“The Transformation of Cycnus into a Swan” – Ovid
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Tag: the Chariot of the Sun
August 2, 2020
Story of Phaeton (VIII) – Ovid
the initial page of the Peterborough Chronicle (14th Century CE)
___________
Jove call’d to witness ev’ry Pow’r above,
And ev’n the God, whose son the chariot drove,
That what he acts he is compell’d to do,
Or universal ruin must ensue.
had Dryden applied commas above,
as I am, you might’ve noted, nearly
compulsively wont to do, commas
being a significant part of my religion,
the verses might’ve been more easily
understood, put a comma after
witness and the object of the
witnessing, in this case an entire
independent clause, That what he
acts he is compell’d to do, finds its
natural position, clarity, Jove has to
do, he says, what Jove has to do
I cannot too much blame Dryden for
this literary indiscretion, this peccadillo,
to my mind, for punctuation has been
an evolving thing, there was a time
when there was no punctuation at all,
not even spaces between the words,
see above, this translation, of 1717,
stands somewhere within the gamut
of our ever evolving English grammar
the God, meanwhile, whose son the
chariot drove, in, above, the second
pentameter, is Phoebus / Apollo,
Phaeton‘s father
Strait he ascends the high aetherial throne,
Jove does
From whence he us’d to dart his thunder down,
From whence his show’rs and storms he us’d to pour,
But now cou’d meet with neither storm nor show’r.
Jove, being rendered impotent by the
raging fires, the immutable trajectory
of the very Sun having been
catastrophically, however improbably,
distorted, is left, at that time, or Then,
as the next line starts up, with no
option
Then, aiming at the youth, with lifted hand,
Full at his head he hurl’d the forky brand,
In dreadful thund’rings.
forky brand, a forklike piece of burning
wood, Jove’s trident
Thus th’ almighty sire
Suppress’d the raging of the fires with fire.
I’m reminded of the planned explosions
at the mouth of the oil wells in Kuwait,
wellheads, after the Gulf War, that were
meant to still for a critical moment the
fires, that would otherwise burn out
of control, in order to squelch the
disastrous conflagrations
At once from life and from the chariot driv’n,
Th’ ambitious boy fell thunder-struck from Heav’n.
The horses started with a sudden bound,
And flung the reins and chariot to the ground:
The studded harness from their necks they broke,
Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke,
Here were the beam and axle torn away;
And, scatter’d o’er the Earth, the shining fragments lay.
The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair,
Shot from the chariot, like a falling star,
That in a summer’s ev’ning from the top
Of Heav’n drops down, or seems at least to drop;
‘Till on the Po his blasted corps was hurl’d,
corps, body, from the French, or
corpse
the Po, a river in Italy
Far from his country, in the western world.
one wonders, however, what happened
to the Earth, the Chariot of the Sun,
upon their fiery interaction, perhaps
the Sun, fallen behind the horizon,
beyond the western oceans, set out
again, the following morning, with its
usual master, Phoebus / Apollo, at
its steady reins, for the world to
see again another day under that
lord’s august intervention
R ! chard
July 19, 2020
The Story of Phaeton (VI) – Ovid
“Mountain Fire“ (c.1903 – c.1908)
John Singer Sargent
_________
because Phaeton was light, nor cou’d
he fill the seat, the horses he would’ve
controlled forsake / Their stated course,
and leave the beaten track
What cou’d he do? his eyes, if backward cast,
Find a long path he had already past;
If forward, still a longer path they find:
Both he compares, and measures in his mind;
And sometimes casts an eye upon the east,
And sometimes looks on the forbidden west,
note the description of the movement
of the eyes, backward, forward, east
and west, uncontrolled, erratic, nearing
madness, despite attempts, however
futile, to remain rational, steady, his
very mind, comparing, measuring, is
quickly losing its bearings
forbidden, once again, this should
probably read forbidding
The horses’ names he knew not in the fright,
Nor wou’d he loose the reins, nor cou’d he hold ’em right.
“Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now,
Prancer, and Vixen! / “On, Comet!
On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen!,
who drove another of the very few
famous chariots in our Western
cultural history
couldn’t help it
the only other one I could think of
is that of the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse, red, white, black,
and pale horses, which I won’t get
into, but to say that they have no
names
the horses who drove the Chariot of
the Sun, meanwhile, were called
Phlegon, Aeos, Aethon, and Pyrios,
though I fully admit that I had to
look those up, then again I’ve never
had to ride the Chariot of the Sun
it appears that Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo had other steeds in his stable
as well, for a rainy day, but they don’t
feature in this particular story
Now all the horrors of the Heav’ns he spies,
And monstrous shadows of prodigious size,
That, deck’d with stars, lye scatter’d o’er the skies.
lye, lie
There is a place above, where Scorpio bent
In tail and arms surrounds a vast extent;
Scorpio, the constellation Scorpius,
visible only in the Southern hemisphere
Scorpio, represented by a scorpion,
thus has eight legs, or arms, and a
highly distinctive tail
In a wide circuit of the Heav’ns he shines,
And fills the space of two coelestial signs.
coelestial, celestial
Soon as the youth beheld him vex’d with heat
Brandish his sting, and in his poison sweat,
Half dead with sudden fear he dropt the reins;
vex’d with heat, from the wayward
chariot, Scorpio [b]randish[es]
his sting
poison sweat, Scorpio, under the
influence of the heat, sweat[s],
exudes, produces, characteristically,
poison
The horses felt ’em loose upon their mains,
mains, manes, long hair
And, flying out through all the plains above,
Ran uncontroul’d where-e’re their fury drove;
Rush’d on the stars, and through a pathless way
Of unknown regions hurry’d on the day.
hurry’d on the day, kept the day going
at its usual, however presently pathless,
or uncharted, pace
And now above, and now below they flew,
And near the Earth the burning chariot drew.
ever, and increasingly, ominously
The clouds disperse in fumes, the wond’ring Moon
Beholds her brother’s steeds beneath her own;
wond’ring, confused, puzzled
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
The highlands smoak, cleft by the piercing rays,
Or, clad with woods, in their own fewel blaze.
smoak, smoke
fewel, fuel
where the highlands are clad with
woods, they blaze in the fires
consuming their own trees
Next o’er the plains, where ripen’d harvests grow,
The running conflagration spreads below.
But these are trivial ills: whole cities burn,
And peopled kingdoms into ashes turn.
an apocalypse
The mountains kindle as the car draws near,
the car, the chariot
Athos and Tmolus red with fires appear;
Athos, Mount Athos, Tmolus, Mount
Tmolus, both mountains in Greece,
both named after mountain gods
Oeagrian Haemus (then a single name)
Haemus Mons, an early name for
the Balkan Mountains
Oeagria, Agria, a town in Greece
And virgin Helicon increase the flame;
Helicon, Mount Helicon, notable for
being the home of the Muses
Taurus and Oete glare amid the sky,
Taurus, the Taurus Mountains, a
mountain range in southern Turkey
Oete, Mount Oeta, a mountain in
Central Greece
And Ida, spight of all her fountains, dry.
Eryx and Othrys, and Cithaeron, glow,
And Rhodope, no longer cloath’d in snow;
High Pindus, Mimas, and Parnassus, sweat,
And Aetna rages with redoubled heat.
spight, in spite
Ida, Eryx, Othrys, Cithaeron, Rhodope,
Pindus, and the more familiar Parnassus,
and Aetna, or Etna, are all mountains, or
ranges, in the Mediterranean, Mimas, an
island there, which is to say, a partially
submerged mountain, all of them
sweltering
see above
Ev’n Scythia, through her hoary regions warm’d,
Scythia, a region northeast of Ancient
Greece, barbarian to the more cultured
people of Greek Antiquity, coarse
forebears of the Cossacks
hoary, sullied white, tired, withered
In vain with all her native frost was arm’d.
even so frosty a region as Scythia
was not immune to, arm’d against,
the running conflagration
Cover’d with flames the tow’ring Appennine,
And Caucasus, and proud Olympus, shine;
And, where the long-extended Alpes aspire,
Now stands a huge continu’d range of fire.
the Appennine, Caucasus, Olympus,
and Alpes, or Alps, are all mountain
ranges throughout Europe, the
representative part then of the
known world
Th’ astonisht youth, where-e’er his eyes cou’d turn,
Beheld the universe around him burn:
The world was in a blaze; nor cou’d he bear
The sultry vapours and the scorching air,
Which from below, as from a furnace, flow’d;
And now the axle-tree beneath him glow’d:
Lost in the whirling clouds that round him broke,
And white with ashes, hov’ring in the smoke.
He flew where-e’er the horses drove, nor knew
Whither the horses drove, or where he flew.
R ! chard
July 11, 2020
The Story of Phaeton (IV) – Ovid
“Dawn“ (1873)
Fyodor Vasilyev
_______
Thus did the God th’ unwary youth advise;
Helios / Phoebus / Apollo tells his
son Phaeton, th’ unwary youth,
that he shouldn’t try to ride the
Chariot of the Sun himself
But he still longs to travel through the skies.
Phaeton, however, is inclined to
disregard his father’s advice
When the fond father (for in vain he pleads)
At length to the Vulcanian Chariot leads.
Vulcanian, of Vulcan, god of fire,
metal, metalworkers
Vulcan, according to Ovid here,
built the Chariot of the Sun
A golden axle did the work uphold,
the axle is the principal part, the
beam between the wheels, that
holds the chariot together, that
did the work, which is to say
the chariot, uphold
Gold was the beam, the wheels were orb’d with gold.
The spokes in rows of silver pleas’d the sight,
The seat with party-colour’d gems was bright;
the chariot was made of precious
metals and gems, was therefore
bright, resplendent
Apollo shin’d amid the glare of light.
Apollo, Sun god, would surely, as
well as the chariot, be radiant,
glowing
note that the Sun god is called
Apollo here, where earlier he’d
been called Phoebus, the Latin
name replacing the Greek, but
upon further investigation I found
that it was Dryden who’d made
the switch, Ovid had called the
Sun god Phoebus in the original
Latin text
The youth with secret joy the work surveys,
Phaeton is beside himself, eager
with anticipation
When now the moon disclos’d her purple rays;
purple rays, tinged with the colours
of dawn
see above
The stars were fled, for Lucifer had chased
The stars away, and fled himself at last.
Lucifer, the Morning Star, the
planet Venus, as it appears in
the East before sunrise
having suspected Dryden of having
replaced with Lucifer another name
from the original Latin text, I was
surprised to discover that Lucifer
had been indeed translated faithfully
from Ovid’s poem, which means that
the Christian name we’re familiar
with as another name for Satan has
to have been adopted from the
Ancients and modified to fit the new
Christian mythology, the biblical
narrative
Lucifer, a god in his own right in
Antiquity, had been the son of
Aurora, goddess of the Dawn
do you love it
Soon as the father saw the rosy morn,
And the moon shining with a blunter horn,
blunter, less incandescent, dulled
by the advancing light
horn, a lesser phase of the moon,
when it is either waxing or waning,
thus resembling a horn
He bid the nimble Hours, without delay,
Bring forth the steeds; the nimble Hours obey:
the Hours, or Horae, goddesses
of the Seasons, horae is the
Greek word for seasons
From their full racks the gen’rous steeds retire,
retire, come away, from their stalls
in the stables
Dropping ambrosial foams, and snorting fire.
ambrosial, especially fragrant, or
tasty
Still anxious for his son, the God of day,
To make him proof against the burning ray,
His temples with celestial ointment wet,
Of sov’reign virtue to repel the heat;
celestial ointment, ambrosia,
elixir of the gods
sov’reign virtue, exceedingly effective
attribute
Then fix’d the beamy circle on his head,
beamy circle, radiant halo of
solar rays
And fetch’d a deep foreboding sigh, and said,
“Take this at least, this last advice, my son,
Keep a stiff rein, and move but gently on:
The coursers of themselves will run too fast,
Your art must be to moderate their haste.
Drive ’em not on directly through the skies,
But where the Zodiac’s winding circle lies,
Along the midmost Zone; but sally forth
Nor to the distant south, nor stormy north.
The horses’ hoofs a beaten track will show,
But neither mount too high, nor sink too low.
That no new fires, or Heav’n or Earth infest;
Keep the mid way, the middle way is best.
Nor, where in radiant folds the serpent twines,
Direct your course, nor where the altar shines.
serpent twines, serpentine, tortuous
entanglements
altar, probably alter, or other, light
sources, the moon, for instance,
the Morning Star, do not be
distracted by bright lights,
Phoebus / Apollo advises
Shun both extreams; the rest let Fortune guide,
And better for thee than thy self provide!
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