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AENEAS AMONG THE POETS by Levi Robert Lind ) ') < ROCKY MOUNTAIN KtVIEW 119 AENEAS AMONG THE POETS by Levi Robert Lind* I When Allen Tate writes a poem called "The Mediterranean" which bears the epigraph "Quern das finem, rex magne, dolorum ?" from Vergil's Aeneid (1.241, with the substitution of doiorum for laborum) and as part of its imagery uses the passage in which lulus, the son of Aeneas, suddenly and comically discovers that the Trojans have indeed fulfilled the Harpy Celaeno's prophecy that they were to eat their own tables (7.110-116; cf. 3. 255-257; 365-366) the careful reader is at once placed on the alert. When, further, he notes that Tate has written another poem, this time with the amazing title "Aeneas at Washington," the reader becomes aware of a fascinating process going on in what he is reading. If, extending his gaze, he comes upon Tate's friend and fellow poet, John Peale Bishop, whose Collected Poems Tate edited,1 and reads Bishop's four-part poem "Experience in the West" with its initial picture of Aeneas fleeing from Troy with father Anchises upon his shoulders, certain facts at least, if not their implications, become clear. Finally, assuming that the reader's curiosity has by this time embraced Robert Lowell's "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid," he cannot help but conclude that Vergil's Aeneid has been doing something important in and to the work of three distinguished American poets. But what, exactly, is this something important? Before we approach the question it must be admitted that any answer will be incomplete, if indeed it can be called an answer. We cannot enter the minds of these poets to learn what they have been up to with Vergil, and even they may have forgotten their original motives or may not at this date be able to give us a precise account of them. The rules of the game of literary criticsm prevent us, moreover, from asking the poets themselves to expound their poems. We are faced here with the •LEVI ROBERT LIND has been a University Distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence since 1940. He was a Fulbright research grantee in Rome, Italy in 1954-55, an NIH grantee in history of medicine in 1960-63, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in 1940. He isa prolific author (please see Who's Who, 1976-77 (39th edition). He has also been the Editor of Problemata Varia Anatómica. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948. 120VOL 34. NO 2(SPRING 1980) Aeneas Among the Poets fallacy of intent and with the ordinary hazards of an interpretation that lacks necessary facts. Perhaps all we can say at the moment is twofold: the use of the Aeneid in these poems is integral to them and fundamentally important to their understanding. In the inescapable sense that no part of the material of a work of art is chosen without a serious purpose we can rest assured that whatever has been drawn from Vergil (and its exact extent remains to be measured) is as necessary as every other element in the poems and may well turn out to be the most significant element of all. Our questions are actually threefold. First, what has been drawn from the Aeneid? Second, how has it been used? And, third, what is its purpose? Let us begin with the "The Mediterranean ." What has been used here? It is clear that Tate has described a voyage; for the moment we may assume that it takes place in the Mediterranean. The voyagers have landed, as Aeneas and his men landed (Aeneid 1. 157-173) in a secluded cove on the Libyan coast. Tate's "long bay" is doubtless Vergil's "secessu longo" (159) and his "towering stone" that walls in the bay is Vergil's "vastae rupes geminique. . .scopuli" (162-163). For both poets there is little or no light in the bay; moreover, an unseen breeze had driven both their ships into a haven. Tate's breeze is specific: "unseen but fierce as a body loved,"; the storm of Aeneid, Book 1, has subsided and we can deem probable there the same breeze which is mentioned later as being favorably supplied by Neptune in 7.23: Neptunus ventis implevit vela secundis. At stanza 3 (and I am supposing the reader has a copy of the poem before him) Tate has already brought us to the place where the men of Aeneas devoured their plates (Aeneid 7.110-116). The transition is swift but natural: the two landings in Aeneid 1 and 7 are closely connected by the economy of Vergil's plot, imagery, and structure. Both point toward success, happiness, and the fulfillrnent of a prophecy; they have been telescoped into one by a process familiar to poets. In other words, Tate's voyage thus far (in "a boat," "the small ship") seems to have moved in two directions at once and probably in a third as well. Vivid details such as "the seaweed parted" and "the murmuring shore" probably indicate the low-shelfed coast of Africa but would do perhaps as' well for Italy: the eaten plates so heavily emphasized in stanzas 3, 4, and 5 have forced us, however, to concentrate our gaze upon the second destination. The startling line "Peaked margin of antiquity's delay" in stanza 1, on the contrary, points almost unmistakably to the straits of Gibraltar, beyond which few ancient Mediterranean sailors had ROCK Y.MOUNTAIN REVIEW121 Levi Robert Lind ever ventured: hence "antiquity's delay." The poem seems to shift focus somewhat sharply at stanza 6 after the despairing admission by the speaker of the poem: What prophecy of eaten plates could landless Wanderers fulfill by the ancient sea? The last five stanzas, indeed, are a confession of failure expressed for himself and his company of wanderers. It is as though this failure has forced them to attempt that even more extensive voyage which is the theme of the last three stanzas. The Vergilian material has now been identified. How is it used? Actual experience seems to be fused or merged with an almost racial memory or a cultural tradition in the poet's mind, and the combination leads to exhortation, speculation, and the coming realization of a new experience arising from the old. The reader's eye is directed backward to the Vergilian story and forward to the American reality: the discovery of the New World by a flood of immigrants from the Old. A cultural perspective has been achieved which involves legend and history and which springs from or has been guided by the myth of Troy. The "famous age" of stanza 6 is surely the Trojan, "eternal" but "hidden from our eyes". "When lust of power undid its stuffless rage" seems to picture the sack of Troy while "They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise" may similarly indicate the band of refugees led by Aeneas, who escape to a new happiness and power in a new land. What is the purpose of this use of the Aeneid? Distinguished precedent is not far to seek, as far as theory is concerned. We find it in T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"2 which has had so profound an effect upon modern poetic practice . He speaks there of "the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence ,. . .it is at the same time what makes a writer conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity." Elsewhere Eliot was 2. Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932), p. 4. One may compare also On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), "What Is a Classic?" p. 62: "Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except where there is other history than the history of the poet's own people: we need this in order to see our own place in history. There must be the knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people, and of a people whose civilization is sufficiently cognate to have influenced and entered into our own." 122VOL. 34. NO. 2 (SPRING 1980) to write:3 "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . It is simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." What Tate has done is to draw a parallel between the Trojan flight toward Italy and the European discovery and conquest of America. Perhaps it may be possible also to agree with, for instance, F. Cudworth Flint, who after pointing to the use of Aeneas by Tate and Bishop describes both the Trojans and the two American poets as "descendants of a culture ravaged by the superior material power of its enemies."4 That statement is followed by a large solid page of print which very seriously discusses the relations of industrial monopoly to the economy of the pre-Civil War South and the consequences of victory in that struggle, presumably for their effects upon the poetry of Tate and Bishop. Delmore Schwartz in another much longer discussion5 analyzes the important role which death and the dead play in Tate's poetry. "The dead are the meaning of time in the sense that only the continuity of past and present makes our existence other than animal," he writes; further: "The dead were the source of life and they remain the source of one's habits, memories, and beliefs, of all one possesses, indeed of one's way of life and of the whole civilization in which one is able to breathe and speak. . . Moreover, the past and the dead to whom one belongs go far back. . .to Aeneas, Troy, and the Mediterranean , which is the beginning of our civilization. Such is the continuity of past and present that on a day of festival in a Mediterranean bay one has the sense that one has 'Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore' which made known his fatherland to him, and it is possible, on the other hand, to support that Aeneas at Washington, regarding America, and thinking of the civilization he had begun, 'what we had built her for.' Aeneas is only one of the living dead who remembers that he was ? true gentleman, valorous in arms,/Disinterested and honorable,' and one of the Confederate dead is 3.In his review of Joyce's Ulysses: "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," The Dial, 75 (1923), 483. 4."Five Poets," The Southern Review 1 (1936), 650-674; the pertinent passages appear at pp. 661-662. 5."The Poetry of Allen Tate," The Southern Review 5 (1940), 419-438; see pp. 432-433. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW123 Levi Robert Lind another one. . ." (He is, of course, quoting "Aeneas at Washington.") Both Flint and Schwartz therefore see Tate as a poet whose sense of tradition in his region of America links his thoughts and the order he imposes upon his experience (along the lines T. S. Eliot has described) with both the Civil War and with Troy itself. While Flint underlines the influence of Eliot in Bishop's poetry Schwartz summarizes Tate's position in the following words: "He is a Southerner; an intellectual much concerned with literary , cultural, and historical problems; an American critical of the domination of finance — capitalism and industrialism; a Western man who recognizes the origin of his culture, even of the very language he speaks, in the Mediterranean, and yet who remains at the same time wholly conscious of his own age, the twentieth century." It is from this position that Tate has exemplified in his poetry the truth of Eliot's lines: Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past. Certainly it is a deep consciousness of the difference between absolute time and relative or psychological time as part of man's consciousness of history which has made him write And we went there out of time's monotone. I had reached this point in the search for answers to my questions when I discovered R. K. Meiners' reading of the poem.6 It was encouraging to find myself in general agreement with his conclusions as to the threefold levels of the poem: literal description , of setting, reference to activities in the Aeneid, and the symbolism of a cultural and historical situation. He has been helpful in such matters as Tate's habit of forcing disparate concepts violently together and his use of such words as "derelict" and "privacy," which Meiners interprets as referring to "the estrangement of the historically minded man from a meaningful tradition" and "piracy" as "seizing the past with a lustful violence ." The last four stanzas of "The Mediterranean" in his view are denunciatory of the lack of historical imagination which characterizes the modern mind. Mr. Meiners says bluntly: "The 6. "The Art of Allen Tate: a Reading of 'The Mediterranean'," University of Kansas City Review 27 (1960), 155-159; the passages quoted appear at pp. 158-159. 124VOL 34. NO 2 (SPRING 1980) Aeneas Among the Poets present can have no significance unless it is understood in the light of the past." His explanation of Tate's lines When lust of power undid its stuffless rage; They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise may be correct as far as the allusion here to Homer, Odyssey, 10. 28-55 and the fateful loosing by Odysseus' comrades of the bag of winds Aeolus had given him is concerned. He writes: "Contemporary man has brought a storm upon himself as surely as if he had opened the wineskin which carried the winds: in seeking to transcend nature, he has forgotten that man is a limited being; in forgetting this, he has cut himself off from an aspect of the Christian tradition which can inform and give sense to Western culture." Mr. Meiners concludes that Tate's myth is "a warning to modern culture that it has forsaken too much of that past which has made its culture; it has forsaken too much of a truly human vision of man."7 II I turn now to "Aeneas at Washington." Here we come much closer to the Trojan saga as well as to Aeneid, Book 2, from which come almost all the details of the early lines of Tate's poem. The first four lines are in fact a literal translation of Aeneid. 2. 499-502. The historical parallels reappear in even sharper outline. They concentrate on the figure of Aeneas himself as a focus for the poet's thoughts. Troy and America, the past and the present, civilization and barbarism, the fields of Troy and those of the American South, with its "tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass," form the subject matter. Aeneas, who is both himself and 7. The best article I have seen on the subject, although it covers more than the two poems discussed here, is Lillian Feder's "Allen Tate's Use of Classical Literature," Centennial Review 4 (1960), 89-114. Her interpretation follows lines already established in other analyses but with additional detail and more breadth. Her explanation of Tate's substitution of dolorum for laborum in the epigraph to "The Mediterranean" is ingenious: "When Aeneas prays for an end to his laborum, he is asking for respite from the suffering involved in completing the heroic task of founding the Roman nation, which exacts a price of pain but offers the reward of self-fulfillment. Modern man, however, deprived of a heroic goal, a virtutis opus, can only cry out for an end to his dolorum, his grief or mental anguish. The difference, of course, lies not only in the quality of ancient and modern men, but in the societies in which they live (p. 93). I may point out that one of the meanings of the Latin word ¡abor is indeed suffering as well as exertion; Tate seems to have been exaggerating to avoid confusion in substituting dolorum. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW125 Levi Robert Lind a Confederate officer, has saved little from his former world in the New World except his memory and "love of past things." The towers of Troy are part of his vision as he gazes at the city of Washington in a rainy nightfall where the Capitol dome shines upon the water of the Potomac river and he thinks of Troy — "what we had built her for." The human mind, imperishable as time in the continuity of human civilization, is a part of what Aeneas has rescued from Troy. But now looking upon the Capitol of the American nation he looks back as well at Troy and reflects upon the decline from excellence and the diminution of passion which mark the years which have brought him to new shores. There is a deep sense of loss, the loss of a glory which had once been worth fighting for. There is also in the reflections of Aeneas that despair which assails the superior mind as "civilization/ Run by the few fell to the many." And why Aeneas at Washington and not some other city or region in America? Doubtless because Washington, geographically part of the South but a symbol of the country as a whole, is the best vantage point for his reflections, as he looks backward both to Troy and to the antebellum South, both with their ideals and cultural heritage now destroyed. Ill John Peale Bishop is closely related to Tate in thinking and imagery in his contribution to the group of poems which has given rise to this essay. "The Burning Wheel" is the first of a series of four short connected lyrics and employs once more the flight of Aeneas (in "shallow ships") as its basic image. Anchises, the old father of Aeneas, who had been the beloved of Aphrodite, is shown here also, "A dotard recollection had made mad," and is perhaps the central Vergilian image in the poem. Bishop'ssailors also climb ashore near woods and this time meet "by the streams savage ambassadors." Vergil is used here chiefly for a parallel since there is no doubt that the shore is that of America and the ambassadors are Indians. The mood is happy: first, Anchises wears "the look of one who young/ Had closed with Love in cloudy radiance;" the mariners are "discoverers;" their experience is early in the poem called "O happy, brave and vast adventure!" The ripened wild grapes of the shore are here as "the grapes sweeter than muscadine" are present in Tate's "The Mediterranean." The final point of Tate's poem: "in that land were we born" is made also by Bishop: 126VOL 34. NO 2 (SPRING 1980) Aeneas Among the Poets They, too, the stalwart conquerors of space, Each on his shoulders wore a wise delirium Of memory and age: ghostly embrace Of fathers slanted toward a western tomb. It was foretold in the Aeneid 3.163 ff. that Aeneas and his men would be actually fleeing westward to what had been originally in the legendary past the birthplace of the Trojan people; hence they were returning in effect to the western tomb of their forefathers . To the aristocratic Southern mind ancestors and genealogy mean much; and when they are coupled with a distinguished cultural tradition ancestors are even more precious. Bishop's final question is rhetorical as was Tate's "What country shall we conquer, what fair land/ Unman our conquest and locate our blood?" Bishop asks: A hundred and a hundred years they stayed Aloft, until they were as light as autumn Shells of locusts. Where then were they laid? And in what wilderness oblivion? What has happened to the ancient ancestors after two hundred years of experience in the West (Vergil's "Hesperia"), the brief temporal occupation of America? They have blown away like the shells of locusts. But his poem, as it proceeds into the parts called Green Centuries, Loss in the West, and O Pioneers, gives us much more of the American experience. "The long man strode apart" as the American backwoodsman strode through the "green wilderness" unconscious of time that lacks fulfillment, of "Time [that] dreams eternity". The wilderness is mindless, savage ; it has no tradition "When every day dawned Now" and there was nothing to look back upon: "In green no soul was found". The pioneer was doomed to failure, to "Loss in the West." He had his day, with the wild pigeon, the turkey, the destruction of a bright and teeming wilderness: The man in the coonskin cap. His curse is a sneer. He has had his day. Yet he pursues his confused dream: What? Wheel of the sun In heaven? The west wind? Or only a will To his own destruction? With IV, O Pioneers! Bishop's Trojan-American has moved far ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW127 Levi Robert Lind westward to the deserts, upon his "father's footsteps." The crazed prospector for gold whose "way is lost to fortune" is the pathetic end-product of the Eastern American pioneer and Indian fighter. "Skeletons and skulls in some daft scheme" now enter the imagery of the poem, and it ends with an almost prophetic note of despair for the despoiled environment, in fact an ecological lament: A continent they had To ravage, and raving romped from sea to sea. Troy's prophecy, the brave voyage, the old man on Aeneas' shoulders, the hope that life could begin anew in that western homeland to which they were only returning have come to this. IV With Robert Lowell's "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" we come to a much different use of the Aeneid. The epigraph tells us the plot of the poem: An old man in Concord forgets to go to Morning Service. He falls asleep, while reading Virgil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince. We have no voyage here, no eager anticipation of a bright new future, no pioneers. The old man in Concord, the birthplace of American patriotism and literature, reads the Vergilian epic poem alone in the twilight of his life, at home on Sunday morning when he should have been at church. The yellow-hammers outside his window are making loud noises as he falls asleep and sees in a dream the body of Pallas, son of Evander, being brought home to his father for burial in Aeneid 11. 29-99. As Lowell's heroic couplets roll on with their clipped and solemn beat the captives who are to be slaughtered on the pyre of Pallas dance in the yellow fire, caught, as the last conscious impression of the old man before he falls asleep, from the yellowhammer 's plumage. Scythe-wheeled chariots (not in Vergil and certainly an anachronism) pass by as the thousand men (Aeneid 11. 61) chosen by Aeneas as an honor-guard carry the body of the beloved young man, who resembles Patroklos in the Iliad. The old man (now become Aeneas himself) holds the sword with which Dido had killed herself, Aeneas' own sword. It turns, as things easily do in dreams, into a bird which had Dido's swordrent breast. The bird-priest (augur, etymologically, "birdshower ") chirps Punic; Dido dissolves into the priest and speaks to Aeneas: 128VOL. 34. NO 2 (SPRING 1980) Aeneas Among the Poets O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life. In Hades she had met Aeneas once more; to enter there she had to die and thus become a living ghost. Yellow-hammers to sword to bird-like Dido to bird-priest is the progression of this dreamsequence . There is no transition in dreams; one picture suddenly gives way to another. In the next His harlots hang his bed With feathers of his long-tailed birds. His head Is yawning like a person. The plumes blow; The beard and eyebrows ruffle. The male servants of Pallas (an obsolete but perfectly proper use of the word harlot) decorate his bier in Vergil with twigs, boughs, arid flowers. The transformation of bird to priest and then to Pallas is not quite complete. The head that yawns in death like a person has plumes as well as beard and eyebrows. Aeneid 11. 67-71 follows in my translation:8 They placed him high on this rustic Bed, like a flower plucked off by a virgin's thumb, Whether soft violet or drooping hyacinth, The bloom not yet lost and all its beauty unfaded Although mother earth (mater. . .tellus) no longer strengthens or feeds it. Lowell transmutes this passage into his own beautiful lines, not so much translating as transforming: Face of snow, You are the flower that country girls have caught. A wild bee-pillaged honeysuckle brought To the returning bridegroom — the design Has not yet left it, and the petals shine; The earth, its mother, has, at last, no help: It is itself. There is in the words "returning bridegroom" and "design" the motivation for the next "passage, where Lowell follows Vergil 8. Vergil's Aeneid: Translated with Introduction and Notes (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1963). Line numbers to both the Latin and English texts are provided in the heading and margin of the book. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW129 Levi Robert Lind closely (Aeneid 1 1 . 72-84). Dido had regarded Aeneas as her bridegroom and had made two robes for him with embroidered designs; again my translation: Then Aeneas brought forward twin garments stiff with embroidered Purple and gold, which Dido of Sidon had made Once with her own hands, pleased with her labor for him, Dividing the web with gold thread. He placed one of these sadly Round the young man as a final honor; part of it He used to cover the hair that was soon to burn. Many besides of the spoils from Laurentian battle He piled up with the booty and ordered to be led forward In a long line, adding horses and weapons which he had Stripped from the foe. Then he tied the hands of the captives (Whom he was to slay in sacrifice to the spirits Below earth) behind their backs, now ready to scatter Their blood on the pyre. Lowell sticks closer to the Latin in his next transformation of Vergil, which follows almost immediately after the passage ending "It is itself.": But I take his pall, Stiff with its gold and purple, and recall How Dido hugged it to her, while she toiled, Laughing — her golden threads, a serpent coiled In cypress. Now I lay it like a sheet; It clinks and settles down upon his feet, The careless golden hair that seemed to burn Beforehand. Left foot, right foot — as they turn, More pyres are rising: armored horses, bronze, And gagged Italians, who must pass by ones Across the bitter river, when my thumb Tightens into their wind-pipes. There are little touches that meet the eye in Lowell's handling. A gold-worked robe (see Aen. 11. 72) is laid upon Pallas; his hair becomes yellow (Vergil does not specify) perhaps because yellow seems to color Lowell's entire poem: the yellow-hammers, yellow fire which "blankets the captives", the "bee-pillaged honeysuckle ," the golden threads of the robe, the yellow nostril hairs of Uncle Charles, even the yellow sunshine of the Sunday morning which falls blue and scarlet on the old man's page as he reads, perhaps due to a prismatic effect given by the window pane. Dido's delight with her handiwork is faithfully retained from 130VOL. 34. NO. 2 (SPRING 1980) Aeneas Among the Poets Vergil. Best of all is the way the Latin text survives in the "golden hair that seemed to burn/ Beforehand." (arsurasque comas). Pallas now lies in his burial hammock: Now the car's Plumage is ready, and my marshals fetch His squire, Acoetes, white with age, to hitch Aethon, the hero's charger, and its ears Prick, and it steps and steps, and stately tears Lather its teeth; and then the harlots bring The hero's charms and baton — but the King, Vain-glorious Turnus, carried off the rest. Here is Vergil, lines 85-90, in my translation: Unlucky Acoetes, Worn out with age, was led in procession, defiling Now his breast with fists and now his face with his nails. He fell, and his entire body lay stretched on the ground. They drove chariots stained with Rutulian blood. Behind them walked Aethon, the war horse, his trappings removed; He wept, and his features grew wet with abundant tears. Other men carried his spear and his helmet; the rest Turnus the victor possessed. What Lowell has done to these lines is to sort out the significant details and abandon the rest. What is most touching in them is the tears of Pallas' horse, borrowed in turn by Vergil from Homer's Iliad, where the horses of Achilles weep for the dead Patroclus (17. 426 ff.). It lacrimans — the horse goes weeping, Vergil writes. There follows a short speech by the ghost of Pallas in Lowell's text: ? was myself, but Ares thought it best The way it happened.' Presumably this is a reply to his father Evander's sad words as he looks at his son's corpse: O Pallas, not this was the promise you gave to your father Who begged you to trust yourself cautiously to savage Mars. (Aeneid 11. 152-3) At this point Aeneas sees his descendants "climb the knees of Father Time" and looks into the future to discern Hannibal crossing the Alps toward Italy. Then follows Aeneas' farewell to Pallas: ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW131 Levi Robert Lind 'Pallas,' I raise my arm And shout, 'Brother, eternal health. Farewell Forever.' This echoes closely the "salve aeternumque vale" of Vergil (11. 97-98). The old man's dream is broken by the sound of church bells as the congregation goes home to Sunday dinner. Still in the grip of his strange experience, he discovers that in his dream, so closely patterned on Vergil's Aeneid, he has re-enacted the funeral of his Uncle Charles forty years ago, no doubt through the vision of his mother's great aunt who had disturbed him from his reading of Vergil when the old man was a boy and sent him off to Sunday school: 'Boy, it's late. Virgil must keep the Sabbath.' There before him in his coffin lies Uncle Charles, the hero of his family and a leader of colored volunteers in the Civil War, dead with his regimental colors, like the robe of Pallas, upon him. "Blue-capped and bird-like," that is, with the blue cap of a Union officer upon his head. Uncle Charles is at once Pallas and the Italian augur. The little boy who is now an old man stands staring while the stuffed birds above the shelf where Vergil's book stands under the bust of the Emperor Augustus in the family parlor or study merge in the old man's dream with the birds of the Vergilian scene until reality returns, with the yellowhammers raging as they mate, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, outside in the sunshine of a Sunday noon. The poem, as we can see, is both a re-creation and in part a translation of a passage from the Aeneid as well as a glimpse of biography set forth in an old man's dream. It could not have been written without the help of Vergil, something we must say also for the first three poems discussed. All four poems are a notable testimony to the re-vivifying powers of Classical poetry and an instructive demonstration in their separate ways of modern techniques of poetry applied to traditional material, the literary inheritance of educated Americans. Aeneas seems to be entirely at his ease among the poets of our day. 132VOL. 34. NO. 2 (SPRING 1980) ...

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