Laudator Temporis Acti

East of the walls of Lo-yang
    the flowers of peach and plum,
Flying here, flying away,
    into whose yard falling now?
And the young girls of Lo-yang
    grieve for their loveliness,
Walking they meet the fallen flowers
    and sigh their long-drawn sighs.
This year as the flowers fall
    their loveliness is changing.
Next year when the flowers bloom,
    who will still be here?
For I have seen cypress and pine
    smashed apart to kindling,
And heard that fields of mulberries
    have changed into the sea.
Those of the past will never again
    be east of Lo-yang's walls,
But people today still must face
    the winds that bring down flowers.
Every year, year after year,
    the flowers are always alike;
Year after year, every year,
    the people are not the same.
I send these words to boys in their prime,
    youths with glowing faces.
Have pity on one already dying,
    A white-haired old man.
The white hair of the old man
    is truly worthy your pity—
A while ago his face glowed too,
    a handsome young man.
You princelings, young noblemen
    beneath the flowering trees,
Clear singing, exquisite dancing
    before the falling flowers,
The Chamberlain's pool terrace,
    patterned as rich brocade,
And tower and hall of General Liang
    bear murals of the gods.
Then one morning lie down sick,
    no one knows your name,
And the pleasures of the springtime
    linger beside another.
Eyebrows gracefully curving—
    how long can they endure?
In an instant crane-white hair,
    tangled all like silk.
Look now to where from ancient days
    were lands of song and dancing.
Now nothing more than the brown of dusk
    and the lament of sparrows.

When a despot is killed or a dynasty destroyed less is achieved than some expect. After the initial transports of newly won liberation men look around and discover that the system abides—and most of the people.

I answered him: 'Ciacco, thy distress so weighs on me that it bids me weep. But tell me, if thou canst, what the citizens of the divided city shall come to and whether any there is just, and tell me the cause of such discord assailing it.'

Io li rispuosi: 'Ciacco, il tuo affanno
    mi pesa sì, ch'a lagrimar mi 'nvita;
    ma dimmi, se tu sai, a che verranno
li cittadin de la città partita;
    s'alcun v'è giusto; e dimmi la cagione
    per che l'ha tanta discordia assalita.'

Curious effect, here in the sanatorium, on Easter Sunday, when the people in this (the most expensive) block of "chalets" mostly have visitors, of hearing large numbers of upper-class English voices. I have been almost out of the sound of them for two years, hearing them at most one or two at a time, my ears growing more & more used to working-class or lower-middle class Scottish voices. In the hospital at Hairmyres, for instance, I literally never heard a "cultivated" accent except when I had a visitor. It is as though I were hearing these voices for the first time. And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will — people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.

But we on our part, thus visiting you, have come as suppliants to your knees, in the hope that you will give us entertainment, or in some other manner be generous to us, as is the due of strangers. Do not deny us, good sir, but reverence the gods; we are your suppliants; and Zeus is the avenger of suppliants and strangers—Zeus, the strangers' god—who walks in the footsteps of reverend strangers.

      ἡμεῖς δ᾿ αὖτε κιχανόμενοι τὰ σὰ γοῦνα
ἱκόμεθ᾿, εἴ τι πόροις ξεινήιον ἠὲ καὶ ἄλλως
δοίης δωτίνην, ἥ τε ξείνων θέμις ἐστίν.
ἀλλ᾿ αἰδεῖο, φέριστε, θεούς· ἱκέται δέ τοί εἰμεν,
Ζεὺς δ᾿ ἐπιτιμήτωρ ἱκετάων τε ξείνων τε,        270
ξείνιος, ὃς ξείνοισιν ἅμ᾿ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ.

Easy to know—the law of this floating life;
hard to deflect a single being from it:
when waters are deep, fish are at their happiest,
where groves flourish, birds find their roost.
Old, feeble, I'm content to be poor and sickly,
wouldn't know how to deal with abundance.
Autumn winds blow over my armrest and cane;
I don't disdain fern sprouts from the northern mountain.¹

1. A reference to the ancient sages Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who chose to live off the fern sprouts of Mt. Shouyang rather than compromise their principles.

Easy to recognize the pattern in this life adrift—
you can't make a single creature go against its nature.
Where the water is deep, the fish have the utmost joy;
birds knows to return where the woods are most leafy.
Aging and infirm, I accept poverty and sickness,
in prominence and glory there are judgments to be made.
The autumn wind blows on my cane and armrest,
I do not weary of north mountain's wild beans.

We may talke what we please of Lilies, and Lions Rampant, and Spread-Eagles in Fields d'Or, or d'Argent; But if Heraldry were guided by Reason, a Plough in a field Arable, would be the most Noble and Antient Armes.

I am one of these men who are always interested in trivialities.

Let us destroy, let us deny, let us annihilate politics, since it divides us and arms us against one another ...

Tuons, renions, anéantissons la politique, puisqu'elle nous divise et nous arme les uns contre les autres ...

"Now, Mr. Sawyer!" screamed the shrill voice of Mrs. Raddle, "are them brutes going?"

"They're only looking for their hats, Mrs. Raddle," said Bob; "they are going directly."

"Going!" said Mrs. Raddle, thrusting her nightcap over the banisters just as Mr. Pickwick, followed by Mr. Tupman, emerged from the sitting-room. "Going! What did they ever come for?"

Yet death, that's common to all, not the gods themselves
can ward off even from a man they love, whenever
the dire fate of pitiless death has once got hold of him.

ἀλλ᾿ ἦ τοι θάνατον μὲν ὁμοίιον οὐδὲ θεοί περ
καὶ φίλῳ ἀνδρὶ δύναται ἀλαλκέμεν, ὁππότε κεν δὴ
μοῖρ᾿ ὀλοὴ καθέλῃσι τανηλεγέος θανάτοιο.

You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
    Within this region I subsist,
    Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.

It is the land that freemen till,
    That sober-suited Freedom chose,
    The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,
    A land of just and old renown,
    Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,
    But by degrees to fullness wrought,
    The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.

Should banded unions persecute
    Opinion, and induce a time
    When single thought is civil crime,
And individual freedom mute;

Tho' Power should make from land to land
    The name of Britain trebly great—
    Tho' every channel of the State
Should fill and choke with golden sand—

Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
    Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,
    And I will see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.

When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
      When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder        5
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
      Perishing be?

Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,        10
May these loved and loving faces
      Please other men!
May the rustling harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather        15
      Posies once mine.

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
      Till to delight        20
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
      In other days.

The following stanza of Mr de la Mare's 'Fare well' first met my eyes, thus printed, in a newspaper review.

Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,        10
May these loved and loving faces
      Please other men!
May the rustling harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather        15
      Posies once mine.

I knew in a moment that Mr de la Mare had not written rustling, and in another moment I had found the true word. But if the book of poems had perished and the verse survived only in the review, who would have believed me rather than the compositor? The bulk of the reading public would have been perfectly content with rustling, nay they would sincerely have preferred it to the epithet which the poet chose. If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn, when the leaves are dry, and when straws and ears from the passing harvest-wain (to which 'harvest' is so plain an allusion that only a pedant like me could miss it) are hanging caught in the twigs; and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!

But we are not told what the true word was—"rusting," in fact. The attitude here exemplified is well documented and familiar. We have all met people who, because they themselves have suffered or been excessively imposed upon, feel the need to compensate by dominating and manipulating others, if only in trivial ways, and the silly power games that Housman here plays with his readers fall squarely within this class. Paul Naiditch suggests that Housman wrote this passage and others like it in order "to let the reader take his own measure, and then, if need be, to confess to himself that the melancholy truth stares him in the face" ([2], p. 152), namely, the truth that he is no critic. This is right, so long as the emphasis falls on the latter part of the sentence: Housman was less interested in educating his readers than in crushing them.

[Y]our reference to the use of “rustling” in the American edition of de la Mare’s Collected Poems, 1901-1918, Volume 1 (Henry Holt 1920) piqued my curiosity. I have a copy of the English edition of the same collection, which was published by Constable in 1920 under the title Poems 1901 to 1918, Volume 1. I checked, and the line reads “May the rusting harvest hedgerow” in the Constable edition (page 250). Comparing the American and English editions on the Internet Archive, it appears that the Holt edition may have been re-set, rather than simply being a re-binding of the Constable sheets for the American edition. Hence, it would appear that someone at Holt decided that “rusting” was “incorrect,” and changed it to “rustling.”

The use of “rusting” in the Constable edition is consistent with Constable’s 1918 edition of Motley and Other Poems, the collection in which “Fare Well” first appeared (to my knowledge) in book form. I have a copy of the 1918 Holt edition of Motley and Other Poems, and “rusting” is used there as well.

Finally, “rusting” is also used in The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare, which was published by Faber and Faber in 1979.

Thus at length we see both by this and other places, that there is scarce any one saying in the Gospel, but must bee read with limitations and distinctions, to bee rightly understood; for Christ gives no full comments or continued discourses, but as Demetrius the Rhetoritian phrases it, speakes oft in Monosyllables, like a maister scattering the heavenly grain of his doctrine like pearls heere and there, which requires a skilfull and laborious gatherer, who must compare the words he findes, with other precepts, with the end of every ordinance, and with the generall analogie of Evangelick doctrine: otherwise many particular sayings would bee but strange repugnant riddles ...

Commands too are always terse and brief, and every master is monosyllabic to his slave ...

καὶ τὸ μὲν ἐπιτάσσειν σύντομον καὶ βραχύ, καὶ πᾶς δεσπότης δούλῳ μονοσύλλαβος ...

I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.

For younger people are always thoughtless.

αἰεὶ γάρ τε νεώτεροι ἀφραδέουσιν.

You are of good blood, dear child, that you speak thus.

αἵματός εἰς ἀγαθοῖο, φίλον τέκος, οἷ᾿ ἀγορεύεις.

• Father to Daughter
• A Man's Prayer for His Son
• Pride
• My Son

        Theirs was a greatness
        Got from their Grandsires —
        Theirs that so often in
        Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths and their homes.

                                  swa him geæþele wæs
from cneomægum,    þæt hi æt campe oft
wiþ laþra gehwæne    land ealgodon,
hord and hamas.

It seems that the ancient Romans, like the Greeks, abhorred the taking of interest on loans as something knavish, and hard on the poor, and leading to contention and enmity; and by the same kind of reasoning the Persians considered lending as having itself a tendency to deceit and lying.

ἀποστραφῆναι γάρ μοι δοκοῦσιν οἱ πάλαι Ῥωμαῖοι, καθάπερ Ἕλληνες, τὸ δανείζειν ὡς καπηλικὸν καὶ βαρὺ τοῖς πένησι καὶ δύσερι καὶ ἐχθροποιόν, ᾧ λόγῳ καὶ Πέρσαι τὸ κίχρασθαι ὡς ἀπατηλόν τε καὶ φιλοψευδές.

• Usury
• Financial Instruments

I want to be read by less and less people; I have no interest in the life of the masses, nor in the intentions of the existing governments of the world. I hope and believe that the whole civilised world will be wiped out in the next hundred years or so. I believe that man can exist, and in an infinitely better, larger way, without "civilisation".

• Gómez Dávila on Writing for Oneself
• Few, One, or None
• Few, One, or None Revisited
• Write the Book You Want To Read
• An Audience of One
• Tolkien on Writing for Oneself
• To Write for Oneself
• Soliloquies
• Mihi et Musis
• Says I to Myself
• A Garbled Footnote
• For the Sole Benefit of the Performer

Then indeed with rejoicing did Agamemnon set foot on his native land, and laying hold of his land he kissed it, and many were the hot tears that streamed from his eyes, for welcome to him was the sight of his land.

ἦ τοι ὁ μὲν χαίρων ἐπεβήσετο πατρίδος αἴης
καὶ κύνει ἁπτόμενος ἣν πατρίδα· πολλὰ δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ
δάκρυα θερμὰ χέοντ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἀσπασίως ἴδε γαῖαν.

• Back Home Again! (T'ao Ch'ien)
• Homecoming (Joachim Du Bellay)
• Home Sweet Home (Homer, Theognis, Marcantonio Flaminio)
• Home Sweet Home (Catullus)