The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils

1646

Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski

With an Introduction by
Maren-Sofie Roestvig

Publication Number 44

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1953

GENERAL EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles

Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington

Benjamin Boyce, Duke University

Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan

John Butt, King’s College, University of Durham

James L. Clifford, Columbia University

Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles

Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

Ernest C. Mossner, University of Texas

James Sutherland, University College, London

H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski (1595-1640) vas a Polish Jesuit whose neo-Latin Horatian odes and Biblical paraphrases gained immediate European acclaim upon their first publication in 1625 and 1628.1 The fine lyric quality of Sarbiewski’s poetry, and the fact that he often fused classical and Christian motifs, made a critic like Hugo Grotius actually prefer the “divine Casimire” to Horace himself, and his popularity among the English poets is evidenced by an impressive number of translations.

G. Hils’s Odes of Casimire (1646), here reproduced by permission from the copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library, is the earliest English collection of translations from the verse of the Polish Horace. It is also the most important. Acknowledged translations of individual poems appeared in Henry Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651), Sir Edward Sherburne’s Poems and Translations (1651), the Miscellany Poems and Translations by Oxford Hands (1685), Isaac Watts’s Horae Lyricae (1706), Thomas Brown’s Works (1707-8), and John Hughes’s The Ecstasy. An Ode (1720). Unacknowledged paraphrases from Casimire include Abraham Cowley’s “The Extasie,”2 John Norris’s “The Elevation,”3 and a number of Isaac Watts’s pious and moral odes.4 Latin editions of Casimire’s odes appeared in London in 1684, and in Cambridge in 1684 and 1689.

Another striking example of the direct influence of Casimire upon English poetry is presented by Edward Benlowes’s Theophila (1652). This long-winded epic of the soul exhibits not only a general indebtedness in imagery and ideas, but also direct borrowings of whole lines from Hils’s Odes of Casimire. One example will have to suffice:

Casimire, Ode IV, 44	Theophila, XIII, 68
Let th’ Goth his strongest chaines prepare,	Then let fierce Goths their strongest chains prepare;
The Scythians hence mee captive teare,	Grim Scythians me their slave declare;
My mind being free with you, I’le stare The Tyrants in the face....	My soul being free, those tyrants in the face I’ll stare.

Casimire’s greatest achievement was in the field of the philosophic lyric, and in a number of cases he anticipated poetic techniques and motifs which later grew popular also with the English poets. Thus, long before Denham and Marvell, he practised the technique of investing the scenes of nature with a moral or spiritual significance. Acomparison of Casimire’s loco-descriptive first epode on the estate of the Duke of Bracciano with Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642) reveals that the Polish poet was the first to mix description with moral reflection, and to choose the gentle hills, the calmly flowing river, and a retired country life as symbols of the Horatian golden mean.

Some of Casimire’s richest imagery is found in his paraphrases of Canticles, and particularly in Ode IV, 21. Parts of this ode provide a striking parallel to the famous fifth stanza of Marvell’s “The Garden.” In it Horace and Virgil meet with Solomon, the hortus conclusus of the Hebrew poet merging with the landscape of retirement as we find it in Virgil’s eclogues or in Horace’s second and sixteenth epodes. Much of Casimire’s poetry, is indeed best understood as a conscious effort to apply the allegorical technique of Canticles to the classical beatus ille-themes,5 just as his thought presents an interesting combination of Stoic and Platonic ideas.

The Polish poet, who was a university professor and a doctor of theology, may easily have learned from the Hermetic writers how to combine these great classical traditions. There is direct proof of Casimire’s familiarity with the Hermetic tradition in his Ode II,5 (“E Rebus Humanis Excessus”), which is a paraphrase of LibellusI, sections 25 and 26.6 Since Henry Vaughan was familiar with Casimire’s poetry, it is reasonable to suspect that Vaughan’s own treatment of Hermetic motifs owed much to this influence. If one compares Vaughan’s religious nature lyrics and Casimire’s odes, anumber of common poetical motifs are easily found, and so we are here again faced with the fact that themes which became popular in England in the mid-seventeenth century were anticipated in the Latin odes of Casimire.7

Hermetic ideas are also encountered in Casimire’s third epode, which combines a Horatian Stoicism with a neo-Platonlc or Hermetic interpretation of the classical landscape of retirement. An avowed reply to Horace’s second epode, it expands the Horatian philosophy through the addition of three new themes: the theme of solitude, the theme of the Earthly Paradise, and the theme of Nature as a divine hieroglyph. Its presentation of the garden ecstasy of the retired beatus vir thus strikes the same note to which we know from Mildmay Fane’s “To Retiredness” and Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.” In slightly adapted form, these themes were to flourish in the poetry of the Countess of Winchilsea, Isaac Watts, John Hughes, and a number of early eighteenth-century nature poets.

In the Romantic period Casimire’s fame was again revived. While still a young man, Coleridge planned a complete translation of Casimire’s odes, but never finished more than the ode “Ad Lyram.” It was also Coleridge who said that with the exception of Lucretius and Statius he knev no Latin poet, ancient or modern, who could be said to equal Casimire in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification.8 Aknowledge of the themes and techniques of this Latin poet should therefore be of interest to all students of English poetry.

Maren-Sofie Roestvig
University of Oslo

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. For a complete bibliography, see Carlos Sommervogel, BibliothÈque de la Compagnie de JÉsus (Bruxelles et Paris, 1896), VII, 627-646.

2. In the preface to The Ecstasy. An Ode (1720), John Hughes comments on Cowley’s indebtedness, in “The Extasie,” to Casimire.

3. Norris’s indebtedness has been pointed out by Hoxie N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York, 1939-), I, 110, n.21.

4. Compare Watts’s “False Greatness,” “’Tis Dangerous to Follow the Multitude,” and “The Kingdom of the Wise Man” to Casimire’s Ode IV, 34; IV, 10; and IV,3.

5. By this term is understood the themes presented in Horace’s second epode on the happy country life.

6. Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica, ed. Walter Scott (Oxford, 1924-36), I, 129.

7. No study has as yet been made of Casimire’s influence upon English literature, but I hope shortly to publish the results of my own investigation of this problem.

8. Coleridge prefaced his translation of the ode “Ad Lyram” with this remark. See also Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), II, 209. For further critical estimates, see Sir John Bowring, trans., Specimens of the Polish Poets (London, 1827), and Caecilius Metellus, pseud., “On the Life and Writings of Casimir,” The Classical Journal, XXV (1822), 103-110.

THE

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Clyx.com

With an Introduction by Maren-Sofie Roestvig