[In the following essay, Scott credits Alcuin for helping shape the evolution toward a modern role for poetry, in which formal rhetoric is subordinated to a functional role within the structure of the poem.]

Much has been written in our century about the question of belief in poetry, and much about the question of rhetoric. I hope in this article to deal with both these aspects of convention (nomos) or habit: rhetoric being considered as linguistic convention or habit, and belief as a habituation of the mind. Style, which begins as a mode of persuasion or appeal to belief, eventually becomes transfixed in an exploration of linguistic habit for its own sake; but a period subjected to appreciable cultural and social change will ultimately come to look back upon this fixation of language as mannered and oppressive. To harmonize our inner and outer habituations, a readjustment of rhetoric and belief is called for. This occurred, for example, during the Romantic Revival, and many have called for it in our own time. I propose to study Alcuin, not just as a poet in his own right, but as an example of such a readjustment. In his age as in our own, language, the great conservative medium of a culture (in which all is convention and only the habitual survives) had become a problematic and challenging link with a largely alienated past.

For late antique poetry, in a period conscious of decline, the key to metrical composition was the imitation and outdoing of established models. This attitude towards language we usually call rhetorical: it conflicts with the criteria of “sincerity” and “uniqueness” which are sought after in modern poetry. The pagan grammatical and rhetorical schools were only superficially affected by their nominal conversion to Christianity: not bishops but barbarians caused their antique traditions to be broken. The new ecclesiastical Latin schools on Teutonic soil (above all in Northumbria), precisely because they were artificial in their very inception, could dispense with the living tradition of school Latin, as it had been modified by seven centuries of rhetorical working, and return, self-consciously, to the much simpler models of Augustan Rome. Thus, just as again during the Romantic Revival, a simpler and more “natural” language was restored by artifice and social change. Language became functional. Indeed, the whole of culture, now shrunk to what the schools would transmit, was as far as possible reduced to what was functional within an informing Christian harmony. The Northumbrian schools were not rhetorical schools in a Christian setting, but the intellectual and spiritual flowering of churchmen united in a vita apostolica or common life.¹

The court of Charlemagne attracted learned men from all over western Europe: Alcuin came from York to be master of the Palatine School, but there were also representatives of the ancient traditions from Lombardy and Gothic Spain. Thus the old faced the new; and the problem of poetic style was obviously pursued as a matter of conscious and perplexing choice. The ultimate tone at the court, leading up to the renovatio Romani imperii, was a programmatic neo-classicism in art, letters, and finally politics.²

Not only the cerebral phantasy of the Holy Roman Empire, but the modern pastoral eclogue, with its deliberately classical evocations, was born (or reborn) out of this confrontation. A pastoral panegyric by Alcuin's pupil Modoin (c. 780-840) goes back to the linguistic exemplars of Ovid and Calpurnius; and owes little or nothing to the last antique panegyrics such as that of the Christian bishop Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 480). Sidonius had written that, with the birth of the Emperor Anthemius,

The rivers, flowing with fresh honey, are slowed by their sweetened waves; and oil runs through the astounded oilpresses from the hanging olive. The meadow brought forth waving grain without seed; and the vine envied the grape, born without its aid.

(II.105-9; M.G.H. [Monumenta Germaniae Historica] Auct. Ant. VIII, 176)

This is imaginative but hardly credible; instead it plays on the theme of credibility (astounded—attonitas, literally “thunderstruck”) for greater effect. Sidonius shows us what, with the decline of republican politics, had happened to antique rhetoric: the transition of purpose from the mental habit or belief which is the object of persuasion, to the linguistic habit or convention (nomos) for its own sake. The bishop accepts the golden age topos for what it is. To say less would be unconventional: “such extravagant rhetoric … did not indicate on Sidonius's part any fundamental belief.”³ In the handling of the same panegyrical topos by Modoin, the supplanting of the credible by the rhetorical is no longer so unambiguous:

Aurea securis nascuntur regna Latinis … (92)
Omnibus una quies terris concessa resurgit (97)
Non freta aranda cavo meditantur cerula ligno,
Nulla peregrinas cognoscunt litora naves,
Terra neque ignotis querenda est fertilis oris. (100)
Omnia fert omnis tellus commertia rerum,
Paupertas fugit ima petens terrasque relinquens.
Nulla bono nostro nunc tempore surgit egestas,
Divitiis opibusque piis cumulabitur orbis.
Non iuga dura praemunt furiosi cornua tauri, (105)
Nam neque tellurem vomer proscindit aduncus:
Terra inarata suo producit sidere messem,
Sponte Ceres flava maturis surgit aristis.(4) (108)
The golden age is born to strifeless Rome. …
In every land one granted peace accrues.
The waves do not think to be ploughed by hollowed wood,
Nor are the coasts aware of peregrine ships,
Nor fertile land sought out on unknown shores,
Since every soil bears every need of life,
And hunger flees from earth to Hades' depths.
No poverty is known in our good time,
The earth will be heaped with pious wealth and means.
Hard yokes do not oppress the straining bull,
Nor curved plough rip the unfurrowed earth
Producing freely crops in their due season
As Ceres rises gold with ripened corn.

The passage, like the whole pastoral poem, is both intriguing and disappointing. While it vaguely evokes, by listing the topoi of Ovid and Vergil's Fourth Eclogue, the cultural aspiration and nostalgia of the Carolingian era, it loses the supple allusiveness of Vergil without compensating for this by a gain of credibility. Modoin is simply a good deal less sophisticated: he goes through the established topical paces, but there is not the same artistic play with the material. The poem is indeed barely more than a cento: the notes show how his studious imagination was dominated and ultimately oppressed by classical authority. It is possible, nonetheless, to be original by subtraction. The Calpurnian periphrases are replaced by a more earnest diction: for the first time since Vergil, we feel in the eclogue some excitement of a genuine turning-point in history. The poem is a good example of what we may call reduction to archetype: just as Vergil before him had censored out the arbitrary details of the bronze age and heroic interlude in the Hesiodic topos (Hesiod has more to tell us about the bronze age than the golden) so now Vergil's rainbow-coloured sheep and honey-sweating oaks, and all such stumbling-blocks for the trained Christian sensibility, have themselves been censored out. But the poet thereby complicates rather than resolves the question of belief; this is no longer a pure rhetorical flight such as we find in earlier descriptions of the Christian paradise; but the poet's plain manner is academic, rather than sincere. The paradox of “pious riches,” though necessary to his business, cannot be explained to us; here and everywhere we conclude that he fails to recast the pagan material in his contemporary and essentially Christian vision.

We may take this as a useful but unsuccessful example of the Carolingian effort to imitate the past from a new perspective. If we turn now to the much greater poetry of Modoin's master Alcuin, we find in it a note of personal sincerity and directness which we can trace to the direct manner of address in Alcuin's early model Bede. The new teaching of Latin on Teutonic soil had led in Northumbria to an obvious purification and simplification of language and diction, and also a self-conscious return to classical models. Bede's poetry is full of interwoven classical tags, for this “weaving” was the principle of poetic making which was taught at the time. But the language and diction are subordinated to his puritan sensibility and moralizing purpose; as a rule this leaves him little room for rhetorical indulgence. Alcuin inherits this plain manner, but consciously embellishes it: in his best poetry we find a balance between statement and allusion, between direct experience and literary context, so that unlike Modoin he succeeds in shaping rhetoric to his personal beliefs.

I find such a balance in the following poem to his cell, which is protected from artificiality by its direct statements and affective commitments, from banality by its involvement with enduring, “literary” themes:

O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata,
          Semper in aeternum, o mea cella, vale.
Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos,
          Silvula 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 ovans.
Pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos,
          Lilia cum rosulis candida mixta rubris. (10)
Omne genus volucrum matutinas personat odas,
          Atque creatorem laudat in ore deum.
In te personuit quondam vox alma magistri,
                    Quae sacro sophiae tradidit ore libros.
In te temporibus certis laus sancta tonantis (15)
                    Pacificis sonuit vocibus atque animis.
Te, mea cella, modo lacrimosis plango camaenis,
                    Atque gemens casus pectore plango tuos.
Tu subito quoniam fugisti carmina vatum,
          Atque ignota manus te modo tota tenet. (20)
Te modo nec Flaccus nec vatis Homerus habebit,
          Nec pueri musas per tua tecta canunt.
Vertitur omne decus secli sic namque repente,
          Omnia mutantur ordinibus variis.
Nil manet aeternum, nihil immutabile vere est, (25)
                    Obscurat sacrum nox tenebrosa diem.
Decutit et flores subito hiems frigida pulcros,
          Perturbat placidum et tristior aura mare.
Qua campis cervos agitabat sacra iuventus,
          Incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior. (30)
Nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus?
          Tu fugis a nobis semper ubique ruens.
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, vita, salus.(5)
O my cell, beloved habitation,
Prosper forever, O sweet cell of mine.
The trees surround you with their murmuring limbs
Forever heavy with their flowers and leaves.
Your fields will flower with health-giving herbs
The doctor's hand seeks out for skilful cure.
Rivers with flowering banks surround you too
Where a fisherman rejoicing casts his nets.
Your cloister smells throughout with apple-branches,
Easter lilies mixed with scarlet roses.
While every type of bird recites its matins
Praising its creator with its mouth.
Here once the master's gentle voice recited,
Transmitting books of wisdom by his mouth.
In you at proper times the praise of God
Sounded from peaceful voices, peaceful minds.
I weep you now, my cell, with tearful muse,
And with groaning heart lament your fate.
Suddenly you have fled the poets' songs
And unknown persons occupy you now.
Now neither Flaccus nor Homerus holds you,
Nor students sing their songs within your walls.
All temporal beauty turns with just such speed
And all things change in their appointed times.
Nothing endures, nothing is eternal:
The shadowy night obscures the holy day,
And frigid winter strikes down pretty flowers,
A sadder wind disturbs the quiet sea.
Where golden youth once coursed a rapid stag
A tired old man now hangs upon his stick.
Why do we love you, world our fugitive?
You flee from us, on all sides fall away.
Then, fleer, flee. Let us love Christ instead,
Our hearts be held by our desire of God.
Let Him defend His servants from the field
And snatch our hearts above to paradise,
When with all our hearts we praise and love,
Who is our pious glory, life, hope, health.

Somewhere in these lines Miss Helen Waddell has found “the silvered light of the Loire”:⁶ I find only the language of earlier models, relaxed in a context of strikingly unadorned and unrhetorical statement. We can see how dangerous is the judgement of Professor Taylor, that the transition to mediaeval poetry is characterized by a movement further and further from “the antique observance of the mean.”⁷ Alcuin, indeed, has effectively censored out the rhetorical overworking, the penchant for the antheron plasma or flowery style, which still operates heavily in some comparable elegiacs by his model Fortunatus (530?-610?):

Hic ver purpureum viridantia gramina gignit
                    et paradisiacs spargit odore rosas;
hic tener aestivas defendit pampinus umbras,
                    praebet et uviferis frondea tecta comis,
pinxeruntque locum variato germine flores,
                    pomaque vestivit candor et inde rubor.
Mitior hic aestas, ubi molli blanda susurro,
                    aura levis semper pendula mala quatit.(8)
Here purple spring gives birth to verdant shoots,
                    sprinkles with scent the paradisal rose;
here the soft tendril guards the summer shade,
                    to yield a leafy and grape-clustered roof.
Flowers adorn the spot with varied buds,
                    crimson and white have dressed the apples there.
Summer is sweeter here; with whispers soft
          a gentle breeze beats on the hanging fruit.

The delicate equilibrium of this idyll (the beating breeze, the tendrilled shade) and its maximized appeal to a set of conventional sensations—all this is a late and highly derivative product, heavily overlaid with literary evocations of the locus amoenus (as the notes will show), especially of the Christian paradise as described in Alcimus Avitus (d. 518) or Dracontius (fl.c. 490). It is true we do not find the same virtuoso performance if we turn to the epanaleptics in praise of Lake Como by the Carolingian Lombard poet Paulus Diaconus (720?-799?):

Ver tibi semper inest, viridi dum cespite polles; (7)
                    Frigora dum superas, ver tibi semper inest.
Cinctus oliviferis utroque es margine silvis;
                    Numquam fronde cares cinctus oliviferis.
Punica mala rubent laetos hinc inde per hortos; (10)
                    Mixta simul lauris Punica mala rubent.
Myrtea virga suis redolet de more corimbis,
          Apta est et foliis myrtea virga suis.
Vincit odore suo delatum Perside malum, (15)
                    Citreon has omnes vincit odore suo.
Cedat et ipse tibi me iudice furvus Avernus,
          Epyrique lacus cedat et ipse tibi
Cedat et ipse tibi vitrea qui Fucinus unda est,
          Lucrinusque potens cedat et ipse tibi.(9) (20)
For you it is always spring, you rejoice in a verdant greensward
                    and overcome all chills, for you it is always spring.
Girdled by olivetree woods are you on either shore;
                    you never lack for green, girdled by olivetree woods.
The pomegranates redden there in the happy plots,
                    mixed together with laurels, the pomegranates redden.
The myrtle twig is fragrant with its fruit,
                    thick-set with leaves the myrtle twig is fragrant.
Now wins by its smell the newly-gathered peach,
          over all the lemon now wins by its smell.
Let yield to you Avernus as I deem,
                    the Epyrian lake as well let yield to you.
Let yield to you Fucina's glassy wave,
                    and mighty Lucrinus, now yield to you.

Paulus is a Lombard, not a Roman. Here, as in his history, he looks to ancient Rome from slightly outside its historical tradition, as not a continuity but a classical model at a moment in time. Hence the emulations of Fortunatus are largely replaced by a simpler diction, more Vergilian and also more direct. Yet the basic structure of the poem is still rhetorical, proceeding (with a set deliberateness alien to Vergil) in methodical catalogues and the experientially meaningless comparisons of the vincit and cedat topoi.¹⁰ If we define mannerism as the indulgence in literary or rhetorical conventions for their own sake,¹¹ then there are still traces of late antique mannerism in the Lombard poets, whence it is picked up by Modoin.

Returning now to the poem of Alcuin, our task is not so much to witness the subordination of traditional rhetoric, as to study closely what residue remains. The simplicity of the poem should not let us forget that it is constructed on a pathetic fallacy, as the epistolary formula of the second line establishes.¹² But whereas the address of, say, Fortunatus to the Garonne (Carm. I.xxi) is epideictic and impersonal, Alcuin has caught the contemporary Irish and Anglo-Saxon tone of sympathy with nature, permitting him the characteristically direct

Atque gemens casus pectore plango tuos.

(v.18)

Then in line 24 there is an equally characteristic and abrupt transition from everyday reality to literary commonplace. The omnia mutantur passage is a paramythetic or consolatory topos, imbuing grief with a pattern at once cosmic—

Nil manet aeternum, celso sub cardine caeli, (11)
                    Omnia vertuntur temporibus variis … (12)
Nunc micat alma dies, veniet nox atra tenebris (17)
          Ver floret gemmis, hiems ferit hocque decus(13) (18)
Nothing remains eternal, under the hinge of the sky,
          All things are turning to their various times. …
Now shines bright day, black night will come with shadows,
          Spring brings forth buds, and winter strikes them down—

and personal, or affective:

Cur tu, dulcis amor, fletus generabis amaros (7)
                    Et de melle pio pocula amara fluunt?
Si tua iam, mundus, miscentur dulcia amaris,
                    Adversis variant prospera cuncta cito. (10)
Omnia tristifico mutantur gaudia luctu,
          Nil est perpetuum, cuncta perire queunt.
Te modo quapropter fugiamus pectore toto,
          Tuque et nos, mundus iam periture, fugis.
Delitiasque poli semperque manentia regna (15)
                    Quaeramus toto, pectore, mente, manu.
Felix aula poli nunquam disiungit amicum;
                    Semper habet, quod amat, pectus amore calens.(14)
Why do you, sweet love, entail such bitter tears
          And from blessed honey pour out bitter cups?
Now, O world, your sweet is mixed with bitter,
          Good fortune changes swiftly to adverse.
All joys are turned to desolating grief,
                    Nothing abides, all things must decay.
Thus let us flee you now with all our hearts,
                    As you flee us, O world about to die.
The bliss of heaven and its enduring realm
                    Let us now seek with all our heart and mind.
There friends will nevermore be rent asunder,
                    The heart, by loving, has its love always.

This last passage, in a letter from Alcuin to an unknown friend, shows the commonplace affective transition from worldly transience to paradisal reconciliation. This is a convention of Christian rhetoric, which in epitaphic formulas had been appropriately stripped of linguistic overlay. But in the cell poem we see that the conventional antithesis has become something more: a vision of the world into which the earlier imagery of the poem is transformed (Decutit et flores subito) and, in the end, celestially translated. The transfer of emotional attention to Christ in the closing lines is another epistolary formula to answer and complete that of the exordium. Thus the antithesis between worldly transience and mortality, and that idyllic reconciliation which the monastic cell should prefigure, is implicitly at least a containing structure for the entire poem: about these poles of alienation and charity, the whole imagery and language of the poem are to a certain extent magnetized.

This affective unity and structure is rare in ancient poetry, pagan or Christian. Even the highly affective rhetorical tropes of Sedulius (fl.c. 435) or Paulinus Nolanus (d.c. 431), to which Alcuin owes so much, are rarely sustained or echoed within their poems; more usually they constitute an excursus irrelevant to the poem's narrative or essentially linear development. Above all, the rhetoric is more or less continuous; it cannot exploit, as Alcuin does, the contrast between direct (vv. 3-22) and allusive language.

Except when he has reasons to be playful, Alcuin's use of rhetoric and literary allusion is almost always functional in terms of the unity of the poem. Take, for example, the bare hint of asyndeton (suppression of conjunction) in the closing gloria, vita, salus. From the fifth century on, one symptom of the decay of classical poetry is the regression towards tasteless and indiscriminate use of the more obvious and easily imitated rhetorical figures such as asyndeton,

myrta salix abies corylus siler ulmus acernus,

(Fortunatus, III.ix.23)

or paromoion (alliteration),

Tantillus tantam temno tacere tamen.

(Theodulfus, XXV.8)

In contrast to both Fortunatus and especially Theodulfus, Alcuin tends to reserve such figures for salutations or reverences to deity, where the conventional and thus depersonalized language has the effect of creating a due sense of ritual or reverence.¹⁵

The old man with the staff is another commonplace allusion; and a poem by Columban (d. 615) which is inspired by the same commonplace moralizing about time and salvation uses the formula baculo nitens in the usual rhetorical manner; there is no visible function to the allusion. But the couplet by Alcuin reminds us of the context or situation in a poem by Claudian, whose appropriate sentiment is here significantly converted. “Happy,” wrote Claudian, “is the man who spends all his days in his own fields.”

Ipsa domus puerum quem vidit, ipsa senem,
Qui baculo nitens in qua reptavit harena.
The same house sees him as a boy, and old
Who leans on a staff in the sand where once he crawled.

Rural simplicity and continuity (Frugibus alternis, non consule computat annum) is for the pagan poet Claudian an earthly consolation: but in Alcuin this image of a man's whole lifetime symbolizes not endurance but brief mortality.¹⁶ Even the rural comforts of the cell flee us as time itself. The use of traditional and thus in a sense timeless language also lends an added mystique to the omnia mutantur topos, since it is only from the timeless perspective of the books studied in the cell that this vision can be sustained. When Professor Laistner professes to admire only the first sixteen lines, adding that “the rest is commonplace,”¹⁷ I think he ignores the appropriateness at this point of language which (like that of the mass) is resonant from timeless repetition in the past. (Words and the Word are traditionally contrasted with the transience of the world—grammata sola carent fato¹⁸—and this invests the master's cell with a limited mystique, or at least foretaste, of secular transcendence.) Alcuin is known to have composed his poems from sylloges or anthologies of epitaphic inscriptions: but his turning of this rhetoric to novel matter is an ingenious technique of sacramentalizing the immediate, of seeing the present in the rich context of a timeless past. It is hard to appreciate mediaeval Latin poetry if we reject its wealth of commonplace. With a different perspective of time and truth, a poet did not have our compulsion to be original.

This unification of structure, imagery, and sensibility, and corresponding balance between direct and rhetorical statement, seem to be features which emerge in Alcuin's late and more mature poetry.¹⁹ We can perhaps best see what was involved by contrasting Alcuin's poem to the nightingale (a set topic if not indeed a school exercise for eulogy) with a late antique example from the pen of Archbishop Eugenius of Toledo (d. 658).²⁰ In the earlier poem a brief exordium (“your song forces this rustic tongue to sing your praise”) is followed by several examples of panegyric outdoing (the vincit and cedat topoi we saw in Paulus Diaconus) to celebrate the victory in song of the nightingale over the cithara, the pipe, the seeds of care, the swan, the garrulous swallow, and the illustrious parrot. (In a ninth-century imitation, the Spaniard Paulus Albarus adds the Muses themselves to the ranks of the defeated; and the same topoi are still set out in the overrated rhythm to the nightingale by Fulbert of Chartres (?) in the tenth or eleventh century.) But Alcuin praises the nightingale, not for her Caesarian invincibility, but as an example of humility and dedication for himself to follow. Characteristically, his exordium is a cry of personal loss, while he concludes with his ever-fervent theme of awakening from the drunken sleep of this life:

Quae te dextra mihi rapuit, luscinia, ruscis,
          Illa meae fuerat invida laetitiae.
Tu mea dulcisonis implesti pectora musis,
          Atque animum moestum carmine mellifluo.
Quapropter veniant volucrum simul undique coetus, (5)
          Carmine te mecum plangere Pierio.
Spreta colore tamen fueras non spreta canendo,
          Lata sub angusto gutture vox sonuit,
Dulce melos iterans vario modulamine Musae,
          Atque creatorem semper in ore canens. (10)
Noctibus in furvis nusquam cessavit ab odis
          Vox veneranda sacris, o decus atque decor.
Quid mirum, cherubim, seraphim si voce tonantem
          Perpetua laudent, dum tua sic potuit?
Felix o nimium, dominum nocteque dieque (15)
                    Qui studio tali semper in ore canit.
Non cibus atque potus fuerat tibi dulcior odis,
          Alterius volucrum nec sociale iugum.
Hoc natura dedit, naturae et conditor almus,
          Quem tu laudasti vocibus assiduis: (20)
Ut nos instrueres vino somnoque sepultos,
          Somnigeram mentis rumpere segniciem.
Quod tu fecisti, rationis et inscia sensus,
          Indice natura nobiliore satis:
Sensibus hoc omnes, magna et ratione vigentes (25)
                    Gessissent aliquod tempus in ore suo.
Maxima laudanti merces in secla manebit
Aeternum regem perpes in arce poli.(21)
Whoever stole you from that bush of broom,
          I think he envied me my happiness,
O little nightingale, for many a time
          You lightened my sad heart from its distress,
          And flooded my whole soul with melody.
And I would have the other birds all come,
          And sing along with me thy threnody.
So brown and dim that little body was,
                    But none could scorn thy singing. In that throat,
That tiny throat, what depth of harmony,
                    And all night long ringing thy changing note.
                    What marvel if the cherubim in heaven
Continually do praise Him, when to thee
          O small and happy, such a grace was given?
Happy the man, who can both night and day
          The Lord with such attention celebrate.
Not food nor drink could tempt you as did song,
          Not even love of some domestic mate.
          This nature gave, and nature's architect
Whom you have praised with such inspiring tongue
          That you could us in drunken sleep instruct
To break the sodden torpor of our minds.
          This you have done, though ignorant of wit,
Your nobler nature a sufficient sign.
          This all have sometime done, whose wit is great,
          And sometime praised the maker in their heart.
The greatest guerdon will in time remain
                    For those who praise Him in celestial court.

The central conceit—“you, too, nightingale, are a little monk”—is a commonplace of Irish poetry in this period.²² The rigorous pursuit of it by Alcuin in this poem has led a modern scholar to complain of “intolerable bathos,” but in fact the single-minded moralizing of the poem is what makes it a genuine experience; the feeling of monastic friendship and communal purpose between man and bird (the same identity as was touched on in the poem to the cell) give this traditional topic a new sense of personal engagement and rapport. Because the nightingale, in the simplest sense, means something to the poet, all of the old imperial rhetoric is censored away, except for what is relevant to his purpose. Moralizing, in this case, has worked for both poetic immediacy and unity of feeling.

This discipline of rhetoric by belief, feeling, and affective purpose, is what distinguishes the northern Carolingian poets, and above all Alcuin, from their Latin contemporaries. The greatest representative of the latter is the Spanish refugee Theodulfus, who seems to have come north about 774 and was soon made Bishop of Orléans. Theodulfus still reflects the continuity of the ancient rhetorical schools, whose influence survives in Spain until the protreptics and Gongorism of the seventeenth century. Of all the Carolingians he is without doubt the most adept, versatile, fluent, and incisive in his use of rhetoric, which he turns with effect to vivid satiric sketches of his own day. By modern critics he has been most admired for his portraits of life at court, with its feasts, drinking, and tenuously repressed hostilities. The chief of these sketches is cast as a panegyric, and in large part it is so well-spoken as to read like a parody of Fortunatus. Its exordium is traditional: the whole world sings the praises of the king, and though it may say much, cannot say all. An adynaton follows: If the Meuse, the Rhine, the Saône, the Rhône, the Tiber, and the Po can be measured, so can your praise. Then a catalogue of specific praises: the face brighter than thrice-melted gold, the egregious head, the golden hands which abolish poverty, the limitless wisdom broader than the Nile, greater than the cold Danube and the Euphrates, not smaller than the Ganges. Then the coming together of his pacified subjects: as there is spring in the world, let there be peace in the state. Then we see the sunlike king, his family, and a chorus of bejewelled virgins such as that which Fortunatus describes in paradise.

This is pastoral-type panegyric of the old order. All of these praises are traditional, but the attitude of the poet is more subtle; somehow we are dealing, as he tells us at the outset, with laude iocoque simul, jokes as well as praise. What a tribute in that admission to the humanity of the period: Theodulfus can joke with his monarch just as Alcuin (Carm. XLV) can give him hard parental advice. (If Fortunatus was joking when he described Queen Fredegonde as “excelling all in merit,” he kept the secret to himself.²³ Familiarity is after all the key to purposive communication: in this respect Vergil himself was constrained within the strictest limits.) In truth Theodulfus was no frivolous man, but in his own way as stern a moralist as Alcuin. His religious verse sings the praises of the monks who reject the world, even if he never quite abandoned secular concerns himself. He was an aggressive reformer, and some of his most powerful verse is devoted to the satiric denunciation of contemporary decadence. In all this we feel we are dealing with an alienated sensibility, a feeling confirmed by Theodulfus' religious verse, where the dominant note is not so much of hope as of despair.

Given the values of his contemptus saeculi, Theodulfus, like Alcuin, was incapable of versifying too seriously. But if he affected a certain contempt for rhetoric, this contempt (like that of Catharism) becomes a licence for excess; he knows the limits of exercises, but rarely gives us anything else. It is the positive details of the Christian religion which, by their very intractibility, are attractive to him as set topics for the display of his techniques. Thus (somewhat like Unamuno in our century) he will versify a chapter of St. Paul, or the description in Matthew XXIV. 21-2 of the coming great tribulation; to the latter he adds an explanation of why, if we rightly read Daniel XII.7, the time of Antichrist will last for forty-two months. We see his two-edged sensibility in a poem on avarice (C.VII) which becomes an opportunity to catalogue the riches of all the exotic places in the fourteenth book of Isidore. A topical consolation (C.XXI) in the vein of Fortunatus (IX.ii) ignores the death which occasioned it, but supplies 73 lines of Old Testament necrology. When he turns to the favourite Carolingian theme of the sower (Matt. XIII) he passes over the archetypal seminal overtones²⁴ for the quaint numerological fancies of Jerome.

Namque index summus leviter cum pollice iunctus
          Terdenum in numeris scit retinere locum.
Mullis et amplexus digitorum dulcia signat
          Oscula coniugii, quae sibi grata manent.
At pollex curvo curvatus ab indice pressus
          Sex denos monstrat, inque typo viduas. …(25)
The index finger joined with the thumb together
Are recognized to mean the thirtieth number.
This gentle finger-coupling signifies
The sweet connubial self-rewarding kiss.
But a curved thumb pressed by an index finger curved
Signifies sixty, and is a sign of widows. …

This, like a great deal of Theodulfus' poetry, is a static metrical exercise. It is true that he is a far greater descriptive poet than Alcuin; he will lavish vivid virtuoso ecphrases on a cup or a pair of gloves. Alcuin, with his nisus towards archetype and the inner simplicity, tends to pass over such sensuous detail, since in his life and prose he treated all sensuous pleasure as volatile shade, velut volatilis umbra. But if such a doctrine seems unpromising in a poet, we should at least see that it was no denial of Alcuin's sensibility, but a fulfilment of it. His desires were other-wordly but none the less powerful for that. Actually, in the long run, the poetry of Theodulfus strikes me as being just as dogmatically limited. He does not give way to desire; his final expectation is that of Antichrist as the evil to cure our evils (Carm. XVIII). What could be closer to an anti-pastoral, a reversal of the affective vision in the Fourth Eclogue, than his versifying of Cyprian (d. 258) on the world's decline?

Non ea temperies hiemis prius ut fruit exstat, (5)
          Quae nutriere queat gramina, ligna, sata.
Copia deest solis torrendo aestate labori,
          Verna nec officio sunt modo laeta suo.
Dulcibus haud adeo mustis autumna redundant,
          Foetibus arboreis non onerata vigent … (10)
Non viget, ut viguit dudum, vegetata iuventa (21)
          Cuncta senectus atrox ore nigrante vorat.
Namque necesse manet minui, cui proximus exstat
          Finis, et occasum haud procul esse videt.
Dat sol ima petens radios splendore minore, (25)
          Lunaque decrescens cornua fusca gerit.
Arbos, quae iuvenis vernabat flore comisque,
          Deformi fundit germina rara situ.
Fons et inundantes solitus diducere rivos,
          Sic guttam tenuem saepe vetustus habet.(26) (30)
Our winters are not temperate as before
To nurse and shelter pasture, shrubs, and seeds.
The sun in summer lacks its parching power
And joys of spring now fail their proper task.
Nor do autumns stream with gentle must
Nor are they laden down with orchard fruit. …
Our youth is not as lively as it was,
Cruel age with pitch-black mouth devours all things.
We must diminish, now our end appears
And we can see our fall not far away.
The sun descending casts less splendid rays,
The waning moon proceeds with darkened horns.
Once flowers and leaves adorned this youthful tree,
Now single shoots escape its weakened burls.
And springs which used to flood with drenching streams
With age have often shrunk to trickling drops. …

In this vigorous reiteration, Theodulfus makes commonplace language supremely his own, and the more emphatic and controlled for its spiritual alicnation. We might say there is something Spanish in this near-fatalism: those who feel a difference between the pedantic curiosity of Isidore and the symbolic appetency of Bede may recognize a similar divergency of motive between the Spaniard and the Northumbrian of the Carolingian Court. Isidore and Theodulfus are late products looking to the authorities of the past; with Bede and Alcuin the legacy of these authorities has been relaxed and remoulded in a vision of new possibility.

The traditional rhetoric of Theodulfus enables us to understand and define more closely the original simplicity of Alcuin. Alcuin too can write light verse involving friendly jokes and even puns;²⁷ but he is more likely to turn these rhetorical jokes to some affective purpose. In like manner the language of allusion is controlled and modulated. Theodulfus uses tags from Ovid, Prudentius, and the satirists more or less indiscriminately, for the sake of elegance, rather than for any special effect. He knows himself to be part of an imitative tradition; Alcuin is equally conscious of the difference between his own relatively plain and unaffected Latin, and the elegant pagan excerpts (literally “pluckings,” since these were the “flowers” of mediaeval florilegia or commonplace books) which he sets like gems within it. There is a more complex intention here, not imitation for its own sake, but a quotation which is functional:

Splendida dum rutilat roseis Aurora quadrigis,
                    Perfundens pelagus luce nova liquidum,
Discutit ex oculis nocturnos pollice somnos,
                    Mox senior strato prosilit ipse suo,
In campos veterum procurrens carpere flores,
                    Rectiloquos ludos pangeret ut pueris. …(28)
While the magnificent dawn shines in her roseate carriage,
          Soaking the liquid sea with light anew
The master strikes with his thumb nocturnal sleep from his eyes
          And soon himself leaps from his lowly bed,
Running to pluck the flowers found in the classical fields
          That he may grant his boys some right-speaking games. …

The thumbwork here, as much as the roseate carriage, is made from echoes, not (as has been suggested) from direct visual observation. Yet the quotations are used to colour and heighten a real, everyday occurrence, as we learn in the cold awakening of the second couplet. The carpere flores topos of the third couplet, one of Alcuin's central and most archetypal metaphors, makes the whole game clear, and establishes the appropriateness of quoting Vergil: Alcuin's poem is, in fact, a preface to his textbook on spelling.

This passage is typical of Alcuin's ability to move backwards and forwards between the rhetorical language of allusion and the direct language of statement; and thus to see the present as unique, at the same moment that it is superimposed upon the past of literature. By moving between these two realms of meaning, an ambiguity of situation is created, of the type which pastoral exploits; and which can be put to work either for allegory or for irony. Alcuin reminds us how closely these two genres are related; just as, in the recent past, the allegoric allusions of romanticism have been inevitably followed by the ironic allusions of Eliot and Pound:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal coot.

Allegory expands, irony diminishes, the extension or truthfulness of its statement. The same telescope can be brought into ironic focus, on the limitations of the actual, or into allegoric focus, on the realm of connotations behind it. A convenient device to either end is (what we find in Alcuin) the conscious art of pastiche. Now the rigorous pursuit of either allegory or irony is likely to pall: what we admire in the eclogues of Vergil, and can find in Alcuin also, is the ability to move lightly from one game to the other. But Theocritus could not represent the past to Vergil as securely as Vergil himself did to the Carolingians: perhaps there has never been another age when, among the literate, a single short canon of authors was so familiarly known, so meditated on,²⁹ and thus so affectively important. Latin was already becoming a literary language dominated by traditional connotations: this, while it threatened poetic immediacy, allowed for an almost unconscious facility and subtlety of allusion which could range through several modes. Of these, in Alcuin, the mode of disaffected irony is most conspicuously absent. Can we trace this perhaps to his real attachment to, and gratification from, the gaudia mentis (XVII.11) or delights of sacred learning, which he so often celebrates in his poetry? We are convinced that for Alcuin the flowers of the commonplace carpere flores topos are real, in the sense of affectively persuasive, however bitter the turbulent waters of the world:

Alcuinus ingrediens patrum sacra prata piorum
          Carperet ut flores per pia rura sacros,
Fingere serta volens puerorum congrua fronti,
          Grandia quorum aetas pondera ferre nequit.
Has, rogo, litterulas nostri perdiscite nati,
          Et tota aeternos mente tenete dies.
Omnia fluxa fluunt saeclorum gaudia longe,
          Nec redeunt iterum more fluentis aquae. …(30)
Alcuin enters the sacred patristic fields
          To gather sacred flowers from this holy country
Hoping to weave a garland fit for the young
          Whose age cannot yet bear too huge a weight.
Learn, O youths, this text of mine, I pray,
          Guard it with all your mind through all your days.
All temporal joys of the world flow far away,
          Like flowing water will not come again. …

In this more serious and religious poem, Alcuin's plain language has divested these two commonplace metaphors, flores and serta, of their originally rhetorical associations. Their affective importance now transcends the lines in which they occur: instead of being an occasional decorative figure, part of the rhetorical ornatus of the poem, they create a central metaphorical situation for the poem as a whole. The meaning of the figures thus greatly transcends their explicit grammatical function: insofar as this happens, we may say that they approach the status of symbolic and even archetypal metaphors. To study the history of this transition from rhetoric to symbolic, and the emergence of poems with underlying metaphorical situations, would require a separate article paying due notice to both rhetorical conventions, such as the epithalamium, and above all the pagan and biblical traditions of allegorical exegesis. The transition is by no means limited to Alcuin, but, especially in the rhetoric-mistrusting north, is a common feature of the period. The important thing to observe (witness the notes to the poem in question) is that the process is largely one of subtraction, a reduction to archetype through the elimination of what is not relevant to it. This is most clearly brought out by contrasting the earlier, more self-conscious figures of Aldhelm (d. 709):

Sic lector libri solers et gnarus amator
Nititur electos scripturae carpere fructus,
Ut pecus agrestes ex prato vellicat herbas.

(Carm. 2773-5)

Thus the skilled and loving reader of books
Strives to pluck the chosen fruits of scripture
As a herd plucks its country herbs from a field.

Or again

purpureos pudicitiae flores ex sacrorum voluminum prato decerpens pulcherrimam virginitatis coronam Christo favente contexere nitar.

(Prosa de Virg. XIX)

Plucking the purple flowers of chastity from the field of the sacred volumes I shall endeavour with Christ's aid to weave a most beautiful garland of virginity.

No one can deny the rhetorical quality of Aldhelm's late Irish Latin: in Alcuin our attention is no longer drawn to the words, but to the mental realm they represent. The more one reads Alcuin's poetry, the more it is clear that for Alcuin the entire universe of abstract meanings and connotations is relatively simple and composed; and the metaphorical situation just quoted is in fact the metaphorical situation for all his poems which have one. It is not (as any modern poem must almost certainly be) a fragment from the world of the poet's imagination; it is very simply that world itself, ordered into a single structured vision or orama between the affective poles of desire (in this poem, the peaceful fields) and alienation (the flowing waters). This world is of course not one of his own invention: if it were, it could not have the objective reality which it does. In large part it has been created by centuries of allegorizing and de-allegorizing from sacred scripture, by the efforts to contemplate that jumbled congeries as a single intellectual whole. It is this sustained interlocking of figurative meanings, operating continuously as a single world of reference underneath the literal development of the poem, that turns rhetorical tropes into poetic symbols.

We saw a hint of this interlocking affective structure, or orama, in the poem to the cell, when its wakeful peace was contrasted with the violent passage of time; and again in the poem to the nightingale, where the spiritual burial of man in wine and sleep was contrasted with the bird's spring vigil in praise of the Lord. Note how all these themes are alluded to in the following letter to Alcuin's former pupils at York, where the linkup of the images is partly independent of the poem's literal development:

Nunc cuculus ramis etiam resonavit in altis;
Florea versicolor pariet nunc germina tellus.
Vinea bachiferas trudit de palmite gemmas,
Suscitat et vario nostras modulamine mentes
Indefessa satis rutilis luscinia ruscis. (5)
Et sol signiferi medium transcendit in orbem,
Et Phoebus vicit tenebrarum regna refulgens;
Atque natans ad vos pelagi trans aequora magni
Albini patris deportat carta salutem,
Moenibus Euboricae habitans tu sacra iuventus. (10)
Fas idcirco, reor, comprehendere plectra Maronis.
Somnigeras subito te nunc excire camenas,
Carminibusque sacris naves implere Fresonum,
Talia namque placent vestro quia munera patri,
Qui nunc egregias regalibus insonat artes (15)
Auribus et patrum ducit per prata sequentem
Praepulchro sophiae regnantem stemmate celsae.
Tu quoque, tu patri nimium dilecta iuventus,
Tu sobolis vitae, patriae laus et decus omne,
Aetheriis sophiae feliciter utere donis, (20)
Ut tibi permaneat merces et gloria semper.
Ebrius initiat vobis neu vincula Bachus,
Mentibus inscriptas deleat neu noxius artes.
Nec vos Cretensis depellat ab arce salutis
Improbus ille puer, stimulis armatus acutis. (25)
Nec vos luxivagus raptet per inania mundus,
Vertice submergens vitalia pectora nigro:
Sed praecepta sacrae memores retinete salutis,
Dulcisono Christum resonantes semper in ore.
Ille cibus, potus, carmen, laus, gloria vobis (30)
Sit, rogo, qui vobis tribuat felicia regna
Atque suis sanctis iungat super aethera semper.(31)
Now has the cuckoo sung in the lofty branches,
The varied earth brings forth its flowery shoots.
The vine puts out its wine-bearing buds from its sprouts,
The nightingale from groves of golden broom
Unwearied wakes our minds with varied measure.
The sun climbs through the middle zodiac,
Resplendent Phoebus conquers the realm of shades;
And swimming to you through the waters of the sea
Alcuin's letter brings paternal greetings,
You hallowed youth within the walls of York.
'Tis fit, I say, to seize the Maronian lyre
And suddenly to wake the sleeping Muses
And fill the Frisian naves with sacred songs;
Because such gifts are pleasing to your father
Intoning noble arts to regal ears
And leading through the patristic fields a youth
Ruling with the crown of lofty wisdom.
You also, youth too cherished by your father,
Offspring of life, our nation's pride and glory,
Use happily the etherial gifts of wisdom.
Do not submit to drunken Bacchus' chains,
Nor lose the arts inscribed upon your minds.
Nor let the Cretan, armed with piercing darts,
Unworthy lad, drive you from heaven's height,
Nor the erring world seize you through vanities
Submerging living breasts in a whirlpool dark:
But retain the precepts of salvation
Singing of Christ with dulcet lips forever.
Let He, to you, be food, drink, song, praise, glory
I pray, and grant to you his happy realm
And join you to his saints above the skies.

The poem's tono scherzoso and vigorous springtime whimsy have been noted before. What is equally original, and has not been noted, is the initial heaping up of congruent images in what we may call symbolic harmony. The single line

Et Phoebus vicit tenebrarum regna refulgens

has a polarizing effect: it not only invests the spring images of the exordium with mystical paschal overtones; but adds symbolic resonance to the succeeding triumph of the health-giving letter over the waters of the sea. This eidyllion of pastoral well-being is sustained in the monastic references of the prata patrum, the sacra iuventus of the poem to the cell, and above all the resonant notion of a time for awakening to song, the same optative idea we encountered in the poem to the nightingale. The pole of optative well-being is mirrored darkly in the antithetical admonition

Nec vos luxivagus raptet per inania mundus
Vertice submergens vitalia pectora nigro

where the vortex of the world, with its wealth of commonplace associations, draws the sea of the earlier lines more securely into the affective structure of the poem; and is contrasted directly with the opposite vortex of the felicia regna. This commonplace archetype of the machina mundi—known to modern readers through the whirling world of Eliot's poetry—is further structured by the commonplace formula raptet per inania. Whatever instance of it may have served as Alcuin's model, its appropriateness is unquestionable. Callisto and her son were caught up by Jove and translated through the void (raptos per inania) to heaven: it is important that the world not seize us in the opposite direction, through the vanities of what Alcuin elsewhere calls the vortices of lust.³²

It is characteristic of Alcuin's poetry that Bacchus and Cupid (the improbus ille puer of Vergil's Eighth Eclogue—to sustain and convert the Vergilian tone of the exordium) have lost their more specific connotations to merge as aspects of a single swirling diabolic force. What we have here is not the amplificatio or “free creation of the marvellous” which C. S. Lewis admires in Claudian (fl. c. 400) or Bernardus Sylvestris (fl. c. 1150), but its opposite and complement, a reduction to archetype. The pagan gods are no longer unmentionable (as when Avitus (d. 518) wrote claudetur fistula Phoebo), but they are relevant only insofar as they have not been wholly “disinfected of belief.” The wish and danger is for Alcuin a real one; thus the poem has an immediacy of appeal which is not purely “rhetorical.”³³

Whoever has read, say, the magnificent paschal poem of Fortunatus (III.ix) knows that this archetypal reduction, and symbolic resonance, do not begin with Alcuin. But Fortunatus rarely sustains a metaphorical situation: a typical poem (VIII.vii) begins with the paschal victory over Tartarus, passes to the flowers which Agnes and Radegunde have strewn in the church, describes the herbid battle of their colours in this place of peace, and compares the victory of the flowers over gems and frankincense to the odour of the nuns themselves. It is, in short, a discursive rhetorical poem: the tropes are his subject, not a unified background for it, and the poem has a linear articulation only. Alcuin's poem is both more immediate and more symbolic. His relatively simple motives control the underlying affective unity of the poem, while allowing for a relative freedom of articulation on the literal level. His unswerving purpose extracts from the literary past only such fragments as are relevant to its intentions, and fixes these, as it were, in a magnetic field of polarized fear and desire.

With these two features, of affective unity and of the disengagement between syntactical and allegorical structures of development, Alcuin represents, in my opinion, an important step in the evolution towards modern notions of poetry. Thus I cannot understand why, up to now, even admiring critics have been so hesitant in their praise. This close examination of the role of rhetoric in Alcuin's poetry should persuade us that Alcuin was original in this, if in nothing else: that rhetoric in all its senses, of tropes, ornatus, emulation, and allusion, was clearly subordinated to a functional role within the unified structure of the poem. This was of course because Alcuin had something to say in an extra-poetic sense. His poems sustain a single optative mood; and his wishes are real ones. Although his poems do not presume to express the full measure of his faith, they lead us to it; and it is possible perhaps to suggest that by modern standards Alcuin was more Christian in his treatment of secular subjects than most of the first Christian rhetoricians in their treatment of sacred ones.

Alcuin had a fairly low estimation of poetry as a secular game or diversion: he left surprisingly little sacred or liturgical poetry, and versified for the most part on relatively humble subjects. Nevertheless, it appears that more of his poetry has been preserved (over 180 folio pages in the MGH edition are attributed to him) than that of any other Latin poet between the sixth and eleventh centuries. I believe it is time to accept the tribute of this preservation as some mark of his true value as a poet, and to challenge the almost universal judgement that

this great scholar and organizer, “the first intellectual among Charlemagne's officials” (Guizot) and “one of the men to whom Western civilization owes most” (Gilson)—was only a second-rate writer.³⁴

The fact is that poetry, even as a game, was important to Alcuin's life-objective: to re-establish learning as a means towards gratifying and thus converting the world. We can still commune in the faith and objective which shaped his life: in reading his letters or his poems, we can understand and identify with his human motivations. However more forceful may be the effect of reading Vergil, or even Fortunatus, the personalities of these ancient writers are veiled to us. The very intensity of Alcuin's dedication to a common faith has the paradoxical effect of lifting that veil. A new intimacy is given to language by his resumption of a common purpose: we read Alcuin, no longer as a rhetorician, but as we would a modern poet.

Notes

1. Cf. R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954): “To be viable, a system of educational training must possess a certain internal harmony. The student must not be troubled by being taught contradictory notions of the world, mutually exclusive values, or incompatible tastes. That type of harmony the Anglo-Saxon schools certainly achieved” (102). Cf. 103: “What they did was to simplify the teaching of grammar and versification so as to bring these subjects within the grasp of students who had needed to start Latin from the beginning.”

2. Roger Hinks, in Carolingian Art (London, 1935) refers to a “sudden and successful resuscitation of the antique style about the year 800 both in book-painting and ivory-carving” (110). It is Hinks's thesis that “the history of medieval art in western Europe starts as an organic growth from the Carolingian Renascence at the end of the eighth century. Until that date the Christian narrative and didactic art of the Mediterranean world had never fused completely with the ornamental and non-representational art of the Celtic and Germanic north. This process took place during the ninth century in the workshops attached to the court of Charles the Great” (ix).

3. George Boas, Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1948), 63.

4. Edited by Dümmler, Neues Archiv XI (Hanover, 1886) 77-91 (90). I have slightly augmented his notes: 92: Calp. Ecl. I, 42, Aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas. 97: Verg. Geo. IV, 184; Omnibus una quies operum. 98: Aen. X, 209, caerula … freta (Ov. Ep. XV. 65); cp. Ecl. I, 136, alnos … sensere cavatas; Aen. III, 191, cava trabe. 99: Ov. Ep. I, 59, peregrinam littora puppim Ov. Met. I, 96, Nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant. 100: Ov. Met. VI, 396, Fertilis … terra; Verg. Geo. III, 225, Ov. Ep. IX, 155, ignotis … in oris. 101: Ecl. IV, 39, Mutabit merces, omnis feret omnia tellus (Ov. Met. I, 102). 102: Aen. VIII, 67, ima petens (Ov. Met. II, 265); Ov. Met. I, 150, terras reliquit. 104: Alcuin LVIII, 32, Divitias cumulat. 105-6: Ov. Fast. II, 295, Nullus anhelabat sub adunco vomere taurus; Ex P. III, 7, 15, taurus … Subtrahit et duro colla … iugo; Met. IX, 186, validi pressistis cornua tauri; Art. I, 414, Rem. 172, vomer aduncus, Drac. II, 433, Vomere non terram proscinderet, cp. Theod. XXVIII, 61, vomer … uncus. 107: Ov. Met. I, 109, Mox etiam fruges tellus inarata ferebat. 108: Verg. Geo. I, 96, Ov. Am. III, 10.3, Flava Ceres; Verg. Geo. I, 348, Ov. Fast. V, 357, maturis albescit … aristis.

5. Alcuin Carm. XXIII, ed. Dümmler, Poetarum Latinarum Medii Aevi Tom. I (henceforward MGH Poetae I) (Berlin, 1881) 243-4. Notes: 1: Alc. XXXIV. 3, O mea cara domus, habitatio dulcis, amata. 2: Alc. XII. 4, Semper in aeternum, Lucia virgo, vale!; XXXVII. 2, Semper in aeternum, dulcis Homere, vale; XXV. 11, Semper in aeternum domino miserante valete; cf. e.g. XXIV.1, XXVII.2, 13, XXVII.9-10, IX.240, XV.1, XXVIII.25. 3: Georg. II. 81, ramis felicibus arbos; Beda de die Iud. 2, resonantibus undique ramis; cf. 1, florigeras … herbas; Aen. V. 287-8, undique … cingebant silvae; Fort. VI. i. 18, undique cinxerunt cf. Angilbert (?) II.98, Undique cingantur; Aedilvulf XXII.28, cingentes undique; Ov. Tr. III.1.40, Fast. VII.1.4; cingit … arbor. 5: Fort. III.ix.12, prata virent herbis. 6: Aen. X.395, dextera quaerit; Fort. V.xvii.6, Dagulf (MGH Poetae I 93) Alc. XLIII.8, LXXVI.ii.12, Salutis ope. 10: Drac. Epith. VI.8, Fort. II. ix. 24, Paulin VI.1.108, Aq. I.60, lilia mixta rosis; Aen. VI.708-9, Drac. I.68, candida … lilia. 11: Beda VSC XLIV.12, matutinas … laudes. 12: Alc. XXXIV. 6, In te discatur sophia sacra patrum. 14: Alc. XXI.30, Sacro … ore. 15: Ov. Rem. 189, temporibus certis. 18: Alc. IX.191 (cf. IX.13), Plango tuos casus; LVII.37, Plange tuos casus. 21: Flaccus and Homerus: the pastoral names at the Carolingian court for Alcuin and Angilbert. 23: Alc. IX.55, Sic fugit omne decus; 112, cadit corporis omne decus; Fort III.viii.16, omne decus, cf. Drac. Satisf. 247-56. 24: Alc. XI.11, Omnia mutantur; IX.12, Omnia vertuntur temporibus variis; cf. Drac. II.587, Tempora mutantur. Prop. Eleg. II.viii.7, Omnia vertuntur; Claudian. Bell. Gildon. 477, Fort. VIII.3. 264, Ordinibus variis. 25: Alc. IX.11, Nil manet aeternum; XI.12, Nil est perpetuum. 27: Alc. LVIII.7, Frigida … Hiems; Drac.I.589, decutit … flores. 29: Alc. LIX.10, sacra iuventus. 30: Alc. IX.101-2, quondam certabat in arvis / Cum cervis, quoniam fessa senectus adest. 33: Alc. XLVIII.26, Sed fugiens fugiet. 38: Alc. XXXVII.6, XLV.8, XLVIII.44 vita salus, Ep. 307 (MGH Epp.IV.470) gloria vita salus.

6. Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (New York, 1955) 46. I have attempted in my notes to support Dümmler's contention that the diction is that of Alcuin; Miss Waddell follows Mabillon in attributing the poem to Alcuin's pupil Fredegis. But, it is unlikely, if not impossible, that Angilbert (“Homerus”) was connected with Corméry or any other cloister that Fredegis could have called his own. For the same reason, the cell cannot have been that of Alcuin's childhood school at York (C. Foligno, Latin Thought During the Middle Ages [Oxford, 1929] 82). The most obvious possibility is a cell in the celebrated park of Aachen itself, since Alcuin knew Angilbert there, and praises the fishing of the neighborhood (Epp. IV. 235). I grant that Alcuin would not call himself a magister sacro ore: this could, however, be the grammarian Peter of Pisa, an elder contemporary who was close to Angilbert (Epp. IV. 285, Poetae I.75). Thus the poem might date either from 790, when Angilbert was made Abbot of St. Riquier and Alcuin returned to England; or from 796, when the now ailing Alcuin went to Tours, and Angilbert was sent on a mission to Italy. Another possibility is Echternach, where Alcuin liked to make his retreat. Its Abbot, “Samuel” (Beornrad, d. 797) is linked with “Flaccus” and “Homerus” in Carm. XVI. 3-4; and Alcuin writes to him in a tone that is both familiar and reverent (Epp. IV. 175, Carm. XVI, sancte pater). Such speculations are, of course, hazardous.

7. H. O. Taylor, The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (New York, 1901), 297.

8. 1: Carm. VI.vi 1-8 (ed. Leo, 146). Notes: 1: Virg. Ecl. IX.40, Hic ver purpureum; Culex 50, Stat. Theb. V.526, Paul. Petr. IV.556, viridantia gramina. 3: Ov. Met. XIII.793, aestiva umbra; Georg. I.448, defendet pampinus uvas; Sil. VII.167, pampinus umbras. 4: Georg. IV.61, frondea … tecta; Ov. Tr. V.vii.50, tecta comis. 8: Drac. I. 194, mollior aura, 198, pendula poma.

9. Carm. (ed. Neff) I. 7-20. 7: Aen. III.304, viridi quem caespite. 17: Verg. Ecl. IV.38, cedet et ipse mari; Eug. Tol. (ed. Vollmer) XXXIII.11, iudice me cygnus et garrula cedat hirundo, cedat et illustri psittacus ore tibi. 19: Aen. VII.759, vitrea te Fucinus unda.

10. For the history of hyperoche or outdoing as a topos, cf. E. R. Curtius (tr. Trask), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), 162-5.

11. Curtius, 273 ff. Curtius treats mannerism as “a constant in European literature”; I am concerned here to suggest its ebb and flow.

12. Miss Duckett (Alcuin, 283), Howard Mumford Jones (P. S. Allen, The Romanesque Lyric, 240) and other translators, not recognizing the formula, have mistakenly assumed that the poet must be saying “For evermore … Goodbye!”

13. Alcuin IX. 11-8. 11: Aldh. c. 1887, sub caeli cardine mundus. 12: Prop. El. II.viii.7, Omnia vertuntur. 17: Fort. II.ix.34, micat alma fides.

14. Alcuin XI.7-18. 9: Ov. Fast. IV.463, Alc. IX.7, miscentur tristia laetis, XLVIII 27-30. 11: cf. Alc. XXIII.24.

15. Perhaps this is the place to observe also the effectiveness of the restrained anaphora (repetition for emphasis) from lines 17-21.

16. Columbanus Ad Sethum 25 ex Ov. Met. XIV.655, Claud. Carm. Min. XX.2-3, cf. Columbanus, loc. cit. 63:

    Omnia tempus agit, cum tempore cuncta trahunter,
    Alternant elementa vices et tempora mutant.

17. M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe A.D. 500-900 (London, 1931) 281.

18. Hrabanus Maurus (Alcuin's pupil), Carm. XXI:

    Grammata sola carent fato, mortemque repellunt,
              praeterita renovant, grammata sola biblis.

    cf. Dungal II.33, Munera Musarum saeclis aeterna manebunt; Albarus IX.134, Hec sola verba nescit cum mundo senesci.

19. His early long poem on the Church of York owes much to Bede; his middle poems (e.g. IV, VII) show that in his forties he could learn much from his encounter with the Lombard poets.

20. Opera (ed. Vollmer), 254.

21. Alcuin LXI (De Luscinia) MGH Poetae I. 274-5. Notes: 1: Alc. LVII.6, Quae te nunc rapuit; Aldhelm Aen. LXVIII.7, Alc. LIX.5, luscinia ruscis. 7: Paulin. Nol. XXIII.33, unicolor plumis ales, sed picta loquellis. 9: Paulus Diac. (Neff) XXIX.2, dulce melos; Aldhelm C.e. III.54, melos fantes modulamine; Paulin. Nol. XXIII.56, vario modulamine; cf. Alc. LIX.4. 10: Alc. ubique, e.g. XXXI.8, XXXV.6, XLIV.18, XLVI.6, LIX.29, semper in ore. 12: Paulus Diac. (Neff) XXV.4 (cf. XXVI.24), o decus atque dolor. 15: Beda de die Iud. 131, Felix o nimium; cf. Verg. Aen. IV.657, heu nimium felix; Commod. Apol. 613, Fortunatus I.ii.27, VIII.iii.299,309, X.vi.113, O nimium felix; Prudentius C. Symm. II.1019 O felix nimium; e.g. Alc. III.xxi.4, laudibus invigilant domini nocteque dieque. 16: vd. supra v.10. 21: Aen. II.265, somno vinoque sepultam; Ov. Fast. II.333, somno vinoque solutos. 26: e.g., Alc. XXI.36, in ore suo. 28: Fort. IV.xxvi.114 arce poli: Alc. III. Pr. 12, IX.226, XXXVII.20, CIX.xii.2, CXII.4, in arce poli; CXVII.8, poli perpes in arce. The first two verses of the translation are by Helen Waddell, Mediæval Latin Lyrics (London, 1933), 89.

22. Cf. a contemporary example (Kuno Meyer, Ancient Irish Poetry, 100):

    Ah blackbird, thou art satisfied
    Where thy nest is in the bush:
    Hermit that clinkest no bell,
    Sweet, soft, peaceful is thy note.

23. A less discreet rhetoric might have earned him a martyr's death, like that of his brother bishop St. Praetextatus of Rouen. Nothing in the poetry of Fortunatus can approach the admonitory tone of Alcuin to Charlemagne:

    Plurima nempe tibi sunt emendanda per orbem. …

    (XLV.41)

24. E.g. Smaragdus III 24-9 (MGH Poetae I.618):

    Qui rutilus nocuas pellat de mente latebras,
    Vincula disrumpat, cordis eliminet umbras,
    Inradietque sacro mentis spiramine fibras,
    Ut valeat nobis divino semine iacto
    Rore poli madidus, doctorum vomere cultus,
    Cordis opimus ager centenos reddere fructus.

25. XVI.ii.11-16, MGH Poetae I.471-2. The conceit is from the so-called Romana computatio, or finger-counting. Cf. Hieron. Adv. Jovinianum I; Ep. CXXIII; Beda Comm. in Ev. Matt. II.13; In Luc. Ev. Expos. III.8; De Temp. Rat. I.

26. Theodulf Carm. XIV, Quod Multis Indiciis Finis Proximus Esse Monstretur; MGH Poetae I.469. I do not wish to suggest that Alcuin was free of historical disillusion: in his later years at least (MGH Epp. IV.89), he too wonders whether the end of the world may not be at hand. But in his long and not unmoving poem on historical vicissitude (De Clade Lindisfarnensis Monasterii, C.IX) he closes on a note of spiritual victory

    Praelia post terrae regnat in arce poli.

    Theodulf omits this commonplace conclusion.

27. E.g. XVI. 6 Est locus in Sennis, auxiliare senem: “There is a place in Sens, to aid an old man.” Whatever we may think of punning or annominatio, it is treated as a formal rhetorical figure in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and later in twelfth-century poetics: cf. Curtius, European Literature, 278 ff. The Est locus formula (e.g. Aen. I.530, III.163; Ov. Her. XV.53; Met. II.195, XIV.489; Fast. II.491, IV.337; Luc. VIII.546; Sil. XI.505; Stat. Silv. V.i.222; Theb. II.32; Claud. III.123, V.466; Lact. Phoen.1; Drac.I.178; Sid.Ap.II.407; Avit.I.193; Fort. I.xviii.1; Alc.I.656) traditionally initiates descriptions of a locus amoenus such as the Christian Paradise: hence we have here another example of Alcuin's novel and whimsical use of allusion.

28. Alc. XLII. 1-6. Notes: Aen. VI.535, roseis Aurora quadrigis. 3: Verg. Geo. IV, 499 dixit et ex oculis; Claud. C.Min.XXV.27, detersit pollice somnum; Fort V.S.M. IV.II, evigilansque oculis detergam pollice somnum.

29. For the meaning of meditation, see Jean Leclercq (tr. Misrahi) The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York, 1962) 25.

30. Alc. LXXVI.5-12. For earlier, more traditionally rhetorical workings of the fingere serta motif, cf. VII.30-5, XIV.1-3. The following loci, especially in their contexts, illustrate the evolution from a rhetorical to a symbolic topos: Euseb. Vitae Const. I init. πλίξαντεs στεθάνουs; Claud. Carm. min. xxx.2, Pierio … serto redimire; Fort. VSM I.36-8, inter tot … gemmantia prata loquentum/ nullo flore virens ego tendam texere sertam; Aldh. De Metris i (ed. Ehw., 62), de amoenissimo scripturarum paradiso quasi quosdam campestrium cauliculos aut vernantes pratorum flosculos coacervans ad unius coronae texturam congerere nitar; Prosa de Virg. xix (249), Carm. 2773-5, vide infra.

31. Alcuin Carm. LIX (Ad Fratres Euboricenses). 3: Verg. Ecl. VII.48, Drac. Feb. in palmite gemmae; Geo. II.74 trudunt de cortice gemmae, 335, trudit gemmas; Avit. II.139, de palmite mala; Ps. Beda Hymn. II, PL 94.608, trudit in palmite gemmae. 4: Paulin. Nol. XXIII.56; Alc. LXI.9, vario modulamine. 5: Aldh. Aen. LXVIII.7, Alc. LXI.1, luscinia ruscis. 6: Verg. Geo. IV.426, ardebat caelo, et medium sol igneus orbem; Drac. II.3, Temperies Caeli medium nec possidet orbem; Petrus Pis. (Neff) XVII.1-2, sol … medium caeli transcenderat axem. 7: Fort. VIII.vii.3, tempore vernali, dominus quo Tartara vicit. 9: Alc. IV.1, Cartula … pelagi trans aequora cursu. 10: Alc. XXIII.29, sacra iuventus. 17: Theod. XLVI.12, celsa Sophia. 18: Aen. IV.130, delecta iuventus. 19: Verg. Ecl. V.34, Tu decus omne. 25: Verg. Ecl. VIII.49, improbus ille puer. 26: Verg. Cul. 212, rapior per inania ventis; Ov. Met. II.506, raptos per inania; Arat. Ep. ad Parth. 52, per inane … rapi; cf. Carm. Sangall. MGH Poetae II.476, Cum mundus per inania vertatur volitando.

32. Ep. 65 (MGH Epp. IV, 107) per libidinum vortices caro rapuit.

33. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958) 82-3. It will be obvious that I find Professor Lewis's chapter on “Allegory” one-sided and dominated by romantic ideas from Coleridge (e.g. Biog. Lit. xviii) and Max Mueller (or Owen Barfield). To Lewis' suggestion that allegory provided a “sleeping-place” for the old gods (ibid.), I much prefer the judgement of Curtius that “Christianity did not allow the antique Gods to die in peace. It had to degrade them into demons” (462). But what really controls their survival in Christian poetry is their connotational function, for either good or evil, within a revised symbolic universe, which is both conventional and affectively important. When Professor Lewis suggests that the gods had to be disinfected of belief before they could “come to light in the imagination,” the truth is that the most easily disinfected (the God Terminus for example) were also the most quickly forgotten.

34. Maurice Hélin (tr. Snow), A History of Medieval Latin Literature (New York, 1959) 29. Cf. e.g., F. J. E. Raby, Christian Latin Poetry (Oxford, 1953) 162: “On the whole, Alcuin was a mediocre poet. His real talents lay elsewhere. He was pre-eminently a teacher.”