Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Horace’s Epodes

In 1929 Edmund Blunden drew attention to several echoes of Horace, most notably the Epodes, in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” on the basis of which he suggested that we might “almost” be justified in imagining “that Keats had his Horace in his hand that day when he sat under the plum tree at Lawn Bank, and presently began to write.”¹ No one seems to have been much impressed by Blunden’s Horatian addition to Charles Brown’s famous picture of Keats at work.² The aim of this note is to demonstrate that Keats did have Horace’s Epodes on his mind when he wrote “Ode to a Nightingale,” and to ask why this might be so. What does Horace’s early miscellany of iambic poems—including political jeremiads; obscene invectives; love poems; and satirical sketches on usurers, upstarts, and witches—have to do with Keats’s famous ode? The answer I will supply is compounded of information and interpretation. My information involves the medical dimension of the Epodes. Scholars such as Donald Goellnicht and Hermione de Almeida have drawn attention to the impress of “the world of Tom’s deathbed and the wards of Guy’s Hospital” on the nightingale ode and the richly textured pharmacological discourse in which it participates;³ as we will see, the book of Epodes is marked by a similar preoccupation with disease and medication. My interpretation centers on the oblique intensity of Keats’s response to the fourteenth epode in particular.

Anyone reading Horace at the turn of the nineteenth century would have been as familiar with the Epodes as with the Odes.⁴ For Keats, the collection would have been peculiarly interesting, studded as it is with allusions to disease: pains, fevers, and potions both poisonous and medicinal. The fourteenth epode—the crucial one, to which Keats’s opening lines are indebted—associates the poet’s indolence with the consumption of a narcotic brew (Pocula Lethaeos … ducentia somnos, 14.3). The third epode depicts him in the throes of acute indigestion after a meal heavily laced with “garlic, more noxious than hemlock” (cicutis allium nocentius, 3.3); “What poison is this,” Horace hyperbolically wonders, “raging in my abdomen?” (Quid hoc veneni saevit in praecordiis?, 3.5). The fifth epode features witches hard at work on a complicated potion. Canidia, their ringleader, claims to be an expert botanist (“no plant, no root lurking in rough terrain, has eluded my hands,” nec herba, nec latens in asperis / Radix fefellit me locis, 5.67–68), yet her latest concoction has unaccountably failed to achieve its intended effect; her new recipe involves starving a little boy to death and then using his dessicated marrow and liver to concoct what will surely be a reliably effective “love potion” (Amoris … poculum, 5.38).

Elsewhere we find Horace self-diagnosing and even self-medicating. In the eleventh epode he recollects a bout of erotic distress during which he longed for an upsurge of bile (bilis, 11.16) to scatter the “poultices that don’t ease my painful wound at all” (Fomenta, vulnus nil malum levantia, 11.17); while the nature of these “poultices” remains mysterious, what matters here is the image’s distinctly medicinal color. In the ninth epode, on the eve of the decisive battle of Actium, he calls for wine to check his rising nausea (quod fluentem nauseam coërceat, / Metire nobis Caecubum, 9.35–36), and in the thirteenth he recommends the same cure (coupled with poetry) to his anxious compatriots, citing Chiron’s advice to Achilles before his departure for Troy: “there ease every pain with wine and song” (Illic omne malum vino cantuque levato, 13.17; cf. the poultices nil malum levantia of the eleventh epode).

But it is in the seventeenth epode, the collection’s final poem, that the medical theme really comes into its own. Here Horace represents himself as ravaged and utterly reduced by Canidia’s spells and concoctions (17.21–26):

Fugit juventas, et verecundus colorReliquit ossa, pelle amicta lurida:Tuis capillus albus est odoribus.Nullum a labore me reclinat otium...