FOOTNOTES:
[1] The ancients have left us little further account of Phaon than that he was an old mariner, whom Venus transformed into a very beautiful youth, whom Sappho and several other Lesbian ladies, fell passionately in love with.—Fenton.
[2] Mrs. Behn's translation:
Say, lovely youth, why would'st thou thus betray.—Wakefield.
[3] In the MS.:
These mournful numbers suit a mournful muse.
[4] Our poet has not varied much here from the couplet of his predecessor, Sir Carr Scrope:
I burn, I burn, like kindled fields of corn,
When by the driving winds the flames are borne.—Wakefield.
The first version in Pope's manuscript, though not so closely copied from Scrope, is decidedly inferior to the text:
I burn, I burn, as when fierce whirlwinds raise
The spreading flames, and crackling harvests blaze.
[5] A childish, false thought.—Warton.
[6] Scrope's couplet exceeds this in simplicity, and to my taste, on the whole, is preferable:
My muse, and lute can now no longer please;
These are th' employments of a mind at ease.—Wakefield.
[7] As Ovid tells the story in his Metamorphoses, Apollo fell in love with Daphne and pursued her. When he was gaining upon her in the race she was transformed, at her own request, into a laurel. The Cretan dame was Ariadne. Bacchus was smitten with her extraordinary beauty, and married her.
[8] This happy line, which is not too extravagant for a lover, belongs to Pope.
[9] Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, an Æthiopian king. Her mother thought herself superior in beauty to the Nereids, which excited their jealousy, and through their influence a sea-monster was sent to prey upon man and beast in the dominions of Cepheus. To atone for her mother's vanity, and rid the land of the scourge, Cepheus agreed to offer up Andromeda to the monster. She was chained to a rock on the coast, where Perseus saw her at the critical moment when she was about to be devoured. Captivated by her charms he engaged and slew the monster, and made Andromeda his wife.
[10] This is very inferior to the conciseness, and simplicity of the original, "memini (meminerunt omnia amantes)." Sir Carr Scrope's translation is nearer the original, and more natural as well as elegant:
For they who truly love remember all.—Bowles.
[11] This line is another of the embellishments which Pope engrafted on the original.
[12] The first line of this couplet is faulty in point of versification, and, to use our bard's own remark, ten low words creep in one dull line. As to the last line, it is wholly redundant, and has no place in the original.—Ruffhead.
[13] In the original, Erycina, which was a surname of Venus from Mount Eryx, in Sicily, where a celebrated temple was dedicated to her.
[14] He has here left four lines untranslated, which are thus rendered in the MS.:
My ruined brother trades from shore to shore,
And gains as basely as he lost before:
Me too he hates, advised by me in vain,
So fatal 'tis to be sincere and plain.
Of the last couplet the MS. contains a second version:
He hates his sister for a sister's care,
So unsuccessful 'tis to be sincere.
[15] In the MS.:
An infant now my hapless fortunes shares,
And this sad breast feels all a mother's cares.
[16] Cephalus tells the story poetically in Sandys' translation of Ovid's Met. vii. 701. He was a hunter, who was setting his nets in early dawn,
When grey Aurora, having vanquished night,
Beheld me on the ever-fragrant hill
Of steep Hymettus, and against my will,
As I my toils extended, bare me thence.
[17] Cynthia prolonged the sleep of Endymion, a shepherd of singular beauty, that she might kiss him without his knowledge.
[18] Scrope is pleasing here:
Oh! let me once more see those eyes of thine!
Thy love I ask not; do but suffer mine.—Wakefield.
Pope's couplet was as follows in the MS.:
Thy love I ask not to forsaken me,
All that I ask is but to doat on thee.
"Scrope melius hic," wrote Cromwell, and though Pope altered the lines the remark of Cromwell remains true.
[19] Ruffhead observes, that this line is superior to the original,
Aspice, quam sit in hoc multa litura loco;
which he thinks flat and languid: but the simplicity of the appeal to the blot on her paper is admirable, and should be only mentioned as a fact. The imitator has destroyed the whole beauty of the line, by a quaint antithesis, and a laboured arrangement of words, which are not natural in affliction. Scrope's translation again excels Pope's:
My constant falling tears the paper stain,
And my weak hand, etc.—Bowles.
[20] "The parenthesis is an interpolation," says a note transcribed by Richardson from Pope's manuscript, and the remark is equally applicable to the next line.
[21] In the first edition,
No gift on thee thy Sappho could confer.
The original couplet in the MS. was
No pledge you left me, faithless and unkind!
Nothing with me but wrongs was left behind.
"Jejune, flat, and ill expressed," is written against the last line in the manuscript, and Pope profited by the criticism.
[22] This image is not in the original, but it is very pleasingly introduced.—Bowles.
[23] The ten next verses are much superior to the original.—Warton.
[24] From Dryden's Ovid, Epist. vii.:
Their daily longing, and their nightly dream.
It was at first thus in Pope's MS.:
Thou art at once my anguish and delight,
Care of my day, and phantom of my night.
[25] In the MS.:
Thy kisses then, thy words my soul endear.
Glow on my lips, and murmur in my ear.
[26] Of this couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:
The charming phantom flies, and I complain,
As if thyself forsook me once again.
And,
I dread the light of cruel heav'n to view,
And close my eyes once more to dream of you.
[27] "Antra nemusque" are not well rendered by "through lonely plains." Ovid is concise and specific, Pope general. Better rendered by Scrope:
Soon as I rise I haunt the caves and groves.—Bowles.
[28] In the first edition:
I find the shades that did our joys conceal,
Not him who made me love those shades so well.
[29] Scrope's translation:
Of Tereus she complains, and I of thee.—Wakefield.
Tereus married Progne, and afterwards fell in love with her sister Philomela. Both sisters conspired to revenge themselves upon him. They killed Itys, his son by Progne, gave him some of the flesh to eat. When, with savage exultation, they revealed the truth to him, and he was about to slay them, Progne was changed into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.
[30] The Sappho of Ovid only says that she laid down upon the bank worn out with weeping. Pope is answerable for the extravagant conceit of "her swelling the flood with her tears." In the next verse Pope calls the Naiad "a watery virgin,"—an expression which borders on the ludicrous.
[31] There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea; for it was an established opinion that all those who were taken up alive would be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy, but perished in the experiment.—Fawkes.
[32] Aleæus arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening, in order to take the leap on her account; but hearing that her body could not be found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his 215th ode on that occasion.—Warton.
The entire story was probably a legend.
[33] These two lines have been quoted as the most smooth and mellifluous in our language; and they are supposed to derive their sweetness and harmony from the mixture of so many iambics. Pope himself preferred the following line to all he had written, with respect to harmony:
Lo, where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows.—Warton.
Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis:
A constant trade-wind will securely blow,
And gently lay us on the spicy shore.—Wakefield.
[34] In the MS.:
To those steep cliffs, that ocean must I fly.
[35] In the place of this couplet, there were four lines in the MS.:
If thou return thy Sappho too shall stay,
Not all the gods shall force me then away;
Nor Love, nor Phœbus, then invoked shall be,
For thou alone art all the gods to me.
Another version ran thus:
Wouldst thou return, oh more than Phœbus, fair
No god like thee could ease thy Sappho's care.
[36] "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force and significance:
What I that loved, and you that liked,
Shall we begin to wrangle?
No, no, no; my heart is fixed,
And cannot disentangle.
Old Ballad.—Bowles.
[37] In the MS.:
Phaon—my Phaon I almost had said—
Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.
Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:
Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled.
Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled.
Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.
[38] Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. Sic recte as [in the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.
[39] In the MS.:
Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales,
Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.
"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "Kinder, and more auspicious, too much."
[40] This image is very inferior to the original, as it is more vague and general: the picture in the original is strikingly beautiful. The circumstances which make it so, are omitted by Pope:
Ipse gubernabit residens in puppe Cupido,
Ipse dabit tenera vela legetque manu.—Bowles.
The objection of Bowles would not have applied to the manuscript, where this admirable couplet, which Pope unwisely omitted, follows the lines in the text:
Shall take the rudder in his tender hand,
And steer thee safe to this forsaken land.
There is a second, but inferior rendering:
Shall sit presiding on the painted prore,
And steer thy ship to this forsaken shore.
Cromwell applied the words of Horace, "quæ desperat nitescere posse, relinquit," which seems intended to intimate that it was impossible to give a poetical translation of the original. Pope deferred to the mistaken criticism.