Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS Aug 19 and 16 2016 from Hal Jensen's review of H. J. Jackson's Those Who Write for Immortality : At the end of his third collection of Odes, right at the "back" of the bookroll, Horace placed a poem which, for 2,500 years, has remained the locus classicus of poetry's unique powers: "exegi monumentum aere perennius" (I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze - although every word requires a scholar's note). More durable than bronze, higher than the pyramids, immune to time and the elements. Horace's poetry guarantees that he will not wholly die ("non omnis moriar"). How quick we all were to buy into that one. How quick to forget what we found at the back of Horace's next bookroll, the Epistles, which appeared in 20 BC, just three years after the Odes. Here, the concluding poem is addressed to the very book (liber) in our hands. It warns of the realities of public life: once out in the world, there is no coming...

After “Naoise at Four,” three out of the following four poems deal with the theme of children as victims. In “Anon,” the poem is compared to a “love child” the author abandons without giving it his name. In “Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan,” the mother-speaker prays for the woods to become a broad ocean, so that her forest-loving son, now a swan, may see not “the cold crest,/ But branches of the whitebeam and the maple.” “O Fons Bandusiae,” a translation of a Horatian ode (Book 3, XIII), devotes a stanza to the kid goat to be sacrificed to the sacred fount. And tomorrow we will bring A struggling kid, his temples sore With early horns, as sacrifice. Tomorrow his new trumpeting Will come to nothing, when his gore Stains and thaws your bright ice. I don’t know how the Latin compares with this, but here are the same lines in an English translation by A. S. Kline I found by googling. Kline says he/she follows the original Latin meter, and gives a reasonably close English version. tomor...