Array Anacreon - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 1)

To dare the deep and quench

Love's slow consuming flame.

Urged to the edge

By maddening desire,

I, too, shall fling myself

Imploring thee,

Apollo, lord and king!

Into the chill

Embraces of the sea,

Less cold than thine, O Phaon,

I shall fall—

Fall with the flutter of a wounded dove;

And I shall rise

Indifferent forever to love's dream,

Or find below

The sea's eternal voice,

Eternal peace.

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THE DUST OF TIMAS

This is the dust of Timas! Here inurned

Rest the dear ashes where so late had burned

Her spirit's flame. She perished, gentle maid,

Before her bridal day and now a shade,

Silent and sad, she evermore must be

In the dark chamber of Persephone.

When life had faded with the flower and leaf,

Each girl friend sweet, in token of her grief,

Resigned her severed locks with bended head,

Beauty's fair tribute to the lovely dead.

THE PRIESTESS OF ARTEMIS

Maidens, that pass my tomb with laughter sweet,

A voice unresting echoes at your feet;

Pause, and if any would my story seek,

Dumb as I am, these graven words will speak;

Once in the vanished years it chanced to please

Arista, daughter of Hermocleides,

To dedicate my life in virgin bliss

To thee, revered of women, Artemis!

O Goddess, deign to bless my grandsire's line,

For Saon was a temple priest of thine;

And grant, O Queen, in thy benefic grace,

Unending fame and fortune to his race.

PELAGON

Above the lowly grave of Pelagon,

Ill-fated fisher lad, Meniscus' son,

His father placed as sign of storm and strife

The weel and oar, memorial of his life.

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The Life and Work of Alcman

Desire

The Mountain Summits Sleep

Slumbering are the Mountains

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The name ALCMAN is the Doric for Alcmæon, and the bearer of it was a Laconian from Messoa (circa 615 B.C.). But Athenian imagination could never assimilate the idea of a Spartan being a poet. In the case of Tyrtæus they made the poet an Athenian; in that of Alcman, some chance words in one of his poems suggested that he or his ancestors came from Lydia. Hence a romance -- he was a Lydian, made a slave of war by the wild Kimmerians, and sold across seas to Sparta, where his beautiful songs procured him his freedom. Alcman is very near the Lesbians; he speaks freely in his own person, using the choir merely as an instrument; the personal ring of his love-passages made Archy+̂tas (4th cent. B.C.) count him the inventor of love-poetry; he writes in a fresh country dialect, as Sappho does, with little literary varnish; his personal enthusiasm for the national broth of Sparta is like that of Carlyle for porridge. His metres are clear and simple; and the fragment imitated by Tennyson in In Memoriam shows what his poetry can be: "No more, oh, wild sweet throats, voices of love, will my limbs bear me; would, would I were a ceryl-bird, that flies on the flower of the wave amid the halcyons, with never a care in his heart, the sea-purple bird of the spring!"

His longest fragment is on an Egyptian papyrus, found by Mariette in 1855, and containing part of a beautiful 'Parthenion,' or choir-song for girls. It is a dramatic part-song. When we hear first that Agido among the rest of the chorus is like "a race-horse among cows," and afterwards that "the hair of my cousin Agesichora gleams like pure gold," this does not mean that the 'boorish' poet is expressing his own intemperate and vacillating admirations -- would the 'cows' of the choir ever have consented to sing such lines? -- it is only that the two divisions of the chorus are paying each other compliments. This poem, unlike those of the Lesbians, has a strophic arrangement, and is noteworthy as showing a clear tendency towards rhyme. There are similar traces of intentional rhyme in Homer and Æschylus; 5whereas the orators and Sophocles, amid all their care for euphony in other respects, admit tiresome rhyming jangles with a freedom which can only be the result of unsensitiveness to that particular relation of sounds.

5 Sept. 778 ff., 785 ff.

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Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness, that breathe desire,

See I faint; for no sea-bird I, as I would be, nor tire

Over the foam-flowers flying with halcyons ever on wing,

Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the Spring.

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The mountain summits sleep, glens, cliffs, and caves

Are silent;--all the black earth's reptile brood,

The bees, the wild beasts of the mountain wood;

In depths beneath the dark red ocean's waves

Its monsters rest; whilst, wrapt in bower and spray,

Each bird is hush'd, that stretch'd its pinions to the day.

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Slumbering are the mountains, crest and chasm,

Ravine and precipice,

And every creeping thing on the earth's dark breast,

Beasts in their forest lairs and the tribes of the bees,

And monsters within the depths of the purple seas:

Slumbering too are the birds

Their swift wings laid to rest.

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The Life and Work of Anacreon

The Odes of Anacreon

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No one need defend the character of ANACREON of Teos; though, since he lived in good society to the age of eighty-five, he cannot have been as bad as he wishes us to believe. His poetry is derived from the Lesbians and from the Skolia of his countryman Pythermus. He was driven from Teos by the Persian conquest of 545 B.C.; he settled in Abdêra, a Teian colony in Thrace; saw some fighting, in which, he carefully explains, he disgraced himself quite as much as Alcæus and Archilochus; finally, he attached himself to various royal persons, Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and Echekrates the Aleuad in Thessaly. The Alexandrians had five books of his elegies, epigrams, iambics, and songs; we possess one satirical fragment, and a good number of wine and love songs, addressed chiefly to his squire Bathyllus. They were very popular and gave rise to many imitations at all periods of literature; we possess a series of such Anacreontea, dating from various times between the third century B.C. and the Renaissance. These poems are innocent of fraud: in one, for instance (No. 1), Anacreon appears to the writer in a dream 3; in most of them the poet merely assumes the mask of Anacreon and sings his love-songs to 'a younger Bathyllus.' The dialect, the treatment of Erôs as a frivolous fat boy, the personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are marks of a later age. Yet there can be no doubt of the extraordinary charm of these poems, true and false alike. Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can understand him, and he ripples into music. But the false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon. Compared with them the real Anacreon has great variety of theme and of metre, and even some of the stateliness and reserved strength of the sixth century. Very likely our whole conception of the man would be higher, were it not for the incessant imitations which have fixed him as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian.

3 Cf. 20 and 59.