By profession, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Classicist. From his novitiate to his death, he taught Greek and Latin at Jesuit schools in England, then at University College Dublin. Remarks in his journals and letters make clear his deep and lifelong engagement with Classics, and the influence of classical literature, particularly the work of Pindar and the Pre-Socratic philosophers, on his English poetry has been observed by numerous critics. Subject to less attention are the poems Hopkins composed in Latin, which include verse composition and translations from English. This article considers one such poem, an original Latin elegy composed in 1867, and explores its language, imagery, literary influences, and possible interpretations.
APPLES AND ACORNS: ADDRESSING A PROBLEM IN THEOCRITUS 5.92-95
H Lenahan (Rhodes University)Theocritus' Idyll 5 details an amoebaean singing contest between two herdsmen in which the goatherd, Comatas, sings an opening couplet and the shepherd, Lacon, replies with a second. This paper considers one exchange between the competitors which has been the cause of particular frustration to readers of the poem due to an obscure, and likely obscene, pastoral analogy offered by Lacon at lines 94-95. After a consideration of evidence drawn from the text, Theocritean scholia and Greek lyric and elegiac poetry, an interpretation of the exchange is offered which may provide some clarity to a much-cited problem in Idyll 5.
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