They still crowd out so; this flock here, that there, belaboring
The loaded flowers.”[1]
So Chapman, in his Gothic fashion, running up his little spires and pinnacles upon the building which he has raised from Homer’s material; but the idea is all Homer’s, and Chapman’s “repairing the degrees of their egression endlessly,” with its resonant hum, is hardly more intentionally a reflex of sound and motion than Homer’s αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων.
We look again at Chapman’s way of rendering the caressing little passage in the fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, wishing to speak of the ease and tenderness with which Athene turns aside the arrow shot at Menelaos, calls up the image of a mother brushing a fly from the face of her sleeping child:—
“Stood close before, and slack’d the force the arrow did confer
With as much care and little hurt as doth a mother use,
And keep off from her babe, when sleep doth through his powers diffuse
His golden humor, and th’ assaults of rude and busy flies
She still checks with her careful hand.”[2]
Here the Englishman has caught the notion of ease, and emphasized that; yet he has missed the tenderness, and all because he was not content to accept the simple image, but must needs refract it into “assaults of rude and busy flies.” Better is the rendering of the picturesque figure in which Ajax, beset by the Trojans, is likened to an ass belabored by a pack of boys:—