'Diana Steads Him Nothing, He Must Stay'

For earned emotional intensity, especially coming from a man seldom associated with emotion, you can hardly outdo A.E. Housman, as recounted by one of his students in Richard Perceval Graves’ A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (1979):

 

“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.”

 

Here is Housman’s rendering of Ode VII, Book IV, usually known as “Diffugere Nives”:

 

“The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws

And grasses in the mead renew their birth,

The river to the river-bed withdraws,

And altered is the fashion of the earth.

 

“The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear

And unapparelled in the woodland play.

The swift hour and the brief prime of the year

Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

 

“Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring

Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers

Comes autumn with his apples scattering;

Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

 

“But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar,

Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;

Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are

And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

 

“Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add

The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?

Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had

The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

 

“When thou descendest once the shades among,

The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,

Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,

No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

 

“Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,

Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;

And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain

The love of comrades cannot take away.”

 

Isaac Waisberg, proprietor of IWP Books, has assembled an online collection of 191 translations of “Diffugere Nives,” arranged chronologically from 1557 to 2021. So many versions of a poem composed more than two millennia ago confirms Housman’s judgment. Go here to watch and listen to the American novelist William Maxwell read the ode. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on this date, December 8, in 65 B.C., in Venosa, Italy, and died in Rome on November 27, 8 B.C. at age fifty-six.

 

Isaac appends to his collection of translations Rudyard Kipling’s “On Diffugere Nives”:

 

“If all that ever Man had sung

In the audacious Latin Tongue

Had been lost – and This remained

All, through This might be regained.”

 

Three months after Housman’s reading of Horace’s ode as described above, the Great War started. Included in More Poems, published by Housman’s brother Laurence after the poet’s death in 1936, is this:

 

“Here dead lie we because we did not choose

     To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

     But young men think it is, and we were young.”