“Metamorphoses” – Ovid, 102
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Tag: “Metamorphoses” – Ovid
April 3, 2020
“Metamorphoses” – Ovid, 101
“Primavera“ (1478)
Sandro Botticelli
_________
a friend expressed some interest in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses recently after I’d sung for
a few moments its praises, had told her I
was revisiting it after some time with the
intention of duly, this time, completing it,
given that, hey, we’ve got lots of time, at
present, all of us, on our hands, by very
mandate
it sounds wonderful, she briefed me after
I’d sent her the appropriate link, but there
are some parts I don’t understand
I’ll help, I said, only too eager to share
the delights of this inprobable treasure,
a gift nearly two thousand years old,
with the magic still of very revelation
Metamorphoses is a creation story, the
equivalent of the Bible for those who
revered the Roman deities, the same
deities that the Greeks revered, but
transplanted, renamed, to Roman
stock, like the Puritans did their
Christian seed at Plymouth Rock
Ovid, 43 BC to 17/18 AD, was a Roman
poet, paying fealty to Augustus, Emperor
of Rome, 63 BC to 14 AD, therefore his
Roman goddesses, gods, and his,
contemporary, Latin
which was translated into English early
in the Renaissance, but found its best
expression, to my mind still, in the
eminent hands of Sir Samuel Garth,
John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph
Addison, William Congreve, among
others in, already, 1717
listen
The Creation of the World
Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ovid is saying my topic is transformation, very
metamorphoses, plural of metamorphosis
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
poets have traditionally called upon their related
muses to inspire them to accomplish their task,
Ovid invokes his Gods, compare Shakespeare’s
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The
brightest heaven of invention, his prologue to
Henry V
“Ye Gods”, Ovid says, “from whom these
miracles did spring”, those everyday wonders
that surround us, inspire me, he asks, that I
might “compleat”, which is to say complete,
his poem, “this long laborious work”
his “numbers” are his years, “coelestial”, or
celestial, “heat”, is inspiration
“tenour to my rimes” means rhythm, weight,
to his poetry
“Nature’s birth”, or the beginning of time, to
“Caesar’s time”, Ovid‘s own period under
Augustus
Ovid asks the Gods to fuel him with the
fire to tell the story of the world from its
very beginning to his own epoch,
Caesar’s
how’s that for a project
enough for now
but stay tuned for, to follow, the Creation,
capital C, I tell you
R ! chard
November 11, 2016
“The Iron Age” – Ovid
“The Age Of Iron“ (1637-1641)
__________
Hard steel succeeded then:
And stubborn as the metal, were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook:
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
Then sails were spread, to every wind that blew.
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new:
Trees, rudely hollow’d, did the waves sustain;
E’re ships in triumph plough’d the watry plain.
Then land-marks limited to each his right:
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone requir’d to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share,
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digg’d from her entrails first the precious ore;
Which next to Hell, the prudent Gods had laid;
And that alluring ill, to sight display’d.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold:
And double death did wretched Man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betray’d,
Now (brandish’d weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands;
No rights of hospitality remain:
The guest, by him who harbour’d him, is slain,
The son-in-law pursues the father’s life;
The wife her husband murders, he the wife.
The step-dame poyson for the son prepares;
The son inquires into his father’s years.
Faith flies, and piety in exile mourns;
And justice, here opprest, to Heav’n returns.
“Metamorphoses“ – Ovid
just saying
Richard
August 11, 2016
to Socrates – on monotheism
“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)
________
by very definition, the inevitable
result of monotheism, Socrates,
is war, if there is one authority it
will eventually be opposed by a
contrary, however picayune,
however trivial, opinion, see the
Protestant Reformation, see Islam,
for instance, now
after which there is disintegration
before Christianity, there were gods,
a pantheon of them symbolically
alive among the rivers, the trees,
the mountains, read Ovid for an
exhilarating description, wars were
waged for territory, not conscience
Judaism, the religion of the Jews,
evolved for their own existence a
deity, Yahweh, who was their one
god, disdainful of foreign others,
an uncharacteristic attitude among
other religions then, becoming one
of the very first monotheistic, and
consequently existentially
compromised faiths, if not the
first
the intent was to rally ideological
support among its adherents so
that they could protect the lands
homes, as they would have it, a
sanctification of the territorial
principle
their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful
work, and the basis for the
Christian Old Testament,
demanded of its followers
unblinking and cruel allegiance,
the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,
a father required to sacrifice his
own son, however might it ‘ve
been at the last minute averted by
the intercession of an angel sent
by that very Lord
Christ came along to turn the other
cheek
which didn’t last long
indeed Montesquieu, an early
philosopher of the French
Enlightenment, tells of the
King’s librarian of Chinese
texts, who had been converted
to Catholicism in China, but
who was nonplussed upon his
arrival in Christian France to find
that the French did not do onto
others as they would have them
do unto themselves, nor did they,
more catastrophically, turn the
other cheek
for that matter see what Christian
Europe did to the Americans
Christ’s own followers, once they’d
achieved political prominence, after,
admittedly, 300 years of persecution
by the prevailing Roman authorities,
set their own deity, God, on high,
indeed beyond the rivers, the
mountains, the trees into the very
ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,
and squelched any opposition for
the next thousand and some years,
the philosophical underpinnings of
which was the work of your
contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his
ideal of the Ideal
Augustine signed those recalibrated
papers with his “City of God“, it took
the Renaissance to make a dent in its
armour, and another several centuries
to declare the Christian God dead,
Time magazine in the ’60s, on the
heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic
pronouncement some 70 years earlier,
that God had exited history
what we are left with, Socrates, is every
wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of
Human Rights, for better or for worse,
otherwise many of us would’ve been
guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned
to death, by now
what do you think
I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every
wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he
believes in, even to inexorable death,
however impractical, unfortunate, or
fateful, if your exemplary life has
anything to say about it
cheers
Richard
March 4, 2016
“Syrinx” – Claude Debussy
“Syrinx“ (1892)
__________
though Debussy would’ve called his
“Syrinx“ “Flûte de Pan”, “Pan Flute”,
alas, the name had already been
taken, he therefore came up with the
much more inspired “Syrinx“
Syrinx, with the help of other nymphs,
who’d come at her cry for help as she
fled the god Pan, a pursuer, had been
turned into a bush of reeds, its canes
producing a song so sweet as to
confound and disarm him, impelling
him to create of them that sublime
instrument
Hermes had been telling Argus, Argus
Panoptes, the giant with the hundred
eyes, the story about the pipes he
was playing, an implement received
from Jove, apparently, god of all the
gods, who wanted him to kill Argus,
for confining Io, who’d been turned
into a heifer by Juno, Jove’s wife,
who’d caught him chasing her, Io’s
plaintive lows had been getting to
Juno as Io fretted unfettered through
the fields too close to Olympus
when Hermes’ music finally closed the
giant’s last two eyes, he beheaded him,
but Juno, in merciful recognition of his
service, however ultimately ineffectual,
set them into the variegated tail of the
peacock
are you kidding me, I always think when
I read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, and am
ever nevertheless entirely enchanted
a flute solo had not been composed in
over 150 years when Debussy composed
at all unimpressive “Sonata in A Minor“
of 1747, it duly set off a new life for the
long overlooked flute, a reed which
Mozart famously didn’t like
note the tonal, rhythmic, and repetition
shifts from the rigid Classical model,
where these are much more strict,
Impressionism was not only breaking
down pictures, the pictorial arts, but its
sound world as well, it was an utterly
new era, new sensibility, new zeitgeist,
and you can feel it, though you might
not be quite able to immediately
verbalize it, the arts were again, as
they ever ‘ve been, the canary in the
gold mine
Richard
psst:
The Transformation of Syrinx into Reeds
Then Hermes thus: A nymph of late there was
Whose heav’nly form her fellows did surpass.
The pride and joy of fair Arcadia’s plains,
Belov’d by deities, ador’d by swains:
Syrinx her name, by Sylvans oft pursu’d,
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
The rural, and the woodland Pow’rs disdain’d;
With Cynthia hunted, and her rites maintain’d:
Like Phoebe clad, even Phoebe’s self she seems,
So tall, so streight, such well-proportion’d limbs:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow:
Distinguish’d thus, the sight she cheated too.
Descending from Lycaeus, Pan admires
The matchless nymph, and burns with new desires.
A crown of pine upon his head he wore;
And thus began her pity to implore.
Whose heav’nly form her fellows did surpass.
The pride and joy of fair Arcadia’s plains,
Belov’d by deities, ador’d by swains:
Syrinx her name, by Sylvans oft pursu’d,
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
The rural, and the woodland Pow’rs disdain’d;
With Cynthia hunted, and her rites maintain’d:
Like Phoebe clad, even Phoebe’s self she seems,
So tall, so streight, such well-proportion’d limbs:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow:
Distinguish’d thus, the sight she cheated too.
Descending from Lycaeus, Pan admires
The matchless nymph, and burns with new desires.
A crown of pine upon his head he wore;
And thus began her pity to implore.
Now while the lustful God, with speedy pace,
Just thought to strain her in a strict embrace,
He fill’d his arms with reeds, new rising on the place.
And while he sighs, his ill success to find,
The tender canes were shaken by the wind;
And breath’d a mournful air, unheard before;
That much surprizing Pan, yet pleas’d him more.
Admiring this new musick, Thou, he said,
Who canst not be the partner of my bed,
At least shall be the confort of my mind:
And often, often to my lips be joyn’d.
He form’d the reeds, proportion’d as they are,
Unequal in their length, and wax’d with care,
They still retain the name of his ungrateful fair.
Just thought to strain her in a strict embrace,
He fill’d his arms with reeds, new rising on the place.
And while he sighs, his ill success to find,
The tender canes were shaken by the wind;
And breath’d a mournful air, unheard before;
That much surprizing Pan, yet pleas’d him more.
Admiring this new musick, Thou, he said,
Who canst not be the partner of my bed,
At least shall be the confort of my mind:
And often, often to my lips be joyn’d.
He form’d the reeds, proportion’d as they are,
Unequal in their length, and wax’d with care,
They still retain the name of his ungrateful fair.
Ovid
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