GRETA

Echoes XXXIV

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Self portrait Alphonse Mucha, 1897c

A. E. Housman’s translation of Horace’s Ode Diffugere Nives, in More Poems (1936)

“During my time at Cambridge, I attended [Housman’s] lectures for two years. At five minutes past 11 he used to walk to the desk, open his manuscript, and begin to read. At the end of the hour he folded his papers and left the room. He never looked either at us or at the row of dons in the front. One morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered with blossom, he reached in his lecture Ode 7 in Horace’s Fourth Book, ‘Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis.’ This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance, wit, and sarcasm. Then for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in quite a different voice said: 'I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry.’ Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own. 'That,’ he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, 'I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature,’ and walked quickly out of the room. A scholar of Trinity (since killed in the War), who walked with me to our next lecture, expressed in undergraduate style our feeling that we had seen something not really meant for us. 'I felt quite uncomfortable,’ he said. 'I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.'”

Flourish in Radiance

Masao Yamamoto