Odes

Horace

Horace. The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace. Conington, John, translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1882.

  • Ho, there! wine to moonrise, wine
  • To midnight, wine to our new augur too!
  • Nine to three or three to nine,
  • As each man pleases, makes proportion true.
  • Who the uneven Muses loves,
  • Will fire his dizzy brain with three times three;
  • Three once told the Grace approves;
  • She with her two bright sisters, gay and free,
  • Shrinks, as maiden should, from strife:
  • But I'm for madness. What has dull'd the fire
  • Of the Berecyntian fife?
  • Why hangs the flute in silence with the lyre?
  • Out on niggard-handed boys!
  • Rain showers of roses; let old Lycus hear,
  • Envious churl, our senseless noise,
  • And she, our neighbour, his ill-sorted fere.
  • You with your bright clustering hair,
  • Your beauty, Telephus, like evening's sky,
  • Rhoda loves, as young, as fair;
  • I for my Glycera slowly, slowly die.