Odes 1.4, also known by its incipit, , is an Ode by Horace addressed to Sestius, suffect consul in 23 BC. The poem combines the coming of spring and the cycle of seasonal change with ideas of linear temporality and mortality, with recourse to the consolatory sympotic strategy of carpe diem. Assessing its quality, often relative to Odes 4.7—to which it is a "lovely forerunner"—scholars and critics have noted the technical mastery and subtle ambiguities, simple singularity of conceptHorace Ars Poetica 23: denique sit quod vis, simplex dumtaxat et unum, "in the end, let it be what you will, so long as it is straightforwardly single-ply and unitary", "simple and unified" notwithstanding the range and contrasts in emotion, tone, and thought, the 'ground covered' in its twenty-line engagement with the "human condition".
Background
The coming of spring, celebrated in the Song of SongsSong of Songs 2.11f.: "...lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come..." (King James Version) and universal to the human experience in temperate regions, has Greek literary antecedents in poems by Alcaeus and Leonidas of Tarentum, the latter quoted more than once by Cicero during the civil wars.Alcaeus fr. 286(a) (numbering per Campbell Loeb edition; P. Oxy. 2301 fr. 1); Leonidas A.P. X.1; Cicero Epistulae ad Atticum IX.18.3, X.2 These poems include references to the Zephyr, frost thawing, flowers blooming, the start of the sailing season, Priapus—and the realm of Tartarus below. Horace would return to the subject of spring in Odes 4.7 and 4.12, although similarly their juxtaposition of nature's cyclical time and the linear life of man, of sorrow at its passing and the implicit injunction to enjoy it while one can with banqueting, wine, and love-making (carpe diem, nunc est bibendumHorace Odes 4.7, 4.12; carpe diem "pluck the day" (it being ripe) 1.11.8, nunc est bibendum "now is the time to drink" 1.37.1), may make it misleading to call these "spring poems", for "if spring comes, can winter be far behind?" Yet unlike the , Catullus 5, and Odes 4.7, Horace has no need to spell the temporal contrasts out in full;Epitaphion Bionis 99ff.; Catullus 5.4–6 soles occidere et redire possunt: / nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda, "suns can set and rise again; for us, when once our short-lived light has set, unitary and never-ending is the night we must sleep"; Horace Odes 4.7.13–16 damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae: / nos ubi decidimus / quo pius Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus, / pulvis et umbra sumus "yet fleet moons repair their losses in the sky: when once we have descended whither pious Aeneas, whither wealthy Tullus and Ancus, but dust and shade are we" his readers, steeped in the tradition, can make the connections themselves, identifying the "correspondence between spring and youth".
Structure The cycle of the seasons has its counterpart in the poem's "open-ended" ring composition or chiastic structure, the five quatrains of men at work→gods of Olympus→Faunus→gods of the Underworld→men at play, opening with the advent of spring and resumption of activity, through the intrusion of death, to leisurely closure in the promise of sex and renewal. Complementary analyses see a more complex twenty-line ten-couplet five-quatrain mirroring; a "12–8 sonnet-like structure", pale death intruding in line 13; "a circle and a line", structure matching meaning; a "diminuendo" from "the panorama of spring" to the specificity of a "boy-favourite"; expansion outwards from a contrapuntal core; and a "sonic circle". Running throughout is the tension between the cyclical and "idealized temporality" of nature, anonymous and ultimately interchangeable (pecus, the herd), and the "contingent" linear lifetime of the singular and irreplaceable individual—Sestius and Lycidas are named only after Death intrudes, i.e., three stanzas of "repeatable time", then "time advances in a line".
In the 12–8 analysis, the chiastic humans work→gods relax→gods work→humans relax (1–12) is followed by death (13–17) and the hedonistic response of the symposium and love-making (18–20). But darkness and desolation may be found throughout, not only after the rupture of pale death in line 13; there are already "definite undertones of the death-theme" in the opening spring picture. There is dissolution and harshness, the groaning of heavy machinery, man and beast forced to seek refuge, manufactory grave and grievous, ponderousness, fire and therefore ash, groves gloomy and umbral. In classical moralizing, ships and sea-faring were emblematic of transgression and decline. Before spring's advent, the herd and the ploughman were joyous indoors; returning from comfort to the fields—before they are ploughed, a pristine and "brilliant landscape"—that happiness is by implication lost. The moon that wanes, that rises in her chariot before going beneath the earth, is associated with change, with loss and death in Odes 2.11, 2.18, and 4.7. Spring liberates, solvitur, while death constricts, premet, but the verb used for the joining of Nymphs with Graces, iungere, is cognate with iugum, "yoke", and the verb for the garlanding, impedire, is that for shackling and impeding (-ped- also serving to "transition" between the "joyous step" of the dance and Death's "tread"). There is the paradox of blood sacrifice for the longevity of the flock. Venus leads the dance, her husband Vulcan, lame and cheated on, cannot join in, underscoring his powerlessness and "deformity". The echo of the dance, quatiunt pede, in Death's knocking or kicking on the door, pulsat pede, transforms the former into a "frightening portent of it"; the evenness of Death's knocking, aequo pede, makes the dance alterno pede "almost 'out of step; already it is in danger of being overly frenetic, shaking the earth. With pallida Mors, "pale Death", the whitenessOvid Ars Amatoria II.440 canet in igne cinis, "ash will turn a greyish white upon the fire", the verb canet cognate with the adjective canus ("canis") of the frost and even the green viridis of the myrtle wreath is reassociated with death; the word viridis may also be used of pallor, as in Appendix Vergiliana, while garlands were used in honouring the dead. Enjoying life while one can may be one response to death, and a literary topos, but it does not go away; the concluding sympotic scene is in the negative, nec...nec... Aleatory are the outcomes of casting lots, with bones, talis, to boot. Soon the maidens will grow warm for Lycidas, his appeal lessening for the youth; in time, the virgines in turn may become lukewarm, the full cycle captured in the single, ambiguous, final word tepebunt.
The thought-structure includes extensive use of antithesis, echoing the alternations of nature, including warmth and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, sound and silence, stillness and movement, constriction and liberation, harshness and tenderness, emptiness and repletion, piety and hedonism, chance and certainty, Venus and Vulcan, Graces and Cyclopes, evergreen myrtle and spring flowers, ewe lamb and billy kid, towers and hovels, kings and paupers, long and short, youths and maidens, joy and grief. The long string of present tense verbs, which help situate the disparate activities "in one immediate and unified 'now, is followed, after the arrival of Death and the "epigrammatic" line 15, by the tension between now and the future, with several verbs in the future for the activities from which Sestius, once brought low, will be excluded, and enjambment to add stress to resolution; "the grammar of the lines mirrors their sense". On a smaller scale, the word order, which can give "an aesthetic satisfaction unknown in English", includes expressive use of hyperbaton, as the dry keels surrounding the winches, siccas machinae carinas, the Graces joined with and embracing the Nymphs, iunctaeque Nymphis Gratiae, the Cyclopes in their weighty workshops, gravis Cyclopum officinas, the head ringed with green myrtle, viridi caput myrto, and Faunus amid the shady groves, umbrosis Fauno lucis. The unity of interlocking ideas is reinforced through anaphora and verbal repetition or echoes:Including the temporal adverbs iam ... iam ..., nunc ... nunc ..., the negatives nec ... nec ... nec ..., the alternatives aut ... aut ..., seu ... sive ..., solvitur and solutae, decentes and decet, pede ... pede ... at first the repeated "or"s suggest there is a range of possibilities; after Death's intrusion, nox "night" is echoed by mox "soon", while the only word to appear twice is the negative nec; there are two kinds of "now", one of the repeatable present, the other "historical and single ... continually being lost". An alternative analysis sees three kinds of "now" or iam, that which looks to and is of the past (l. 3), that of the present (l. 5), and that which looks to and is of the future (l. 16); through this combining of past, present, and future, starting in spring and ending in death, the reader is left with a feeling of "totality and plenitude", of closure.
Metre
Rather than a "straitjacket", metre is a source of "expressive power" and "poetic significance". Coming after his Satires, in dactylic hexameters and that look to Lucilius, and iambic Epodes, Archilochus and Hipponax their model, Horace's Odes emulate the Greek lyric tradition with its nine canonical poets. The so-called, programmatic, Parade Odes that open Book 1 are "characterized by their metrical ", each of the first nine poems having a different metre. Odes 1.4Scansion of Odes 1.4, quantity notated with macron and breve, caesurae with a double vertical bar, and the diaereses after the tetrameter with a vertical ellipsis: ¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ (5) / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯¯ ¯¯ ¯‖˘˘ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯˘ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯‖˘˘ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ (10) / ¯˘˘ ¯¯ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯¯ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯¯ ¯˘˘ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯˘ (15) / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯¯ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ / ¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯‖¯ ¯˘˘ ⋮ ¯˘ ¯˘ ¯¯ / ¯¯ ˘¯ ¯‖¯ ˘¯ ˘¯ ¯ (20) is in the Third/Fourth Archilochian, in which the first line of each distich (couplet) is in the greater Archilochian (an combination of two different rhythms, comprising a dactylic tetrameter (the first three feet of which may through contraction be a spondee instead of a dactyl) followed by an (three trochees or brevis in longo two followed by a spondee), with a caesura in the third foot and a diaeresis after the tetrameter), the second line an iambic trimeter catalectic (with the first syllable anceps, a spondee substituted for the iamb in the third foot, the final syllable long, and a caesura after the fifth syllable); there is no elision. The only example in the Odes of a poem in this metre, the rotation and alternation of metrical system echo spring's "equivocal nature".