Some Seventeenth-Century Latin Poems by English Writers

Some Seventeenth-Century Latin Poems by English Writers Edmund Blunden If even those who possess complete editions of the poets of the seventeenth century do not always explore with passion those parts of them where Latin and sometimes Greek verses are assembled, the gods surely do not grow angry. Such pieces come under the suspicion of being academic exercises, and many of them deserve it; some pretended to nothing more than the complimentary or incidental uses, and we today are hardly to be blamed if we do not spend time in working out their circumstances and catching their witticisms. Another cause for being disinclined to stay long in these areas is the labyrinthine look of much of the writing, and the unweeded garden of the vocabulary; those whose training in classical authors has been at all severe and select must recoil. Again-and this is a bigger thing-we have immediate access to the profusion of English poems from that celestially poetic age, and may reasonably reflect that we shall hardly have done justice to all those delights before we pass beyond present chances of imaginative enjoyment. Weighing such things fully, may we not still enquire occasionally into these collections of verse in acquired language? It is not a final objection that they do not command anything like the admiration given to the earlier Latin poetry of the Christian church. To that abundant poetry with its hymnal majesty, its echoing innovations of rhythm and rhyme, the usual seventeenth-century Latin verse in England was not much related. We may indeed trace to another copious fountain of the older poetry the merry independent mind of Richard Brathwaite, whose early "Barnabae Itinerarium" came out in Milton's days. "The Latinists of the Renaissance," D. B. Thomas has written, "preferred-nay, insisted upon-the metres of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace; but Brathwaite, in spite of Oriel and Pembroke, spumed the over-deliberate, meticulously 10 17TH CENTURY LATIN POEMS 11 finished verses of the Augustans to range himself with the vagrant gnsto of the thirsty Goliards." And well he did it; but so far as my observation goes Brathwaite was an exception. The epigram was a form which kept some of his contemporaries busy, as it had kept St. Thomas More. But these pieces are generally contrivances, and though Thomas Campion was skilful with them his lyrics leave them aside from the genius we seek in him. Of John Owen, who took his station among European writers on the strength of his much more numerous epigrams, I do not now speak; and indeed this topic leads away from my track. Donne's Latin pieces though epigrammatic are few, and mild. The following gives at least an agreeable impression of his personal life: its paradoxing was not such as to bewilder the recipient. The occasion was that Donne had lent a book to a friend, whose children had tom it up; but a transcript was made and sent to Donne. TO MY VERY LEARNED FRIEND. DR. ANDREWS What Printing-presses yield we think good store, But what is writ by hand we reverence more: A book that with this printing-blood is dyed On shelves for dust and moth is set aside, But if 't be penned it wins a sacred grace And with the ancient Fathers takes its place. Tell how, Apollo! children have supplied To this new book old age, how sanctified. No; that the sons of a physician thus Could change its life is not miraculous. If these can make young old, their father's art Might aged me into a youth convert. But old age turns us ancient men (hard truth) All back to children, not one to a youth. Ancient of Days, that's Thy prerogative, Whom seeing, Adam young again doth live. Meantime we'll cheat our slow and weaker hours With books and friendship's heaven-attempting powers; Among which this small book restored by thee Till now so dear, so mine, could never be. Donne himself gave an English version of the Latin lines accompanying his present to George Herbert, with whom my subject at once opens out. This poet was of Westminster School, and Public Orator...