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Horace's Odes 4.2 and Pope's"Essay on Criticism"Rodney Stenning Edgecombe aa University of Cape TownPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Rodney Stenning Edgecombe (2005) Horace's Odes 4.2 and Pope's"Essay on Criticism", ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews,18:1, 23-24, DOI: 10.3200/ANQQ.18.1.23-24

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/ANQQ.18.1.23-24

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Winter 2005, Vol. 18, No. 1 23

Horace’s Odes 4.2 and Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

In their annotations to the definitive “Twickenham” edition of Pope’s“Essay on Criticism,” Audra and Williams find a connection with Horacein the following passage:

The Muse, whose early Voice you taught to Sing,Prescrib’d her Heights, and prun’d her tender Wing,(Her Guide now lost) no more attempts to rise,But in low Numbers short Excursions tries. (325–26; emphasis in original)

Their note to the last of these lines suggests that “[h]ere perhaps Pope asso-ciates his poem with Horace’s Ars Poetica, especially as that poem hadbeen described by Dryden in his tr. of Persius [. . . as comprising] ‘lownumbers’” (326). However, in addition to this generalized sense of an Hor-atian tone, one also could adduce a more specific thematic parallel fromHorace’s Odes 4.2. Pope addresses his late mentor William Walsh andimplicitly salutes him as a miglior fabbro without whose assistance he hashad to curtail the scope and scale of his efforts. He almost certainly had inmind Horace’s self-effacing tribute to the son of Mark Antony:

multa Dirceaum levat aura cycnum,tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altosnubis tractus. ego apis Matinaemore modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laboremplurimum circa nemus uvidiqueTiburis ripas operosa parvuscarmina fingo.

A mighty breeze uplifts the Dircean swan, Antonius, asoft as he essays a flight to the lofty regions of the clouds.I, after the way and manner of the Matinian bee, thatgathers the pleasant thyme laboriously around full manya grove and the banks of well-watered Tibur, I, a humblebard, fashion my verses with incessant toil. (288–89)

Here are the same notes that Pope strikes in his tribute to Walsh, namely,humility (“parvus” matches “low Numbers”) and a low trajectory in flight(the bee’s earth-bound bumblings and Pope’s “short Excursions”).

RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBEUniversity of Cape Town

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24 ANQ

WORKS CITED

Horace. Odes and Epodes. Trans. C. E. Bennett. London: Heinemann, 1967.Pope, Alexander. Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism. Ed. E. Audra and

Aubrey Williams. Twickenham Edition 1. London: Methuen, 1961.

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