Sunday 10 April 2016

'Latin Lines to William Sotheby' (Sept 1802)



J C C Mays prints this poem as no. 323, and notes that it comes from 'a letter to Sotheby dated 28th Sept 1802', adding: 'C has just imagined or remembered himself walking with the Sothebys in summer ... he goes on to speak in the poem of a meeting Sotheby's fireside':
Frigidus at sylvis Aquilo si increverit, aut si
Hyberni pluviis dependent nubibus Imbres
Nos habeat domus, et multo Lar luceat igne.
Ante focum mihi parvus erit, qui ludat, Iulus,
Blanditias ferat, et nondum constantia verba:
Ipse legam magni tecum monumenta Platonis!

[If the chill north wind blows the woodlands more strongly, or if
wintry showers hang down from the rainy clouds
we'll remain indoors, and let the great fire burn in our hearth.
And before the fire my little one will play, Iulus,
And give us caresses and not-yet fully formed words:
Whilst you and I read together the remains of the great Plato!
]
Very nice, but not Coleridge. It's from a short poem by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Girolamo Fracastoro (Latin: Hieronymus Fracastorius; 1476–1553), called 'Hiems, ad eundem' ('Winter, to the same', that is, addressed to the same person as the previous poem, 'Joannus Baptista Turrianus Veronensus'):


As you can see, Coleridge has picked six from the original twelve lines of this poem, and made one change: Fracastoro's original has him snuggling up to read 'Maronis', which is to say: Vergil (indeed, Fracastoro's opening makes the literary pedigree explicit: 'frigidus et silvis aquilo' is quoted from Vergil, specifically from Georgics 2:403: 'frigidus et silvis aquilo decussit honorem', 'the chill north wind shook the woodland's coronal'). Coleridge changes it to Plato, presumably because he and Sotheby had been working their way through the Greek philosopher together.

Fracastoro was a reasonably famous Renaissance Latin poet. It was his 1539 pastoral poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus ("Syphilis or The French Disease"), about a shepherd boy named Syphilus punished by Sun-god with a ghastly sickness, that gave us the name 'Syphilis' for the notorious sexually transmitted disease. The question is: would we say that Fracastoro is well enough known, especially in his minor works, to mean that Coleridge could reasonably expect Sotheby to recognise these lines? I'm going to say no, and suggest that STC is being naughty here: Sotheby would surely assume that Coleridge himself had written this verse (as Mays, much later, also did). Coleridge certainly does nothing in his letter to disabuse either man of this assumption. And with that in mind, I'm going to finish with the story of Fracastoro's ball:
A marble portrait statue of Girolamo Fracastoro by the Carrarese sculptor Danese Cattaneo (completed 1559) stands on a beautiful arch in the central Piazza dei Signori of Verona, near the monument to Dante Alighieri. On its base is the inscription: "HIER FRACASTORIO \ PAULLI PHILIPPI F \ EX PUBLICA AUCTORITATE \ DICATA \ AN SAL MDLIX". According to a popular legend the stone ball Fracastoro holds in his right hand, symbolizing the world, will fall on the first honorable person to walk under the arch. Over the centuries many people have passed every day under the arch but the ball remains in place.
Here's the statue:



Coleridge could walk under that, no worries.

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