'Under the Same Architrave'

Architrave entered English in Shakespeare’s day by way of Latin and Italian. It describes the bottom portion of an entablature, the horizontal lintel resting on columns or a wall in classical architecture, below the frieze and cornice. Think of it as a beam, a load-bearing member. Milton uses the word in Paradise Lost -- “Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave” – when describing Satan’s palace in Pandemonium. A synonym is epistyle.

 

With time, the word took on a secondary meaning, strictly ornamental: the molding that surrounds a doorway or window. Walter Savage Landor uses the word in an untitled epigram, probably in the original sense:

 

“The gates of fame and of the grave

Stand under the same architrave.”

 

During his lifetime, Landor was better known for his prose work Imaginary Conversations (1823-29) than for his poetry. His “fame” was limited and I suspect he is hardly read today. Landor is one of numerous writers in need of literary resuscitation. His epigrams are the stylistic link in English between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham. He wrote as a classicist, including verse in Latin, and much of his poetry is tart and “load-bearing,” not ornamental. Here is another epigram, a sort of revengeful love poem:

 

“Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak

Four not exempt from pride some future day.

Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek

Over my open volume you will say,

‘This man loved me!’ then rise and trip away.”

 

Landor was born on this date, January 30, in 1775 and died in 1864 at age eighty-nine.