United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In his daughter's words, 'he read in season, and out of season; and he not only read, but remembered. As a schoolboy, he knew by heart the first book of the 'Iliad', and all the odes of Horace; and it shows how deeply the classical part of his training must have entered into him, that he was wont, in later life, to soothe his little boy to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon.
For these odes carried great authority. In them the poet appears as the authorised voice of the state, dispensing verba et voces "the charm of poesy" to allay the moral pestilence that is devouring the people. No one can read the odes without being struck with certain features wherein they differ from his other works. One of these is his constant employment of the Olympian mythology.
What of this quality may have found expression in his lost poems, especially the Dirges, we can scarcely guess, but in his triumphal odes it hardly appears at all, unless in the touches of tender gracefulness into which he softens when speaking of the young.
It consisted very largely of conversations between two persons, representing two opposed points of view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the whole.
But the evil that men do lives after them, and each year saw a fresh band of unwilling bards goaded to despair by his bequest. True, there were always one or two who hailed this ready market for their sonnets and odes with joy. But the majority, being barely able to rhyme 'dove' with 'love', regarded the annual announcement of the subject chosen with feelings of the deepest disgust.
But it is in his inimitable "Odes" that the genius of Horace as a poet is especially displayed; they have never been equaled in beauty of sentiment, gracefulness of language, and melody of versification; they comprehend every variety of subject suitable to the lyric muse; they rise without effort to the most elevated topics; and they descend to the simplest joys and sorrows of every-day life.
This flourishing period of song sank away when a new form of literature, that of the drama, suddenly came into being and attained immediate popularity. For a century earlier it had been slowly taking form in the rural districts of Attica, beginning in the odes addressed to Dionysus, the god of wine, the Bacchus of Roman mythology.
Of Hau-ki there is some notice on the tenth ode of the first decade of the Sacrificial Odes of Kau. To him the kings of Kau traced their lineage. Of Kiang Yuean, his mother, our knowledge is very scanty. It is said that she was a daughter of the House of Thai, which traced its lineage up to Shan-nung in prehistoric times.
Onias, the Israelite general, had asserted that these odes might be compared with those of Alcman or of Pindar, and had quoted certain passages that had pleased the queen.
Victor Hugo, like his young friends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric marvels as the Odes et Ballades may be forgiven for its eccentricities. William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.
Word Of The Day