'The Changing Year’s Successive Plan'

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “he was changing—not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.” Previously, Johnson had denied the impact of the seasons on the emotions (“imagination operating on luxury”), what we call in some cases “seasonal affective disorder (SAD).” In 1784, the year he would turn seventy-five, Johnson spent July through November in Lichfield, the city of his birth. 

“As November came to Lichfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again,” Bate writes, “he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace’s odes (IV, vii) especially haunted him – the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man.” Johnson’s translation of the ode, composed in Lichfield, is among the last things he ever wrote:

 

“The snow dissolv’d, no more is seen;

The fields and woods, behold! are green;

The changing year renews the plain,

The rivers know their banks again;

The sprightly nymph and naked grace

The mazy dance together trace.

The changing year’s successive plan

Proclaims mortality to man.

Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,

Spring yields to summers sovereign ray;

Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,

And winter chills the world again:

Her losses soon the moon supplies,

But wretched man, when once he lies

Where Priam and his sons are laid,

Is nought but ashes and a shade.

Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,

Will toss us in a morning more?

What with your friend you nobly share,

At least, you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,

When Minos once has fix’d your doom,

Or eloquence, or splendid birth,

Or virtue, shall restore to earth.

Hippolytus, unjustly slain,

Diana calls to life in vain;

Nor can the might of Theseus rend

The chains of hell, that hold his friend.”

 

Johnson would soon leave Lichfield, return to London and die on December 13. Bate writes of Johnson’s version: “Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely.”