SOURCE: Pucci, Joseph. “Alcuin's Cell Poem: A Virgilian Reappraisal.” Latomus: Revue D'Études Latines 49, no. 4 (October-December 1990): 839-49.

[In the following essay, Pucci analyzes Alcuin's use of Virgilian pastoral language.]

The artistic, generic, and stylistic features of Alcuin's carmen 23 (MGH [Monumenta Germaniae Historica]), commonly called the cell poem, are novel, marking an advance on Merovingian poetics¹, and symbolizing an invigoration of poetry-writing after several centuries of relative abandonment. Such features have inspired several generations of scholars at once to praise the poem and to agree upon the unities and assymetries involved in its creation². Alcuin combines in this poem an array of literary modes that in other circumstances might well collapse of their own weight. Generically, he writes an elegy in mature couplets but his topic is almost entirely pastoral. Beyond the mere conflation of form to content is the addition of Virgilian pastoral language that is set side by side with Christian imagery. Additionally, the poem moves beyond the confines of a form that is already challenged by its content when, at its conclusion, it takes up the theme of lament with which it began, making it more properly elegiac again.

Moreover, Alcuin was able in writing the cell poem to concentrate on the strengths of Latin, especially making the language's elegant simplicity work to good effect. Alcuin, in fact, would seem to expose the central dilemma of his situation of discourse in the cell poem precisely in the control exhibited in his language, and this is the one feature on which prior work on the poem has most usually centered. In re-working Latin in the ways he did, Alcuin allows himself to become the poet of the classical locus amoenus. Because his engagement of Virgilian pastoral is so convincing, Alcuin places himself in the paradoxical position of seeming to embrace precisely what he rejects at the poem's end: a love of earthly beauty.

This essay takes as its starting point this essential paradox. Its purpose is to analyze more closely the Virgilian material found in the cell poem. Such attention is merited, for through the deployment of classical allusion Alcuin is able to control the tone and movement of his own poem without necessarily saying anything overtly. Due to the conflation—but not the confusion—of classical modes of writing and the use of classical allusion Alcuin has often been seen as less than concerned to revive classical norms and genres³. But his seeming disinterest in genre as such ought not to be mistaken for a haphazard poetic style or artistic crafting. Indeed, the novel ways he goes about crafting his poem are themselves sophisticated and important new ways of crafting, forged in the peculiar environment in which he lived: absent of living models and a literary tradition of which to speak⁴.

This kind of artistic composition can be seen at work immediately in the opening verses of the cell poem. While v. 1-3 will have special significance in their linkage with Georgic 2, the first sixteen lines of “O mea cella” need to be analyzed first in order to understand the ideal about to be destroyed through the linkage to that Georgic:

O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata,
          semper in aeternum, o mea cella, uale.
Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos,
          siluula florigeris semper onusta comis.
Prata salutiferis florebunt omnia et herbis, (5)
          quas medici quaerit dextra salutis ope.
Flumina te cingunt florentibus undique ripis,
          retia piscator qua sua tendit ouans.
Pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos,
          lilia cum rosulis candida mixta rubris. (10)
Omne genus uolucrum matutinas personat odas
          atque creatorem laudat in ore deum.
In te personuit quondam uox alma magistri,
          quae sacro sophiae tradidit ore libros.
In te temporibus certis laus sancta tonantis (15)
          pacificis sonuit uocibus atque animis(5).

Alcuin begins in the present, bidding his cell farewell (v. 1-2), before undertaking a nostalgic description of the cell itself and its surroundings, in part evoked by the leave-taking, and in part a way of prolonging the moment of departure in his mind: a clear, fine moment of ideal memory (v. 3-12). He ends with a warm remembrance of the teaching that was at the core of the activity in the cell (v. 13-16). There is a progressive distancing of the poet's voice in these lines, from the firm and clear present imperative of uale (v. 2), to the less powerful present indicatives of v. 3-12: cingit, quaerit, cingunt, tendit, redolent, laudat (florebunt, future indicative, is the only exception here). Once he begins to recall the intellectual activity that he misses already, however, Alcuin reverts to perfect tense, since the activity is completed now, never to be taken up again. As if to mirror this process, the distance between the poet and reader and the poet and his topic has grown greater in the very writing and reading of these lines. The poet of nostalgia in v. 1-3 has been transformed by the process of poetic composition into a poet of distance and gloom⁶.

So too does the poem's movement in these lines imply a loss of integrity and an eventual abandonment of an ideal. The poet, taking leave of his cell and temporarily caught up in its magic, has constructed a worthy catalogue of its virtues. First, he recalls trees, then meadows, then rivers, before moving on to living creatures and, finally, the recollection of the sure strength and power of the cell as a dwelling-place. The catalogue is important because both in his conception of, and his meditation on, idealism in v. 1-16 and in his pastoral résumé of the cell's surroundings, Alcuin has taken as a general guide Georgic 2.1-346. The linkage of choice here is Georgic 2.81-82: exiit ad caelum ramis felicibus arbos / miraturque nouas frondes et non sua poma⁷, to which v. 3 of Alcuin's poem alludes: Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos. The casualness of Alcuin's language (or Virgil's) ought not suggest the implausibility of allusiveness here, for although ramis and arbos are common words, they appear only once in Virgil's oeuvre—here, in Georgic 2—in this proximity⁸. It should be noted also that Alcuin has inserted an ablative between these two words—as Virgil does also—to further strengthen the linkage.

This linkage sanctions a broader relationship between the texts. Virgil speaks in v. 81-82 of a most extraordinary tranformation. V. 73 ff. have taken up the topic of grafting, which is itself the arboricultural form of allusiveness, that is, the implantation of foreign material into a form or body. But the result is magnificent, both for the eye of the beholder of the tree (or the reader), and especially for the tree itself (the text and its author). Virgil says miraturque nouas frondes et non sua poma: “and [the tree] marvels at new leaves and fruit not its own”. The “fruit not its own” here is, in fact, partially its own and partially not its own, and Virgil's description of it manifests a strange but common instance where language is incapable of describing phenomena, for the fruit is of the tree in the sense that it has grown from it, but is unlike it organically, in that it is not genetically related to the tree that now succors it⁹.

In Virgil, this is both a description of allusion and an image of man-made growth that represents the ideal of fruitful vitality and the possibility of abundance. The allusion to a description of allusion functions in Alcuin, however, both as a symbol of allusion and as an indicator of the larger role Virgil will play in the poem. Virgil's idea of grafting, so Alcuin suggests through the self-same grafting in the cell poem, will be important in his own poem.

But so too do Virgilian ideas of abundance and rustic idealism play a central role in Alcuin the cell poem, for idealism is the notion of choice in the opening lines of this poem. There is, then, a firm parallel between Alcuin's ideal pastoral recollection of his cell and Virgil's rustic pastoral ideal, a linkage that will be ratified in v. 3-12. These later verses, which most closely approximate Virgilian pastoral, function also to suggest a key point: even though Alcuin begins his poem with an evocation of ideal memory of the cell (it is his habitatio dulcis [et] amata), the formally pastoral verses begin at line 3, precisely where the allusion to Georgic 2 has been placed. The beginning of the poem is as much Virgil's, then, as Alcuin's.

V. 3-12 follow the same movements as the first 350 or so lines of Georgic 2 and such a parallel is strategic¹⁰. First Alcuin remembers arbos (v. 3-4), then prata (v. 5-6), and then flumina (v. 7-8) in a fashion similar to Virgil's opening to Georgic 2. There, Virgil treats arbos first (principio arboribus uaria est natura creandis (v. 9)); following his discussion of arbos with a discussion of terrae, the kinds of land, and the kinds of flowers, herbs and fruits they harbor (v. 109 ff.: terrae being the broad category of which prata is one typos, which Alcuin could not credibly treat exactly as Virgil does here); and finally, ending with a discussion of flumina (v. 157 ff.). Virgil's discussions of soils and olives, impossible to include in a poem written in northern Europe, is wisely and credibly omitted by Alcuin (v. 177 ff.). The broad sweep of topics that Virgil treats in a treatise on agriculture, a passage of which functions in the opening lines of Alcuin's poem, also seems to function much more broadly as a model of poetic movement. The dimensions of the movements seem calculated to suggest the strong connection that has already been made Alcuin's poem and the second Georgic. Virgil ends v. 1-350 with a discussion of spring, another seeming instance of parallelism, here operating to give new form to Alcuin's v. 13-16.

Those verses would seem to take shape from Georgics 2.315-346, Virgil's vernal monologue, which follows the catalogue of agricultural traits whose order Alcuin has seemed to imitate. Virgil praises this season for all that it makes possible: for its innate virtue as a constant symbol of life, growth and potential. His praise, however, is eventually undercut by the poet's calculated accentuation of the impermanence of spring and its conditions¹¹. Alcuin's v. 13-16 easily parallel the movement of Virgil's monologue on spring, where the shift to the perfect tense and the distancing of the poet's vision and voice undercut the serenity and perfection of the pastoral scene and highlight Alcuin's growing realization of the impermanence of his vision in the world, of its inability to offer what it promises. In v. 3-12 of the cell poem, Alcuin, like Virgil in the second Georgic, would seem to set up a pastoral ideal only to comment on the fallaciousness of a beauty doomed to the cycles of mutability and impermamence that characterize all life.

Alcuin concentrates in v. 1-16 on the ideas of impermanence and change. His allusion to the second Georgic highlights the idea that any pastoral vision is undercut by the same cycles of change which seemingly are the source of their fundamental allure. But an allusion to Aeneid 6.707-9 at v. 10 (lilia candida) helps Alcuin both to confirm the functioning of the allusion to Georgic 2 and also to form a provisional solution to the problem of impermanence and change. Especially when read as a propadeutic to the second block of material, v. 17-32, which represents the poet's bitter lament over the fact that omnia mutantur, Virgil's function in “O mea cella” becomes clearer, deepening and coloring certain concepts and emotions suggested by the language Alcuin carries over from Virgil's own poetry:

Te, mea cella, modo lacrimosis plango camoenis,
          atque gemens casus pectore plango tuos.
Tu subito quoniam fugisti carmina uatum
          atque ignota manus te modo tota tenet. (20)
Te modo nec Flaccus nec uatis Homerus habebit,
          nec pueri musas per tua tecta canunt.
Vertitur omne decus secli sic namque repente:
          omnia mutantur ordinibus uariis.
Nil manet aeternum, nihil immutabile uere est, (25)
          obscurat sacrum nox tenebrosa diem.
Decutit et flores subito hiems frigida pulcros,
          perturbat placidum et tristior aura mare.
Qua campis ceruos agitabat sacra iuuentus,
          incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior. (30)
Nos miseri, cur te fugitiuum, mundus, amamus?
          Tu fugis a nobis semper ubique ruens.

Aeneid 6 is by any account a tour-de-force of lyric form, its emotion superbly honed under the veneer of epic design. It is this book that the Latin Middle Ages, with its great love of bizarre locales and the dark of evil, well-remembered and for just this reason Dante made good use of it in his own epic experiments. The book is justly famous as a recollection of Aeneas' journey to the world below in order to complete his search for knowledge about the future, but, though the book brims with Aeneas' presence, it is Anchises who stands out in the book's end.

The linkage of the two texts is subtle but it is possible to say that Aeneas' position in book 6 of the Aeneid suggests to Alcuin certain parallels to his own position as construed in the cell poem. One point of connection would be the emotional exhaustion of both figures exhibited at the beginning of their respective texts. Aeneas, recall, at the opening of book 6 is in tears over Palinurus' death and, more generally, is rattled over the course of events that more and more compel him—without very much of his own control—to action. In the same way, Alcuin also begins his poem in distress, grieving at v. 13-16 over the loss of his cell.

A more cogent point of connection would be the concept of uncertainty that works in both the Aeneid and in the cell poem. Book 6 recounts Aeneas' efforts to escape uncertainty, to find out about the future from none other than his father. The linkage is apt since the allusion to this book in the cell poem comes immediately before the poet's pessimistic turn from his own pastoral vision (doomed to death, and so useless) to lament an uncertainty that has already enfeebled a vision he had hoped might somehow relieve his pain. Alcuin, too, has turned to his father, God, for help in his own poem. Aeneas will leave this world, as Alcuin will seem to suggest must be done also at the end of “O mea cella,” (tu fugiens fugias; Christum nos semper amemus, v. 33), in order to find the answers he seeks. But both Aeneas and Alcuin have long and very different journeys through dark worlds to undertake. For Alcuin, “O mea cella” itself represents a dark journey and the end of darkness never really obtains. For Aeneas, darkness ends finally at v. 638 ff., when he comes to places described as delightful and green (locos laetos et amoenos, uirecta)¹².

Much compressed emotion animates this scene in the Aeneid and Virgil plays such emotions perfectly, contrasting the relieved re-discovery of security in Aeneas with the reclaimed sense of self that Anchises' tender devotion to his son elicits. The physical act, however, that would be the natural culmination of the event at hand—the embrace—cannot take place, because Anchises is a shade. Virgil's emphasis on the emotions of Aeneas seems calculated to heighten the sense of emotional deprivation and extreme desire that compel the son to try three times to embrace his father. Virgil describes the attempted union this way:

Sic memorans largo fletu simul ora rigabat.
Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par leuibus uentis uolucrique simillima somno

(v. 699-702).

Almost as if to describe this haunting act by means of recreating Aeneas own vision of it,—moving from image to image in a way that seems to represent the very thoughts of Aeneas in his own mind, and cast directly through Aeneas' own line of vision from beginning to end—Virgil immediately moves to describe what Aeneas sees after his failed attempts to embrace his father occur. Surely hurt and somewhat bewildered by his father's vapory form, the sudden shift of focus from Anchises to a plush grove seems calculated to reproduce the make-shift reaction of an emotionally hurt child: quickly, after the hurt, divert one's own, and, it is hoped, everyone else's, attention away from oneself, before anyone can discover the hurt. Aeneas' hurt here is complex; he is hurt, to be sure, in the way a lost child is hurt: longing for a security that seems forever lost to him. But he is hurt also because in this scene he has just recognized that he is experiencing a world of deep illusion and paradox, real, yet unreal, like the fruit of Virgil's grafted tree which is itself grafted onto the opening of Alcuin's poem.

Aeneas' makeshift reponse to his father at v. 703-4 leads now directly to the allusion in v. 10. V. 703-709 of the Aeneid describe a grove where a stream (amnem), and a meadow (prata) thick with flowers (floribus), entertain bees who dance on white lilies (lilia candida). Alcuin's use of lilia candida links specifically to Aeneid 6.708-9. Aeneas' grove, then, the grove that averts his attention from one kind of unreality to another, the ideal grove of the underworld, is transfixed allusively to Alcuin's text and becomes Alcuin's own vision also, a vision that ultimately proclaims the doom of the temporal world.

But these verses also link to the figure of Anchises and the idea of permanence that he represents. Aeneas has left the world of the living. But the luscious meadow he sees, the grove that averts his gaze from his father, is as unattainable to him at this point as his father's form. And, given the linkage to Virgil's lilia candida, the pastoral vision in Alcuin's poem well-represented by this image is also an unattainable, a vision of ideal memory that both is unreal and doomed to perish.

Both Aeneid 6 and Georgic 2 are meditations on permanence. In Georgic 2 images of spring that intimate their own demise in the cycles of change that envelop the world lead, eventually, to an abandonment of ideal memory altogether. As Gary Miles has noted, Virgil ends this poem “with an image in which the rustic ideal is subsumed in a mythical past that ipso facto places it beyond the attainment of this world, and of the poet himself”¹³. The motions of impermanence and permanence are not for Virgil successfully mediated in the second Georgic. The poem ends with an image of philosophic failure, or at best, philosophic exhaustion, with the poet's horses about to be unharnessed. The problem has been broached and dissected, but that is all. The enquiry has led to a dead end¹⁴.

But Alcuin does not embrace the position of Virgil in Georgic 2 entirely. Virgil's position there, after all, is a tentative position, and forms one aspect of a more complete response on his part. Such exhaustion or failure does not obtain, for example, in Virgil's passage from the Aeneid. The Georgics can suggest the solemnity and immensity of the issue allusively in the cell poem but the allusion to the Aeneid suggests Alcuin's solution to the problem: a willingness to re-harness the horses and to plunge ahead, due, in large part, to the hard work of Virgil, who also forged ahead from his Georgics into a different, maturer position in the Aeneid¹⁵.

That willingness is seen in the ending of the poem where the poet declares in clear and strong language his own position. While noting is these verses that omnia mutantur ordinibus uariis (v. 24), and that nil manet aeternum, nihil immutabile uere est (v. 25), nevertheless Alcuin is strong enough not to stop after he says this, to ask the question that has entered his mind in his readings of Aeneid 6 and Georgic 2: nos miseri, cur te fugitiuum, mundus, amamus? / tu fugis a nobis semper ubique ruens? (v. 31-32). But where the Virgil of Georgics 2 had no answer for Alcuin, the Virgil of Aeneid 6 has at least a possible answer for him. Virgil has himself moved with some assurance from his position in Georgics 2, where impermanence could only be accepted, to the heart and soul of the Aeneid itself, and his answer is moving and humane.

His answer is found in the figure of Anchises, and in the antinomy between what is real and unreal, between what remains and is permanent and what has vanished or is about to vanish. Like Virgil's delight with Casella's song in the Purgatorio, where we find Dante reading Virgil along the lines suggested here¹⁶, Virgil focuses in this passage in the Aeneid on the idea that what abides, what is permanent, is not the ideal memory of the man (“he was my great and perfect father”), but is rather the essence, the reality (“he—his love—was my guide and protector”). In realizing that Anchises was his guide and protector, that Anchises truly loved him, Aeneas realizes that Anchises remains to him what he was, that Anchises' essence, even in death, is permanent.

Why do we love the world even though it falls away from us? We love it because, like Anchises' essence, it is what abides even though it, like the grafted tree or the texts of Virgil and Alcuin themselves, is real and unreal, abides and flees but does not really flee; because it is also truly what we are: fugitiuus, doomed to change and to perish. Alcuin's answer is—like Virgil's answer in the Aeneid—humane and profound. We love the world because it is the world, we love it simply for what it is, like Anchises loves his son; and we love it because in loving it we quietly affirm our own humanity, fallibility, and impermanence, which is a way of groping for permanence after all. But such a position points to an ultimate idea that Dante will celebrate also: that what is supremely and uniquely human is also entirely and sublimely divine.

There can, of course, be no happiness in a poem such as this even if there is celebration. The poet, like a scorned lover, can taunt the world:

Tu fugiens fugias; Christum nos semper amemus:
          semper amor teneat pectora nostra dei.
Ille pius famulos diro defendat ab hoste (35)
          ad caelum rapiens pectora nostra, suos.
Pectore quem pariter toto laudemus, amemus:
          nostra est ille pius gloria, uita, salus.

But the taunt of v. 33-34 brings no relief. The solitude of nostalgia and ideal memory that leads to the central dynamic of the poem is not mediated by the ending of the poem, because the language of the ending is insufficient. This is not the language, after all, of a Christian rejoicing in God's love. It is the language of a man who has momentarily lost his balance, who has realized the divinity of humanity and who questions his ability to scorn all that is beautiful in the temporal world for a faith that is, after all, based on an ideal (like Virgil's ideal in the Georgics) unattainable in this life. Alcuin, like Dante, suggests the paradoxical: that something abides in the temporal world though nothing is ever supposed to remain.

“O mea cella” seems to offer an easy answer to its central question. Virgilian allusiveness, however, allows readers to see beyond the veneer of dismissal to a place where both Alcuin and Virgil seek a permanence and a perfect calm that can never, so both know, be achieved. Alcuin's poem has become, like Virgil's grafted tree, a medieval form containing to its astonishment classical parts growing in and out of it. It has become what it seeks to describe, an essence of beauty amid impermanence that even while it laments impermanence seeks itself to become permanent and so transcend its own nature.

Notes

1. Fortunatus would be the only Merovingian poet of stature at the court of Charlemagne, where his verse was considered canonical. Unfortunately, no modern appraisal exists of the poetry of this important “représentant de la poésie latine dans la Gaule mérovingienne”, as he was called by D. Tardi, Fortunat, Paris, 1927, the last scholar to treat his poetry substantively. See also R. Koebner, Venantius Fortunatus: Seine Persönlichkeit und seine Stellung in der geistigen Kultur des Merowinger Reichs, Leipzig-Berlin, 1915; W. Meyer, Der Gelegenheitsdichter Venantius Fortunatus in Abhandlungen der Göttinger Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Berlin, 1901; C. Nisard, Le poète Fortunat, Paris, 1890; J. Szövérffy, Venantius Fortunatus and the Earliest Hymns to the Holy Cross in Classical Folia 20, 1966, p. 107-122; and also his À la source de l'humanisme chrétien médiéval: “Romanus” et “Barbarus” chez Vénance Fortunat in Aevum 65, 1971, p. 77-86; G. Davis, Ad sidera notus: Strategies of Lament and Consolation in Fortunatus' De Gelesuintha in Agon 6, 1967, p. 118-134; or F. Ela Consolino, Amor Spiritualis e linguaggio elegiaco nei Carmina di Venanzio Fortunato in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 8, 1977, p. 45-56. The dynamics of Merovingian literary culture relative to the classical and Carolingian periods also demand serious modern attention, not yet forthcoming, although one helpful short study would be A. Michel, La tradition de la poésie latine de Boèce à Blaise Cendrars in Estudios sobre Humanismo Clásico, Madrid, 1977, p. 11-47 and esp. p. 11-25. Cf. S. Mariner Bigorra, Prudencio y Venancio Fortunato: influencia de un metro in Helmantica 26, 1975, p. 333-340.

2. The small body of work devoted to this most important poem of the Medieval Latin tradition is in agreement, for example, that a tension exists in the poem, that rhetoric is used to embody and exemplify that tension, that discords displayed through its rhetoric, enveloped in an over-arching concord that becomes the poem itself, serve as the fundamental architectonic idea for the poem, and, finally, that the poem is language set to motion, alternating between the discordance of Christian and classical voices but ultimately coming to express the concord of the poet's faith. P. D. Scott, Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin Verse in University of Toronto Quarterly 33, 1964, p. 233-257, has admirably demonstrated how Alcuin relies upon a “careful rhetorical motion, set into play through an uncanny ability to move backwards and forwards between the rhetorical language of allusion and the direct language of statement” (p. 248). Such a motion implies movement between a love of earthly beauty and the seeking of heaven, the discord inherent in the understood concordia of Christian creation. This motion has been construed even more compellingly by P. Godman, Alcuin's Poetic Style and the Authenticity of O mea cella in Studi Medievali 20, 1979, p. 555-583, who has observed that Alcuin notes the elusiveness of the mutable world, the world of discord, “without succeeding in making it anything but hopelessly desirable” (p. 578). The poem can be read as rhetorical re-creation of concordia discors, whereby the motion of the poet's language introduces readers to the discors inherent within concordia (the poem itself) through the very act of reading, while ambiguously questioning its own intent. The sure-handed motions and polarities of the poem have lead Godman to question whether the apologia with which the poet ends the poem is not somehow countered by his implicit desire for mutable things, most notably, language itself. In such a light, it becomes hard not to read the middle portion of the poem, v. 17-32, as anything other than a lyric monologue on Alcuin's own poetic and emotional dilemma. That dilemma, simply put, entails the discords involved generally in being a poet in a Christian culture and those involved specifically in confronting one's own poetic priorities and making choices as to what value one will assign to poetry, to language, to beauty, to Christ and to faith. Cf. M. Uhlfelder, Classicism and Christianity: A Poetic Synthesis in Latomus 34, 1975, p. 224-231.

3. On Alcuin's relation to the tradition of pastoral see P. D. Scott, Alcuin's Versus de Cuculo: The Vision of Pastoral Friendship in Studies in Philology 62, 1965, p. 510-530, esp. p. 510-513, and n. 1, 2, 4.

4. In writing his own “pastorals”, Alcuin seems to have learned much of his craft from Virgil, specifically, a style of writing comparable to what J. Bayet, Un procédé virgilien: la description synthétique dans les Géorgiques in Studi in onore di Gino Funaioli, Milan, 1955, p. 9-18, as reported by L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey, Cambridge, 1969, p. 203, describes as Virgil's “description synthétique”. In carmen 59, this is manifested in Alcuin's superbly controlled manner in gliding his readers into the perceptual and intellectual worlds he creates. This is a complex dynamic: we perceive what Alcuin perceives, but strategies of allusion also enable readers to reconstruct intellectual patterns and habits of thought that symbolize the ways the poem was composed, the thoughts and imaginative processes that comprise the composition of the poem. Such a style of writing relative to Virgil has been discussed by M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues, Princeton, 1970, p. 253-254, in a discussion of Robert Frost and Virgil. This kind of crafting, which Alcuin seems to have well learned from Virgil, allows, so Putnam writes, “the reader to make the transition from his own thoughts into the processes of Frost's (or Virgil's) imagination and thence into his book” (p. 254). Cf. n. 23 there on Rilke's membership in a group of similar-minded pastoral composers. This concept of crafting awaits substantive treatment relative to the poetry and poetics of Alcuin and I suggest it here simply to point up the sophistication implicit within Alcuin's verse.

5. Scott offers a revision of Duemmler's text with a complete list of line sources and parallels in Alcuin as a Poet, p. 255. The poem appears in Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Poetarum Latinorum Medii Aevi, I, Berlin, 1881, p. 243-244. Godman, Alcuin's Poetic Style, p. 555-583, and his Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, Norman, 1985, p. 124-125, are recent and sound editions of this poem.

6. This reminds of the lyrics of Sappho and Catullus in its sophistication and power, particularly Catullus 51 and the Sapphic original of which it is a translation. On these and the idea of distance see now W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry, Berkeley-London, 1983, p. 38 ff. and 108 ff.

7. All texts of Virgil are from R. A. B. Mynors, P. Vergili Maronis Opera, Oxford, 1969.

8. According to my perusal of H. H. Warwick, A Vergil Concordance, Minneapolis, 1975.

9. On these lines see A. S. Pease, Notes on Ancient Grafting in TAPA [Transactions and Proceedings. American Philological Association] 64, 1933, p. 66-76; D. O. Ross Jr., Non Sua Poma: Varro, Virgil, and Grafting in Illinois Classical Studies 5, 1980, p. 63-71, and especially p. 65-68, and n. 6 and his book, Virgil's Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics, Princeton, 1987, p. 110, and generally p. 104-109, and R. F. Thomas, Tree Violation and Ambivalence in Virgil in TAPA 118, 1988, p. 261-273, and on grafting specifically p. 271-273.

10. I take the catalogue, for the most part, from Brooks Otis' careful consideration of the Georgics in his Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, Oxford, 1966, p. 148-153.

11. I follow G. B. Miles, Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation, Berkeley-London, 1980, p. 141-142. Cf. M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics, Princeton, 1979, p. 101 ff., and E. Winsor Leach, Georgics 2 and the Poem in Arethusa 14, 1981, p. 35 ff.

12. Green is an important color in book 6 of the Aeneid, in the second Georgic, and in the cell poem, and its play in the tone and meaning of these poems could form a study unto itself. Anchises is found by Aeneas penitus conualle uirenti (v. 679), thereby linking a dominant color of both Georgics 2 and O mea cella to the idea of discovery and revelation for Aeneas at Aeneid 6.

13. Miles, Virgil's Georgics, p. 164.

14. Ibid., p. 165.

15. On the ways which problems in the Georgics are meditated on in the Aeneid see W. R. Johnson, The Broken World: Virgil and His Augustus in Arethusa 14, 1981, p. 49-56, and especially p. 52 ff.

16. That is, as a poet concerned with the paradoxes and anxieties of last things; cf. Purg. II.