Coleridge's Latin Verse

 

I've briefly mentioned this short Latin poem, ‘Lines For A Second Emblem’, before on this blog. What I want to do in this post is dig a little deeper into it. My claim is not that this is a good poem, since it really isnt. It's a doodle, a notebook entry in which STC flexed his Latinist muscles but slightly, and that went no further. But I am interested in the process by which Coleridge, more or less desultorily, produced the text. I say desultory because he not only never published this, he didn't prefer it for its stated purpose: as a motto or legend appended to a pictoral emblem, engraved jewel or brooch [click the header images to embiggen them, and you can see J C C Mays explanation of the context]. He was manifestly doodling his thoughts, and did so in Latin on this occasion because Latin is the traditional language in which such mottoes are cast.

Eheu! dum me mea Psyche,
Dulce decus veris aprici,
Pulchra Comes et Zephyrorum,
Dum Psyche me fugit eheu!
Pallidulum me tua taeda
Quid juvat, o inamata Juno!

Alas when my Psyche (soul/butterfly) has (gone) from me
Sweet delight of sunny Spring
Lovely partner of the Zephyrs,
When Psyche has fled, alas!
Pale little me: your torch
What joy does it bring, unloved Juno!

The emblem in question is a butterfly. Juno's torch would accompany a wedding, and so is out of place in this mournful situation, when the speaker's butterfly-woman soulmate has abandoned him.

So the larger question is: how might an anglophone poet go about writing a poem in Latin? 

There are two main obstacles. One is the business of writing a poem in a language that is not one's mother-tongue. Two is, more specifically, the prosodic difficulty of composing metrically valid verse according to a system not (as in English) of ictus—patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables—but of arsis, or quantity (patterns of long and short vowels).

To take the question of fluency first. Plenty of writers and poets have managed to write well in a second or even a third language, of course, and some (Conrad, Nabokov, Achebe) have created great art that way. Latin, however, is not a living language. One cannot pick up conversational Latin by moving to Ancient Rome for a year or two. It is possible to become a reasonably accomplished Latin speaker by immersing oneself in the language, but only with unusual effort. When Latin was still living, or half-alive, as Europe's lingua franca (when it was still the language of the Catholic mass, and scientific and literary texts were still being published in it) such immersion was more achievable. Erasmus spoke Latin so well and so much that, reputedly, he forget how to speak Dutch. Montaigne, sent to school with a German teacher who spoke no French, was educated exclusively in Latin and became confidently expressive in that language. That Latin had not entirely lost its function as lingua franca into the 17th century certainly facilitated the career of Casimir (Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski), famous across Europe as ‘the last Latin poet’ and Horationis par, ‘the equal of Horace’. His own ease with Latin owed much to the fact that he was a Jesuit priest, which made Latin a working as well as a classical language for him. There is nothing equivalent in Coleridge's life.

Indeed the comparison shows up one of the main fault-lines of neo-Latin discourse for a writer like Coleridge: viz., that writing in Latin actualises both the (for him, good!) heritage of classical, or more narrowly Augustan, Rome and the (bad!) associations of continental Roman Catholicism. Coleridge's engagement with neoLatin must undertake a ticklish navigation of this, for him, problematic territory. Not where Casimir is concerned, I should add (Coleridge often quotes, and indeed translates, Casimir's poetry), although Casimir's fame was such as to transcend his connection with Catholicism. But in other regards Coleridge's attitude was indicative of his era. In the words of A M Juster:

Nineteenth and early twentieth century British scholars largely defined the field, and they did so in their own image. Their worldview tended to incorporate strong emotional connections between the Roman Empire and their British Empire, which is why they focused on the perceived glory days of the Augustan era, downplayed the repulsive aspects of that era, only grudgingly studied the following century, and then largely ignored the empire’s literature after about 100 AD.

The dissolution of the Roman Empire was painful for British classicists not only because of the parallels to their own nation’s international decline, but because the literature became increasingly Catholic. Hatred of Catholicism was a standard failing of the British elite through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and classicists were no different. Most classicists of that period viewed Late Antique Latin poetry as degenerate, and simply did not study it or teach it.

Juster rightly notes ‘the strangeness of this bigoted cutoff for the study of a language’s literature’ (‘French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?’). 

Two is the prosodic question. I will be honest here and confess that I find this actually quite difficult to judge. English-speakers (in my experience of teaching poetry) generally have a good ear for ictus, can pick which syllables in any given line of verse are stressed and which are unstressed. Couple this with the easily taught table of the four most common metrical patterns in stressed verse—the iambic (de DUM de DUM de DUM), the trochaic (DUM de DUM de DUM de), the anapestic (diddy DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM) and the dactylic (DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM diddy) and you've basically got it. There are other metrical patterns, obviously, and you may need the occasional DUM-DUM spondee to make your prosodic analysis work out, but that's basically it. Then it's a simple matter tracing the iambic pulse in a Shakespearian line, or contrasting the dactylic

Blow the wind southerly,
Southerly, southerly,
Blow the wind south o'er the
Bonny blue sea

with the famously anapestic

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

that used to be Byron's most memorised poem. All well and good. But this later European tradition of scanning verse by stressed and unstressed syllables is quite different to the tradition that obtained in ancient Greek and Latin verse. Their metrical feet are the same: iambs, anapests and so on. But in place of stress, the ancients heard length. Robert Graves described the difference of modern and ancient poetics as being that between the hammer and anvil of the blacksmith—ictus—and the long and short strokes of the boatsman's oar—classical prosody. Maybe that gives you a sense of the distinction.

Whether the Ancients also heard stress is a moot point, but their poets, and their grammarians, certainly analysed poetry in terms of the pattern of long and short syllables, not in terms of patterns of ictus. And that's a distinction we can understand too: we hear the difference between the long e (Greek η) in feel and the short e (Greek ε) in fell; between the omega (ω) in dole and the omicron (ο) in doll. But the fact that we can distinguish those sounds in individual words doesn't mean we can all hear the complex patterns of long and short syllables in passages of Homer or Vergil.

Here's my rather shaming confession: I studied this stuff as an undergraduate doing a Classics degree, and went into it in greater detail for my PhD (where it was really quite important), but I'm still not sure I can properly ‘hear’ the dactyls in Homer or Vergil as I read them aloud. Certainly not in the way I can ‘hear’ the stress patterns in English verse. I can see those patterns in Homer and Vergil, when the verse is written down, and can analyse it and so on; but I suppose ictus just strikes me as intuitive and common-sense in a way patterns of long and short vowels don't.

It doesn't help that there's no way of working out which vowels in Latin words are long and short. You just have to know. Which is to say, since nobody (realistically) is going to acquire that degree of expertise, you need a guidebook. For British schoolboys, and for those who persisted in the exacting and largely fruitless exercise after their schooldays, this meant the Gradus.

Gradus ad Parnassam, or ‘steps to Parnassus’, is a book listing Latin words in which the quantities of vowels are marked, to facilitate the slotting of the various words into the requisite metrical wire-frames of verse composition.

The first ‘step’ or lesson is contained in the title phrase itself, because gradus being a fourth-declension noun (a step), with a short ‘-us’ in the singular, becomes gradūs, with a lengthened ‘-ūs’, in the plural (steps). The difference in meaning teaches one to observe the difference in vowel quantity between two forms which look the same but have different grammatical properties, and so to pronounce the title of the dictionary correctly. Then ‘Parnassus’ is a poetic figure alluding to the Muse (of poetry): and the second function of the thesaurus is even so, to illustrate such figures. Therefore, the whole expression Gradus ad Parnassum is not just a title but an epitome of the work itself, combining declension, construction, scansion and figure. [Chisholm, Hugh, ‘Gradus’, Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.: Cambridge University Press 1911), 12:314]

There were several Gradus ad Parnassums published. The one with which Coleridge was familiar from his own schooldays was the English translation of Paul Aler's (the famous revision of this by John Carey wasn't published until 1818). The problem, of course, was that painstakingly assembling a poem out of these units, like a child fitting lego-blocks together to make a tower, negates the organic fluency of Coleridgean imaginative creation, and throws the writer back on mere ‘fancy’: derivative quasi-plagiaristical rote-work. Early on in the Biographia, Coleridge mocks a contemporary neo-Latin poet, and his reliance on the Gradus, in precisely such terms. First he makes the general point:

This style of poetry, which I have characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody them. [Coleridge Biographia Literaria (1817), ch 1]

Then, in a footnote, the specific:

In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.

Now look out in the Gradus for Purus, and you find, as the first synonime, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonime is purpureus. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.

The line from Italian poet Poliziano means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The synonymical line means: ‘the milky stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles’. Actually the quoted Latin is from Poliziano’s Rustica (1480s) not his Nutricia. The ‘University poem’ from which the second line is quoted is the Oxford Prize Poem of 1789, Iter Ad Meccam [‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’] by George Canning (1770-1827)—the same Canning who went on to become Prime Minister. Coleridge had been ridiculed in Canning’s reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, and the young STC had attacked the whole of Pitt’s Napoleonic War cabinet (which had included Canning). But he had later been introduced to Canning by Frere, and seems to have mellowed towards him. The actual force of the note, in other words, is an obscure, if gentle, mockery of a prominent political figure. ‘Ferrumination’ seals the joke: it is an Anglicisation of the Latin ferrumino, which means ‘to cement, solder, glue, unite, bind, join’. ‘Soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning (Peter Durand’s patent on his new method for preserving food using tin cans had been granted in 1810).

Still: absent an Erasmian absolute fluency in Latin, what was the neo-Latin poet to do? I don't believe (though I can't prove) that Coleridge fumbled through an actual copy of his old schooldays Gradus when he composed in Latin, but there's no denying that much of his Latin verse is derivative, fanciful rather than imaginative. Indeed, some of it hugs the coast so closely that it approaches the plagiaristic.

I think his praxis, in writing such poetry, involved one or two approaches. Sometimes, as with ‘Ad Vilmum Axiologum’ (‘To William Wordsworth’ 1808), Coleridge actually sat with a specific Latin poem in front of him—in this case a Latin poem by Ariosto—and reworked it, writing-out and adapting the original. On other occasions, he drew on his internal reference library. STC read very widely, in Latin and neo-Latin literature, and possessed an unusually capacious literary memory. It is surely likely that, as he put pen to paper, the compositional wheels span in his head and he withdrew likely-sounding half-lines and lines from that storehouse. Which brings me back to the brief ‘Lines for a Second Emblem’:

Eheu! dum me mea Psyche

This is a version of a line of neo-Latin verse by Samuel Johnson. Nothing suspect or Catholic about him as a source! Coleridge has read, and remembered: ‘qualia dii! vidi dum me mea nympha secuta est’, a line from a poem co-authored by Johnson and Stephen Barrett, ‘Contributions to Poems by Others’ (1745) that means: ‘ah, what sights I saw, ye gods, when my nymph walked with me!’ Coleridge shrinks this to a tetrameter, lopping off ‘qualia, dii!’ and substituting the more conventional alas, eheu, which, since it is a trochee, can substitute metrically for the two long syllables of vidi. Then, because Sara Hutchinson is more than just any old nymph, but is in some crucial sense his soul (his inspiration, love and life) he changes the trochaic nympha for the spondaic psyche. That's OK, though, because by curtailing he is also prosodically adjusting the anapestic hexameter of Johnson's line, availing himself of the convention by which the two unstressed syllables of an anapest can be swapped for a single stressed syllable, as with a spondee.

I don't want to labour the point, but the whole poem is assembled this way. Dulce decus is Horatian (is, indeed, right from the beginning of that schoolroom essential author: it's Odes 1.1, line 2). Pulchra comes, ‘lovely companion’, is common in Latin verse (Johannes Silos ‘Epigram CCV’ [1673]; Hugo Grotius uses the phrase in his Latin translation of the Greek Anthology, CLXXX). Me fugit eheu is a standard Latin tag, most famous in relation to the phrase derived from Vergil and Horace tempus fugit eheu. Quid juvat is from Claudian. And so on.

What this means, arguably, is that we are better served if we ‘read’ Coleridge's Latin poems precisely in terms of their intertexts:—as, in other words, poems as much about their prototypes. or more precisely about the way their prototypes express or reflect latter-day concerns, as for their own sakes. This motto poem is not a very good example of that, except in the sense that it is indicative of Coleridge's strategy. The Ariosto poem, and Coleridge's anguished reworking of it (already discussed on this blog), is a better example, but even there where STC deviates from his working text, he does so via a series of props and stays, a walking-frame of familiar tags and phrases he already knows fit the rigours of Latin prosody. Still: not just the specifics of the choices Coleridge makes in composing his partly or wholly refried neoLatin texts, but the fact that he chooses to write in Latin at all is significant.

Kenneth Haynes suggests that writing in a language other than their mother-tongue ‘gives writers the option to choose a language in order to reach, or to elude, a particular audience.’ Coleridge does both of these things: sometimes aiming to connect with a certain scholarly or (as with this motto) formal-traditional mode, other times aiming to free himself from the restrictions of Emnglish propriety, or prudishness, or perhaps simple manners. Latin is teh key language here, as Haynes notes:

Latin, in particular, was available both to enlarge one's audience in one respect (as when religious controversialists like Luther, Calvin, Milton and many others chose the international language) and to restrict is in another (by excluding the Latin-less from discussions of sensitive matters) ... Latin literature offered writers new literary possibilities, from the magnificence of the high style to the urbanely bawdy. [Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford Univ Press 2003), 19-20]

This utility of Latin outweighs, for Coleridge, the limitations of writing in the language, the way it shifts him back towards Fancy and away from Imagination.