Wednesday 23 December 2015

'National Independence: A Latin Fragment' (1814) Not An Original Coleridge Poem



Hold the front page!  A brief pendant to my previous post, and not really any less dull. J C C Mays includes this 8-line Latin poem in his edition of the Collected Poems, as you can see above, under the title 'National Independence: A Latin Fragment'. It was written in one of STC's Notebooks in 1814, and not reprinted in his life.

The thing is (a) this is not by Coleridge, and (b) when you compare it with the original you can see that it hasn't been transcribed properly from STC's Notebook ('ullum' in that first line should be 'unum'). Lines 1-2
Dignius an vates alios exercuit unum
Femineae virtutis opus?
are from Claudian's Laus Serenae 30: 11-12; they mean 'Did ever the single theme of woman's worth more fitly stir other bards?' The middle section:
Tibi mutua laudes,
Armipotens Virgo, patriae dilecta Deoque,
Tradit Posteritas, semel et succumbere Gallis,
Te victrice, juvat meliores clade Britannos.
is stitched together from various bits and pieces: 'tibi mutua laudes' is Tibullus (Elegies, 3:28); 'te victrice' is also Tibullus (Elegies 7:7); 'patriae dilecta' is a Neo-Latin commonplace, and is also in Claudian's In Rufinum (2:95); the reference to Britannia plays on Claudian's Panegyricus Dictus Manlio Theodoro Consuli, 51 and so on. (The lines mean: 'you are honoured by all and sundry, Armed-and-powerful Virgin, loved both by your country and by God, and all rejoice that the British once yielded to France before your victorious banners, made better by their defeat'). The last three lines are from Claudian's Panegyricus de Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augusti ('Panegyric on the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius'), 98-100:
Illi iustitiam confirmavere triumphi,
Praesentes docuere deos. hinc saecula discant
Indomitum nihil esse pio tutumve nocenti:
This means 'It was those triumphs that set Justice on her throne and taught us all that divine help will be forthcoming. From such victories let the after-ages learn that virtue need fear no enemy and that there is no safe-place for the guilty'. So there you have it: Coleridge's very own Frankenstein poem.

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