Invocation
Apollo Dancing with the Muses, After Giulio Romano, ca. 1540, fresco in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, Florence
7, to delight and horrify
Andrew Marvell, On Mr Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’
At once delight and horror on us seize,
Thou sing’st with so much gravity and ease;
And above human flight dost soar aloft,
With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.
7, predecessors’ deeds and pains
Mary Shelley, The Last Man, Volume III, Chapter VI
Patience, oh reader! … lend thy attention to the tale, and learn the deeds and sufferings of thy predecessors.
7, Now Muses
Hesiod (Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Theogony, 1-103
For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with [Mnemosyne] … And when a year was passed … she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care … the Muses sang who dwell on Olympus … Cleio and Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene and Terpsichore, and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania and Calliope, who is the chiefest of them all … they pour sweet dew upon [Zeus’s] tongue, and from his lips flow gracious words.
8, at Hippocrene
Nonnus (William Henry Rouse), Dionysiaca, 41
The horsehoof fountain of imagination, dear to the nine Muses.
(“Hippocrene” means “horse’s spring.”)
8, by the Muses were inspired
Friedrich Nietzsche (Gary Handwerk), Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human Part II, 27.1
Hesiod’s artistic technique the fable.
Inspiration of the muses, the process.
8, untainted atmosphere
Hesiod (Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Theogony, note on p. 87
Aether is the bright, untainted upper atmosphere, as distinguished from Aer, the lower atmosphere of the earth.
8, sky from which life-giving
Aristophanes (William James Hickie), Clouds
our father of great renown, most august Aether, life-supporter of all
8, womb of mother Earth
Lucretius (Gary B. Miles), De Rerum Natura, Book I, quoted in Virgil’s Georgics: A New Interpretation
Finally, the rains end when father air [pater Aether] has precipitated them into the womb of mother earth; but gleaming crops spring up, boughs become green on trees, which themselves grow and become heavy with fruit.
8, later works and days
Hesiod (Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Works and Days
8, a Bildungsroman
Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, p. 1
According to Dilthey [Wilhelm Dilthey in Leben Schleiermachers], the typical Bildungsroman traces the progress of a young person toward self-understanding as well as a sense of social responsibility.
8, in a periplum
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, pp. 43-44
the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map, but as it would be in a ‘periplum’, that is, as a coasting sailor would find it.
8, along with thinking mind
Elizabeth Bishop, Letter to Donald E. Stanford, November 20, 1933, quoting E.W. Croll’s “The Baroque Style in Prose”
Their purpose (the writers of Baroque prose) was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth.
8, shallows of the sea
Elizabeth Bishop, The Map
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
9, both heard and overheard
John Stuart Mill, Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties
Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.