Odes 1.4

The coming of spring, celebrated in the Song of Songs and universal to the human experience in temperate regions, has Greek literary antecedents in poems by Alcaeus and Leonidas of Tarentum, the latter quoted more than once by Cicero during the civil wars. These poems include references to the Zephyr, frost thawing, flowers blooming, the start of the sailing season, Priapus—and the realm of Tartarus below. although similarly their juxtaposition of nature's cyclical time and the linear life of man, of sorrow at its passing and the implicit injunction to enjoy it while one can with banqueting, wine, and love-making (carpe diem, nunc est bibendum), may make it misleading to call these "spring poems", his readers, steeped in the tradition, can make the connections themselves, identifying the "correspondence between spring and youth". ==Structure==

The cycle of the seasons has its counterpart in the poem's "open-ended" ring composition or chiastic structure, opening with the advent of spring and resumption of activity, through the intrusion of death, to leisurely closure in the promise of sex and renewal. a "12–8 sonnet-like structure", pale death intruding in line 13; structure matching meaning; a "diminuendo" from "the panorama of spring" to the specificity of a "boy-favourite"; expansion outwards from a contrapuntal core; and a "sonic circle". In the 12–8 analysis, the chiastic humans work→gods relax→gods work→humans relax (1–12) is followed by death (13–17) and the hedonistic response of the symposium and love-making (18–20). a pristine and "brilliant landscape"—that happiness is by implication lost. is associated with change, with loss and death in Odes 2.11, 2.18, and 4.7. With pallida Mors, "pale Death", the whiteness of the frost and even the green viridis of the myrtle wreath is reassociated with death; the word viridis may also be used of pallor, as in Appendix Vergiliana, while garlands were used in honouring the dead. but it does not go away; the concluding sympotic scene is in the negative, nec...nec... The long string of present tense verbs, which help situate the disparate activities "in one immediate and unified 'now'", is followed, after the arrival of Death and the "epigrammatic" line 15, by the tension between now and the future, with several verbs in the future for the activities from which Sestius, once brought low, will be excluded, and enjambment to add stress to resolution; "the grammar of the lines mirrors their sense". includes expressive use of hyperbaton, as the dry keels surrounding the winches, siccas machinae carinas, the Graces joined with and embracing the Nymphs, iunctaeque Nymphis Gratiae, the Cyclopes in their weighty workshops, gravis Cyclopum officinas, the head ringed with green myrtle, viridi caput myrto, and Faunus amid the shady groves, umbrosis Fauno lucis. at first the repeated "or"s suggest there is a range of possibilities; ==Metre==

Rather than a "straightjacket", metre is a source of "expressive power" and "poetic significance". Coming after his Satires, in dactylic hexameters and that look to Lucilius, and iambic Epodes, Archilochus and Hipponax their model, Horace's Odes emulate the Greek lyric tradition with its nine canonical poets. Odes 1.4 is in the Third/Fourth Archilochian, in which the first line of each distich (couplet) is in the greater Archilochian (an combination of two different rhythms, comprising a dactylic tetrameter (the first three feet of which may through contraction be a spondee instead of a dactyl) followed by an (three trochees or brevis in longo two followed by a spondee), with a caesura in the third foot and a diaeresis after the tetrameter), the second line an iambic trimeter catalectic (with the first syllable anceps, a spondee substituted for the iamb in the third foot, the final syllable long, and a caesura after the fifth syllable); there is no elision. The only example in the Odes of a poem in this metre, the rotation and alternation of metrical system echo spring's "equivocal nature". In Aristotle's Poetics, dactylic hexameter is "heroic", "the most stately [or "stationary"] and weighty" metre; iambo-trochaic verse, on the other hand, is "kinetic", "expressive of motion". As such, a "metrically literate reader" may be able to feel in Odes 1.4 the "release" as the dactylic tetrameter gives way to the iambo-trochaic. At the same time, "the metrics ... embody an underlying assertion of generic preferences", epic poetry making way for lyric. In the first line, hiems, "winter", is followed by a caesura, a metrical break; after vice, "change", coinciding with the end of the tetrameter, the new metrical system, the ithyphallic, opens with veris, "spring", metre aligned with meaning. In lines 2, 4, and 10, the caesura helps connect adjective with noun, one coming immediately before the mid-line pause, the other the line end. Death's knocking on the pauperum tabernas "hovels of the poor", is matched by the trochaic rhythm. In line 7, the only to start with five long syllables, the "heavy spondaic rhythm" is that of a "simple rustic dance". ==Mythology==

's Primavera: Venus, Cupid in attendance, flanked by Mercury, dancing Graces, Flora, the nymph Chloris, and Favonius/Zephyrus (Galleria degli Uffizi); The poem's mythological plane need not imply religious belief, being operative also as symbolic and linguistic convention, as "poetic code". The myrtle was sacred to her. as the moon doth wax and wane, the winter that gives way to spring will return. while music and dance on like themes may have been a feature of earlier Athenian symposia. The Cyclopes, shepherds in the Odyssey, are thunderbolt-forgers in Hesiod's Theogony, and nymph-scaring smiths toiling away at the "anvils of Hephaestus" in Callimachus. "blazing" or "ardent"—effect for cause Linked also with the Lupercalia, Simultaneously, Faunus' presence "suggests the simple pieties of the Italian countryside". Mors, death personified, is pale—cause for effect—and impartial, striking with his foot—and the "lavish" alliteration and plosive onomatopoeia of p, t, b, and d—the doors of rich and poor alike with the same sound. "Storied" are the Manes, the spirits of the dead, while Pluto's underworld realm and meagre mansion is "insubstantial", oxymoronic play on Plutus, wealth; the adjective used, Plutonia, "more grandiose" than the closest alternative, the genitive Plutonis, is fit for the "sphere of epic and tragedy". ==Mores==

from a tomb in Rome; at the diolkos, cranes, windlasses, rollers, and wheeled sleds may have been used for hauling boats In the almost tideless Mediterranean, it was customary to draw boats—or, pars pro toto, their "keels"—a short distance up out of the water, as encountered at Ostia in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, for shelter from winter storms; manoeuvred onto sleds on wheels or rollers, they could be hauled with pulleys and winches, and propped up on blocks. The grating velar k and g sounds of acris ... rata ... -que ... siccas machinae carinas in the opening couplet, like the cracking ice and creaking cables, give way, with the abundant i sounds of the whistling wind, to the liquid r sounds and softer spirant v and sibilant s sounds of spring. The previous ode, 1.3, purports to be a or "sending-off" poem, wishing Virgil a safe voyage to Greece, though this may be a allegory for his epic venture; following on so closely, the boats we see setting out to sea in spring may be a reference to the start, freshness, and novelty of the Odes. As in the cup of Lethe, the act of drinking is an archetypal symbol of liberation and release; time stands by in the "celebration of the present", In a metapoetic sense, wine is also the source of poetic inspiration, as in Epistles 1.19, where Liber (Bacchus) enlists poets among his fauns and satyrs. Varro is cited by Nonius Marcellus on the subject of the arbiter, magister, or modimperator potandi, the "master of ceremonies" his very name may hint at both the animal and the divine, through the Greek λύκος or "wolf" and the cult practices of Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, the name Lycidas appearing in earlier pastoral poetry with its idealized bucolic and Arcadian escapism, the Idylls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues. As the nautical imagery links with the preceding Ode, the "lyrical eroticism" of the ending connects with the Ode that follows, 1.5, on the topic of love, the final word tepebunt, "warming up", as is the weather, reinforcing the equivalence of spring with youth. ==Addressee==

While the poem's speaker has a relatively undeveloped persona, that of a disinterested if knowing acquaintance of a prominent patrician politician, the character of Sestius is more complex, functioning as he does as a reminder of the closeness of death, even for those in comfortable circumstances, in elevated positions. Many of the bricks are stamped OF (officina, "workshop"), while an amphora stamp found at Cosa, LVC.LV.SE, may even intimate Lyc(idas) was a real person, perhaps a Greek slave or freedman of Lu(cius) Se(stius). ==Reception==

with kylikes (wine cups) on the table and garlanded symposiasts, the elder denoted by his beard, from the Tomb of the Diver at Poseidonia in Magna Graecia The fourth of the twelfth-century Quirinalia of Metellus of Tegernsee begins with the line Solvitur acris hiemps tersa nive persecutionis, "Melteth harsh winter with the snow of persecution wiped away", echoing the incipit of the fourth of Horace's Odes. Eight centuries later, Paul Claudel would write a poem with which to greet spring entitled Solvitur acris hiems. In his search for the sources of Botticelli's Primavera, Aby Warburg noted a close relationship with Poliziano's Rusticus of 1483, vv. 217–221 of which draw in turn on Horace, borrowing alterno terram pede from line 7. In Milton's "Horatian" Sonnet 20 To Mr. Lawrence, there is "conscious imitation". Walter Savage Landor presented a copy of the works of Horace to Robert Browning, annotated in the margins with his own critiques, including, for Odes 1.4, the provocation that the pale death of line 13 "has nothing to do with the above". According to Ezra Pound, the ode's first line alone "has a week's work in it for any self-respecting translator", including at least one day of inspiration. In the translation of the Odes by British Prime Minister Gladstone, published in 1894, the year he left office, in line with Victorian mores, Lycidas goes unnamed, a "needful" disguise of the homoeroticism, a "paraphrase in mitigation". A setting to music of the ode, likely by , may be found in the marginalia to the 1505 Donnino Pinzi Venetian edition of the works of Horace in the . Another was published in 1930, with piano accompaniment, for singing in schools and colleges. ==See also==