Kindle Notes & Highlights
The poet Robert Frost, when asked, “what is poetry?” is reported to have quipped, “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” His point is well-taken. No transfer of discourse from one language to another can preserve every nuance and every subtlety of the language of its origin; no “translation” can convey to members of a different language and culture exactly the same atmosphere, resonance, and range of intertextual associations—the same “flavour”—as that of the original text.
In 1960 Alec Robertson (140) said that exploring the beginnings of early Christian song, which included both psalm-chants and the early hymns, meant “a journey into a fog, musically speaking, that rarely lifts and is usually impenetrable.”
In the early Christian centuries, whether due to declining educational standards, a change in the way Latin was spoken, the ascendance of folk-poetry (if we assume the latter was accentual), or all of these together, a sense of the length of syllables weakened, making word accent more distinct in compensation.
Alfred Tennyson, who tried his own hand at the ancient forms, hated the result and railed against them in the three poems published under the rubric “In Quantity” in Enoch Arden and Other Poems, calling the exercise “a burlesque barbarous experiment.”
On the evidence of the Christian literature of the period, religious people in the Middle Ages spent a good deal more time thinking about death and eternity than do their modern counterparts, and this is hardly surprising given the condition of human life at the time.
medieval literature does indeed abound in the notion of “finding oneself,” but in doing so on the other side of the grave—in
Impossible but true was a quintessential experience of late ancient and medieval Christianity, and the literature in which it is expressed abounds in what strikes one as verbal slight-of-hand,
Medieval spirituality reveled in irony, self-contradiction and paradox, and in structures of word and thought which convey these, such as the oxymoron, chiasmus and antimetabole.
formulated as A (life), B (death) | B (death), A (life) and the two adjacent pairs are configured vertically as A B X B A we have an arrangement of the elements A and B which creates a visual image of the Greek letter X (chi). This figure was not only perceived as a cross, but was also the first letter of the word “Christ” in Greek (Χριστος). Rhetorical theory designates this figure variously as chiasmus, (ki-ás-mus) after the Greek letter chi, represented in Greek as X, and antimetabole (Greek “opposite-change”).
The chiastic (X) arrangement of words and ideas is found in ancient pagan literature, where it is used for emphatic or decorative effect, but it was in Christian literature that it came into its own as a signal of the reversal of values brought about by Christianity.
In the Roman classical age the poet Horace (65 BCE-8 CE) wrote: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio . . . “Greece, taken captive, took captive her boorish conqueror and gave the arts to rustic Rome . . . “ (Epistula 2.1.156). The poet was referring to the defeat and occupation of Greece by Roman armies, followed by the triumph of Greek culture over the hitherto inferior artistic and intellectual life of Rome. In simplified form the idea can be expressed as “Rome captured Greece / Greece captured Rome” (ABBA), and can be further simplified to the irreducible
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Here the very idea expressed in the Old Testament, and later in Horace’s Epistle, has been Christianized. Before our eyes, the Christian “captor captured” motif has emerged (i.e., Satan undone by his own evil, see General Introduction § 5). Although it is highly unlikely that Paul knew the Horatian text, educated Romans of the classical and post-classical age would likely have known it and would thus have been well prepared to receive the idea as a central part of Christian biblical teaching.
So it was that the phrase “the death of death” (i.e., “the slayer slain”) came to encapsulate the essence of Christianity. Through the action of Christ, life yielded to death (the crucifixion) in order that death might yield to life (the resurrection). We will encounter this form of thought and expression again and again in the poems below,
When one reviews the many instances of typology in the poems below it quickly becomes evident that the idea could be overdone and was often arbitrary and forced to a point that bordered on absurdity:
When Augustine adopted Christianity in 387 CE, it was upon his reading of the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius of Alexandria; when he subsequently gave up his professorship at Milan and returned to his native North Africa
