See how Mount Soracte stands white with the deep snow … this is perhaps Horace’s most benign and attractive version of the carpe diem theme, with the stress on wine, warmth and love, rather than the inexorable journey to the grave. See and hear the poem here.
Tennyson combines his admiration for Milton’s poetry with his love of ancient poetry, and in particular his love of Alcaics, the Greek metre that Horace used for his loftiest themes in the Odes. You can decide for yourself how far the experiment succeeds, and use the links to compare Tennyson’s poem to some of Horace’s poems in the same metre, here.
In today’s Ode, Horace exclaims at the futility and presumption of the rich, who go in for grand building works, even encroaching on the sea in places like the luxurious seaside resort of Baiae. He prefers the simple life on his Sabine farm.
Horace uses Hipponactean metre, an unusual one found only here among his works. Hear his Latin performed in the original and follow in English here.
A E Housman was a professor of Latin as well as a famous poet of the life of the English countryside. Because of these twin talents, his translation of Horace’s “Diffugere nives” (Ode 4.7) captures its sentiment and mood perfectly although he uses English poetic techniques and convention which could hardly be more different than those of Latin poetry. All the more reason to encounter Latin poetry in the original, with a reading and a translation, at Pantheon Poets.
In the illustration, Theseus and Pirithous, whose legendary friendship is referred to at the end of the poem, rid the land of robbers and liberate abducted women.
See and hear Horace’s original alongside Housman’s translation here.
Horace’s poem is addressed to his friend Septimius and praises the attractions of Tarentum on the heel of Italy, to which Septimius seems to have a connection. Hear it with a translation here.
Illustration: Maria, Testa di donna (Taranto), CC BY-SA 2.0