is poison in a ring. March, madman, cross

the Alps, the Tiber-be a purple patch

for schoolboys and them for declamation!

Compared to the previous imitations, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is a substantial effort (nearly four hundred lines) and a novel one. The closing verses, which provided Johnson with material for a fine passage ("Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? ..."), seems in the Lowell version to be more faithful to the original sprit. Juvenal, in a rate constructive comment, here urges man to pray for mens sana in corpore sano. Johnson's soaring close inspires, but is un-Juvenlia on that account. Lowell's tone is simpler, lightly ironic, and a little irritated: just right, as far as I can see.

Success is worshipped as god; it's we who set up shrines and temples in her name.

I give you simply what you have already.

Of the three Horatian poems, the version of the Cleopatra ode (Nuncest bibendum, nunc pede libero/ pulsanda tellus ...) seems the best. The first stanza is ecstatic in its joy:

Now's the time to drink, to beat the earth in rhythm toss flowers on the couches of the gods Friends!

Horace is delighted at the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra at Atrium, but admires the courage of the queen. Both moods are conveyed by Lowell. Cleopatra's "depraved gangs" are "germs of the Empire" while Caesar is seen in "the scowling truth of his terror." But at the end:

...Then bolder more ferocious, death slipping through your fingers, how could you go aboard Octavian's galleys,

how could you march on foot, un humbled,

to crown triumphant Caesar's triumph--

no queen now, but a private woman?

Lowell excusably makes no attempt to duplicate the intricate metrics of Horace; for the Alsaic stanzas of two of the odes he successfully substitutes short lines with a varying number of stresses. In the "Spring" ode, however, the meter of the original, a strange mixture of falling dactyls and trochees alternating with rising lambs is important for the poem's mixture of moods. Mr.Lowell substitutes a more regular series of five-stress lines, but supplies energy and excitement with repetition, and improves in at least one passage of typically Horatian philosophy by turning a flat statement into a metaphor:

Move quickly, the brief sum of life forbids