Yeah ... of course I know where that comes from ... the Ars Amatoria or the Fasti of Publius Ovidius Naso ... I'll find it for you ... hang on a jiff ... don't be impatient ... book just over here ... gimme just a moment ...
It's gotta be Ovid. Elegiacs; combined with literary pretences of Divine inspiration ... as Pope Francis would say, it just smells of Ovid, doesn't it ...
Bede.
Saint Bede the Venerable, you say, in his Historia Ecclesiastica? ... pull the other one ... Book IV cap 18/20? .. well I'll be jiggered ... and Bede wrote these verses himself? How on earth did Ovid's 'didactic' poetry get onto the shelves of his devoutly Anglo-Saxon monastic library? Explain that away ...
Wozzat? S Dunstan had Ovid on his shelves ... ? In his library at Glastonbury? You must be joking.
True, I' afraid. Book I of of Ovid's humorous spoof of didactic verse, the Ars Amatoria, had lost, in S Dunstan's copy, its last page. So the Saint, in his own handwriting, copied out the missing text. It's in Bodley ... Auct. F.4.32 ...
And S Bede's fifty-or-so line poem has all the tricks and dodges; recusatio down to recondite allusion. Its style is Carolingian ... er ... well ... wrong century, you say ... s'pose so ... but what about those compounds in the last couple of couplets ... dulcisono and altithrono ... isn't that the sort of thing the Carolingian scholars loved?
Indeed ... but so did the 'neoterics' in the age of Catullus. It must be something about compounds ... mind you, when S Bede wrote his poem, Cinna and Calvus and the rest of them may not have been 'lost'. Just as, before the Franks and the Turks took their tinder-boxes to the great libraries of the Byzantine world, I bet you could have strolled in and read the complete text of the Hecale and the Aitia. Adrian Hollis need not have devoted all that time and energy to reconstructing mangled fragments from the sands of Oxyrhynchus.
But I had better come clean. If you look more closely at S Bede's elegiacs, you will find two refinements to 'Neoteric' cleverness, designed, in fact, to make the already-clever-clever even cleverer.
(1) The couplets are alphabetic ... which is why the poem has 54 lines (after Z, Bede puts in four more couplets forming AMEN). 46+8=54).
(2) The first quarter of the distich is repeated verbatim as the second part of the pentameter. Such schemes are called echoici, serpentini, or reciproci. Ovid occasionally did it, when it suited him: Fasti IV 365-6.
Easy? You try doing it.
But S Bede leaves me, at least, with a different sort of puzzle. In his introductory words, he writes ante annos plurimos ... composuimus.
Why does the Saint, apparently, want to distance himself by saying "I wrote this a long time ago"? Is he afraid that his peers will say "It's not very good"? Or that a censorious mouth will enquire whether Bede has nothing better to do with his time than ...
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