'The Dead World's Much Too Crowded'

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.” 

Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives and oldest friends are dead – the unhappy price paid for longevity. As Dr. Johnson describes grief in The Idler (January 27, 1759):

 

“The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

 

The line quoted at the top is from “Letter to Horace After Reading Ode i.24” by a poet new to me, Tamara Nicholl-Smith, and published in Modern Age. The poem is dedicated to David Solomon. She addresses the Roman poet as she might a friend:

 

“Horace, I must confess, you’ve managed to surprise

Me. I had thought there were too many centuries

Between us—that your verse would sound like dusty, sighs;

Nothing that would please.”

 

Nicholl-Smith endorses a notion commonly dismissed: a writer born millennia ago can still speak to us, often more potently than contemporaries. “Despite our progress, pain is pain. / And Death, in any age, won’t give back what he reaps.” The next line in the fourth stanza, “Our loss remains his gain,” sounds like an echo from Bob Dylan’s "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest": “My loss will be your gain.”

 

Horace’s Ode i.24 is dedicated to Virgil. David Ferry’s translation (Of No Country I Know, 1999) begins: “How should this grief be properly put into words?” It concludes:

 

“It is hard. But all of this must be endured,

And by endurance what can never be changed

Will be at last made easier in the heart.”