The taste of honey

by Edna Worthley Underwood

This from Euripedes, from one of the choruses of Electra:

“In ancient song is the tale yet told,

How Pan the master of forest and mead,

Unearthly sweet while the melody rolled,

From his pipes of cunningly linked reed,

Did of yore from the mountains of Argus lead

From the midst of the tender ewes of the fold....”

The construction shines through the none too skillful turning into a modern tongue, in both examples. And in both we still feel recurrence of balanced sound that can not be reproduced in English, and unmapped spaces of loveliness.

Goethe declares, thinking, perhaps, of this: “Man studiere nicht die Mitgeborenen und Mitstrebenden, sondern grosse Menschen der Vorseit, deren Werke seit Jahrhunderten gleichen Wert und gleiches Ansehen behalten haben.... Man studiere Molière, man studiere Shakespeare, aber vor allen Dingen, die alten Griechen, und immer die alten Griechen.”