The Calvinist International
For those who, for whatever reason, don’t like to sing the actual words of the Psalms, metrical psalmody can be a good substitute. But it can also have its difficulties. Probably the best known metrical Psalter in English is the Scottish Metrical Psalter. Anyone who has ever used it knows how torturous and opaque the […]
The 4th/5th century Greco-Egypto-Roman poet Nonnus of Panopolis composed a huge epic work in 48 books on Dionysus, the Dionysiaca, as well as an epic poetic paraphrase of the gospel of John, both in Homeric idiom and meter. In his version of the famous Johannine prologue, Nonnus writes: ἐν ἀχλυόεντι δὲ κόσμῳ οὐρανίαις σελάγιζε βολαῖς γαιήοχος […]
In his 1960 collection Homage to Clio, WH Auden included a series of what he called “Academic Graffiti,” tendentious and silly, but despite (or rather because of) that fact nevertheless insightful, biographical poems on important figures. (The technical term for this genre, as a colleague of mine in the English Department pointed out, is “clerihew,” named […]
Another poem of Melanchthon’s, this time a prayer in verse (the meter is elegiacs) based upon the story of the Rich Man (or Dives) and Lazarus in Luke 16, written in 1539. “A Prayer taken from Luke 16, concerning Lazarus” Sick and rough with sores all over my body, I lie here, and my limbs perish […]
Some more on Melanchthon’s poetry, while we’re on the subject. Below is a poem from (perhaps) 1540. “Christ’s Speech (from Psalm 2)” What madness to rouse arms against the heavenly powers! Man’s impiety will not have a happy issue. On Zion’s height God hands me Zion’s royal scepter and grants it to me to bring new […]
Did you know Melanchthon wrote poetry? Well, did you? And did you know he wrote a lot of it? I didn’t realize until recently that he did, and until very recently just how much of it there was. Last week The Imaginative Conservative ran a piece of mine on one of Melanchthon’s prefaces to Cicero’s On Duties […]
In a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, Irena Backus notes Martin Luther’s generic versatility in the composition of poetry (pp. 331-2, unfortunately not available in the preview). He was capable of satirical extremes that make many modern readers uncomfortable: for instance, a professor he fired from the University of Wittenberg (“for dedicating his first published […]
At the conclusion of his Icones, a series of tributes to the Reformers and their forerunners, Theodore Beza attaches a series of 44 emblemata, pictures with captions in verse to explain their meaning. The opening image/poem combination in the series is quite nice. The image, an empty circle, at first glance appears odd. What could it possibly […]
In a set of Icones contained in his youthful collection of poems (the Poemata or Iuvenilia, or Poemata Iuvenilia), first published in 1548 before his embracing of the Reformation the following year and reissued in expurgated form several times afterwards, Beza includes the following distich about Vergil, a couplet that remains in later editions of the poems. I post […]
Thedore Beza, in addition to being a theologian, pedagogue, and controversialist, was a delightfully ingenious neo-Latin poet. Below is an elegy (in elegiac couplets, natch) in praise of the Horatian aurea mediocritas (though he doesn’t say anything explicitly about Horace), the golden mean–that old standby of ancient philosophical wisdom. It is thoroughly classical and classicizing; all […]