulus Gellius, who tells us that he heard one of the odes performed at a birthday entertainment.
The singular beauty of our poet's style and the apparent facility, perhaps, of his metre have attracted, as I have already remarked, a crowd of imitators. Some of these have succeeded with wonderful felicity, as may be discerned in the few odes which are attributed to writers of a later period. But none of his emulators have been half so dangerous to his fame as those Greek ecclesiastics of the early ages, who, being conscious of their own inferiority to their great prototypes, determined on removing all possibility of comparison, and, under a semblance of moral zeal, deprived the world of some of the most exquisite treasures of ancient times. The works of Sappho and Alcaeus were among those flowers of Grecian literature which thus fell beneath the rude hand of ecclesiastical presumption. It is true they pretended that this sacrifice of genius was hallowed by the interests of religion, but I have already assigned the most probable motive; and if Gregorius Nazianzenus had not written Anacreontics, we might now perhaps have the works of the Teian unmutilated, and be empowered to say exultingly with Horace,
Nec si quid olim lusit Anacreon delevit aetas.
The zeal by which these bishops professed to be actuated gave birth more innocently, indeed, to an absurd species of parody, as repugnant to piety as it is to taste, where the poet of voluptuousness was made a preacher of the gospel, and his muse, like the Venus in armor at Lacedaemon, was arrayed in all the severities of priestly instruction. Such was the "Anacreon Recantatus," by Carolus de Aquino, a Jesuit, published 1701, which consisted of a series of palinodes to the several songs of our poet. Such, too, was the Christian Anacreon of Patrignanus, another Jesuit, who preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that the Graecian poet had dedicated to festivity and love.
His metre has frequently been adopted by the modern Latin poets; and Scaliger, Taubman, Barthius, and others, have shown that it is by no means uncongenial with that language. The Anacreontics of Scaliger, however, scarcely deserve the name; as they glitter all over with conceits, and, though often elegant, are always labored. The beautiful fictions of Angerianus preserve more happily than any others the delicate turn of those allegorical fables, which, passing so frequently through the mediums of version and imitation, have generally lost their finest rays in the transmission. Many of the Italian poets have indulged their fancies upon the subjects; and in the manner of Anacreon, Bernardo Tasso first introduced the metre, which was afterwards polished and enriched by Chabriera and others.
ODES OF ANACREON
ODE I.[1]
I saw the smiling bard of pleasure, The minstrel of the Teian measure; 'Twas in a vision of the night, He beamed upon my wondering sight. I heard his voice, and warmly prest The dear enthusiast to my breast. His tresses wore a silvery dye, But beauty sparkled in his eye; Sparkled in his eyes of fire, Through the mist of soft desire. His lip exhaled, when'er he sighed, The fragrance of the racy tide; And, as with weak and reeling feet He came my cordial kiss to meet, An infant, of the Cyprian band, Guided him on with tender hand. Quick from his glowing brows he drew His braid, of many a wanton hue; I took the wreath, whose inmost twine Breathed of him and blushed with wine. I hung it o'er my thoughtless brow, And ah! I feel its magic now: I feel that even his garland's touch Can make the bosom love too much.
[1] This ode is the first of the series in the Vatican manuscript, which attributes it to no other poet than Anacreon. They who assert that the manuscript imputes it to Basilius, have been mislead. Whether it be the production of Anacreon or not, it has all the features of ancient simplicity, and is a beautiful imitation of the poet's happiest manner.
ODE II.
Give me the harp of epic song, Which Homer's finger thrilled along; But tear away the sanguine string, For war is not the theme I sing. Proclaim the laws of festal right,[1] I'm monarch of the board to-night; And all around shall brim as high, And quaff the tide as deep as I. And when the cluster's mellowing dews Their warm enchanting balm infuse, Our feet shall catch the elastic bound, And reel us through the dance's round. Great Bacchus! we shall sing to thee, In wild but sweet ebriety; Flashing around such sparks of thought, As Bacchus could alone have taught.
Then, give the harp of epic song, Which Homer's finger thrilled along; But tear away the sanguine string, For war is not the theme I sing.
[1] The ancients prescribed certain laws of drinking at their festivals, for an account of which see the commentators. Anacreon here acts the symposiarch, or master of the festival.
ODE III.[1]
Listen to the Muse's lyre, Master of the pencil's fire! Sketched in painting's bold display, Many a city first portray; Many a city, revelling free, Full of loose festivity. Picture then a rosy train, Bacchants straying o'er the plain; Piping, as they roam along, Roundelay or shepherd-song. Paint me next, if painting may Such a theme as this portray, All the earthly heaven of love These delighted mortals prove.
[1] La Fosse has thought proper to lengthen this poem by considerable interpolations of his own, which he thinks are indispensably necessary to the completion of the description.
ODE IV.[1]
Vulcan! hear your glorious task; I did not from your labors ask In gorgeous panoply to shine, For war was ne'er a sport of mine. No—let me have a silver bowl, Where I may cradle all my soul; But mind that, o'er its simple frame No mimic constellations flame; Nor grave upon the swelling side, Orion, scowling o'er the tide.
I care not for the glittering wain, Nor yet the weeping sister train. But let the vine luxuriant roll Its blushing tendrils round the bowl, While many a rose-lipped bacchant maid Is culling clusters in their shade. Let sylvan gods, in antic shapes, Wildly press the gushing grapes, And flights of Loves, in wanton play, Wing through the air their winding way; While Venus, from her arbor green, Looks laughing at the joyous scene, And young Lyaeus by her side Sits, worthy of so bright a bride.
[1] This ode, Aulus Gellius tells us, was performed at an entertainment where he was present.
ODE V.
Sculptor, wouldst thou glad my soul, Grave for me an ample bowl, Worthy to shine in hall or bower, When spring-time brings the reveller's hour. Grave it with themes of chaste design, Fit for a simple board like mine. Display not there the barbarous rites In which religious zeal delights; Nor any tale of tragic fate Which History shudders to relate. No—cull thy fancies from above, Themes of heaven and themes of love. Let Bacchus, Jove's ambrosial boy, Distil the grape in drops of joy, And while he smiles at every tear, Let warm-eyed Venus, dancing near, With spirits of the genial bed, The dewy herbage deftly tread. Let Love be there, without his arms, In timid nakedness of charms; And all the Graces, linked with Love, Stray, laughing, through the shadowy grove; While rosy boys disporting round, In circlets trip the velvet ground. But ah! if there Apollo toys,[1] I tremble for the rosy boys.
[1] An allusion to the fable that Apollo had killed his beloved boy Hyacinth, while playing with him at quoits. "This" (says M. La Fosse) "is assuredly the sense of the text, and it cannot admit of any other."
ODE VI.[1]
As late I sought the spangled bowers, To cull a wreath of matin flowers, Where many an early rose was weeping, I found the urchin Cupid sleeping, I caught the boy, a goblet's tide Was richly mantling by my side, I caught him by his downy wing, And whelmed him in the racy spring. Then drank I down the poisoned bowl, And love now nestles in my soul. Oh, yes, my soul is Cupid's nest, I feel him fluttering in my breast.
[1] This beautiful fiction, which the commentators have attributed to Julian, a royal poet, the Vatican MS. pronounces to be the genuine offspring of Anacreon.
ODE VII.
The women tell me every day That all my bloom has pas past away. "Behold," the pretty wantons cry, "Behold this mirror with a sigh; The locks upon thy brow are few, And like the rest, they're withering too!" Whether decline has thinned my hair, I'm sure I neither know nor care; But this I know, and this I feel As onward to the tomb I steal, That still as death approaches nearer, The joys of life are sweeter, dearer; And had I but an hour to live, That little hour to bliss I'd give.
ODE VIII.[1]
I care not for the idle state Of Persia's king, the rich, the great. I envy not the monarch's throne, Nor wish the treasured gold my own But oh! be mine the rosy wreath, Its freshness o'er my brow to breathe; Be mine the rich perfumes that flow, To cool and scent my locks of snow. To-day I'll haste to quaff my wine As if to-morrow ne'er would shine; But if to-morrow comes, why then— I'll haste to quaff my wine again. And thus while all our days are bright, Nor time has dimmed their bloomy light, Let us the festal hours beguile With mantling pup and cordial smile; And shed from each new bowl of wine, The richest drop on Bacchus' shrine For death may come, with brow unpleasant, May come, when least we wish him present, And beckon to the Sable shore, And grimly bid us—drink no more!
[1] Baxter conjectures that this was written upon the occasion of our poet's returning the money to Polycrates, according to the anecdote in Stobaeus.
ODE IX.
I pray thee, by the gods above, Give me the mighty bowl I love, And let me sing, in wild delight, "I will—I will be mad to-night!" Alcmaeon once, as legends tell, Was frenzied by the fiends of hell; Orestes, too, with naked tread, Frantic paced the mountain-head; And why? a murdered mother's shade Haunted them still where'er they strayed. But ne'er could I a murderer be, The grape alone shall bleed for me; Yet can I shout, with wild delight, "I will—I will be mad to-night."
Alcides' self, in days of yore, Imbrued his hands in youthful gore, And brandished, with a maniac joy, The quiver of the expiring boy: And Ajax, with tremendous shield, Infuriate scoured the guiltless field. But I, whose hands no weapon ask, No armor but this joyous flask; The trophy of whose frantic hours Is but a scattered wreath of flowers, Ev'n I can sing, with wild delight, "I will—I will be mad to-night!"
ODE X.[1]
How am I to punish thee, For the wrong thou'st done to me Silly swallow, prating thing— Shall I clip that wheeling wing? Or, as Tereus did, of old,[2] (So the fabled tale is told,) Shall I tear that tongue away, Tongue that uttered such a lay? Ah, how thoughtless hast thou been! Long before the dawn was seen, When a dream came o'er my mind, Picturing her I worship, kind, Just when I was nearly blest, Loud thy matins broke my rest!
[1] This ode is addressed to a swallow.
[2] Modern poetry has conferred the name of Philomel upon the nightingale; but many respectable authorities among the ancients assigned this metamorphose to Progne, and made Philomel the swallow, as Anacreon does here.
ODE XI.[1]
"Tell me, gentle youth, I pray thee, What in purchase shall I pay thee For this little waxen toy, Image of the Paphian boy?" Thus I said, the other day, To a youth who past my way: "Sir," (he answered, and the while Answered all in Doric style,) "Take it, for a trifle take it; 'Twas not I who dared to make it; No, believe me, 'twas not I; Oh, it has cost me many a sigh, And I can no longer keep Little Gods, who murder sleep!" "Here, then, here," (I said with joy,) "Here is silver for the boy: He shall be my bosom guest, Idol of my pious breast!"
Now, young Love, I have thee mine, Warm me with that torch of thine; Make me feel as I have felt, Or thy waxen frame shall melt: I must burn with warm desire, Or thou, my boy—in yonder fire.[2]
[1] It is difficult to preserve with any grace the narrative simplicity of this ode, and the humor of the turn with which it concludes. I feel, indeed, that the translation must appear vapid, if not ludicrous, to an English reader.
[2] From this Longepierre conjectures, that, whatever Anacreon might say, he felt sometimes the inconveniences of old age, and here solicits from the power of Love a warmth which he could no longer expect from Nature.
ODE XII.
They tell how Atys, wild with love, Roams the mount and haunted grove;[1] Cvbele's name he howls around, The gloomy blast returns the sound! Oft too, by Claros' hallowed spring,[2] The votaries of the laurelled king Quaff the inspiring, magic stream, And rave in wild, prophetic dream. But frenzied dreams are not for me, Great Bacchus is my deity! Full of mirth, and full of him, While floating odors round me swim, While mantling bowls are full supplied, And you sit blushing by my side, I will be mad and raving too— Mad, my girl, with love for you!
[1] There are many contradictory stories of the loves of Cybele and Atys. It is certain that he was mutilated, but whether by his own fury, or Cybele's jealousy, is a point upon which authors are not agreed.
[2] This fountain was in a grove, consecrated to Apollo, and situated between Colophon and Lebedos, in Ionia. The god had an oracle there.
ODE XIII.
I will, I will, the conflict's past, And I'll consent to love at last. Cupid has long, with smiling art, Invited me to yield my heart; And I have thought that peace of mind Should not be for a smile resigned; And so repelled the tender lure, And hoped my heart would sleep secure.
But, slighted in his boasted charms, The angry infant flew to arms; He slung his quiver's golden frame, He took his bow; his shafts of flame, And proudly summoned me to yield, Or meet him on the martial field. And what did I unthinking do? I took to arms, undaunted, too; Assumed the corslet, shield, and spear, And, like Pelides, smiled at fear.
Then (hear it, All ye powers above!) I fought with Love! I fought with Love! And now his arrows all were shed, And I had just in terror fled— When, heaving an indignant sigh, To see me thus unwounded fly, And, having now no other dart, He shot himself into my heart![1] My heart—alas the luckless day! Received the God, and died away. Farewell, farewell, my faithless shield! Thy lord at length is forced to yield. Vain, vain, is every outward care, The foe's within, and triumphs there.
[1] Dryden has parodied this thought in the following extravagant lines:———I'm all o'er Love; Nay, I am Love, Love shot, and shot so fast, He shot himself into my breast at last.
ODE XIV.[1]
Count me, on the summer trees, Every leaf that courts the breeze; Count me, on the foamy deep, Every wave that sinks to sleep; Then, when you have numbered these Billowy tides and leafy trees, Count me all the flames I prove, All the gentle nymphs I love. First, of pure Athenian maids Sporting in their olive shades, You may reckon just a score,
