[In the following essay, Scott examines the symbolic meaning of the cuckoo in a poem by Alcuin, arguing that he used this central image as a means of sublimating the expressions of desire contained within the poem.]

Though I believe Alcuin to have been the innovator of Christian pastoral, I cannot claim that he showed any great interest in perfecting the genre as such. Indeed, he seems almost to have stumbled upon it by accident. We must remember that, when he began to write, the terms pastoralis and ecloga were both too vague to have any precise connotation, though by his death they were re-established as formal genres.¹ From the standpoint of his contemporaries, Alcuin's “pastorals” are always examples of some other form: the Conflictus Veris et Hiemis is a rhetorical synkrisis; his poems to Corydon and to Cuculus are each an epistola ammonitorialis currens.² Though each of those poems, to some extent, echoes the formal arrangement of Virgil's Eclogues, and to good purpose, this formal echo is less important than the pastoral symbolic imagery which can also be found in Alcuin's other poems.³

The poem to Corydon, by its failure, shows that Alcuin did not easily arrive at this unity of pastoral form and content. For it is nostalgic in the unpoetic sense: it recalls, but does not recreate, the conventional signs of a lost foster friendship. It opens with the unusually complex imagery of Alcuin's poem Nunc cuculus: the hostile waves, the appeal to song, a Biblical allusion to spiritual feeding, and the liberating notion (so central to the Conflictus) of free flight over water. But these are hardly integrated:

En tuus Albinus, saevis ereptus ab undis,
          Venerat, altithrono nunc miserante deo,
Te cupiens apel—peregrinis—lare camenis,
          O Corydon, Corydon, dulcis amice satis.
Quicquid tu volitas per magna palatia regum, (5)
          Ut ludens pelago aliger undisono:
Qui sophiae libros primis lac ore sub annis
          Suxisti et labris ubera sacra tuis.
Dum tibi, dum maior per tempora creverat aetas,
          Tunc solidos sueras sumere corde cibos.(4) (10)
Lo, your Albinus, snatched from the cruel waters
By noble God's compassion, now had come,
Wishing to call you to the exiled muses
O Corydon, Corydon, my sweet, sweet friend,
Wherever you may fly through the royal palace
Playing like a bird on the wave-loud sea.
At first your mouth sucked milk from books of wisdom
As to these sacred breasts you gave your lips.
Then, as you arrived at a fuller age
You were accustomed to take solid food.

The first line links Alcuin to the figure of Aeneas after his escape from drowning, addressing Dido for the first time. The fifth echoes a favourite whimsy of Alcuin in addressing his former students, the game of bird-identification to symbolize spiritual friendship:

Postquam de paternae pietatis nido in publicas saecularium negotiorum evolastis auras.⁵

Now that you have flown out from the nest of paternal love into the public breezes of secular cares.

The lover's complaint in the Second Eclogue is indeed an appropriate background for this teacher's call to an erring pupil, in terms of the topical epistolary question: Cur taces? But the pastoral opening is hardly sustained as such, nor the pregnant similes of flight and water worked out in terms of the poem's central antithesis between the sleep of Bacchus and the awakening to the idyll of divine song.⁶ The thematic coherence is implicit, but not established; and the poem's final tone of forgiveness is sustained by a turn to triviality—we finish with no more than a punning personal use of the Virgilian material.⁷ One should not quarrel: no doubt this is all Alcuin intended at the time. But the essentially pastoral optative of the desired return seems to have struck Alcuin as having larger possibilities; for he deals with it again and again.

The result of these exercises is the Versus de Cuculo, where the playful bird-identification is no longer an incidental simile, but a central image modulating and effectively sublimating the poem's expressions of desire. This game is anterior to the poem. Alcuin did have a pupil whom he addressed in his letters as Cuckoo, just as their friend Bishop Arne was an eagle, and Alcuin himself a goose, a swallow, or a swan.⁸ The Cuckoo's real name was probably Dodo, since an ammonitorial letter from Alcuin to Dodo reads like an abstract of the poem's thematic material:

Carissimo filiolo meo, quem et sero genui et cito dimisi, nec bene ablactatus raptus est ab uberibus meis. Inmitiorque noverca tam tenerum de paterno gremio per libidinum vortices caro rapuit. Heu pro dolor, quid faciam, nisi plangam pereuntem, si forte calidis lacrimarum fomentis resuscitari possit.⁹

To my dearest son, whom I have both lately begotten and swiftly lost, since he has been snatched not yet well suckled from my breasts. A crueller stepdame, the flesh, has snatched him through the vortices of lust from my paternal lap. Alas, what shall I do, but weep my dying one, in the chance that perhaps by the fomentations of scalding tears he may yet be resurrected.

The tone of this letter is severe; yet from beginning to end its admonition is sweetened by a tone of forgiveness and personal concern:

Do do iuxta nomen tuum tibi, tu mihi da da
          Do tibi me totum, sed tu, Dodo, mihi te da.(10)
As your name asks, I give; but give to me:
          All of myself I give you, give thus to me.

The letter's language is borrowed from that of paramythetic or consolatory rhetoric: its allusions to death color with sympathy and care the letter's sterner business of parental correction. In like manner the poem, to maintain the same affective balance, is cast in the form of a mock pastoral elegy.

MENALCAS:
Plangamus cuculum, Dafnin dulcissime, nostrum,
          Quem subito rapuit saeva noverca suis.
DAFNIS:
Plangamus pariter querulosis vocibus illum,
          Incipe tu senior, quaeso, Menalca prior.
MENALCAS:
Heu, cuculus nobis fuerat cantare suetus, (5)
          Quae te nunc rapuit hora nefanda tuis?
DFANIS:
Heu, cuculus cuculus, qua te regione reliqui,
          Infelix nobis illa dies fuerat.
MENALCAS:
Omne genus hominum, volucrum simul atque ferarum
          Conveniat nostrum querere nunc cuculum. (10)
DAFNIS:
Omne genus hominum cuculum conplangat ubique,
          Perditus est, cuculus, heu, perit ecce meus.
MENALCAS:
Non pereat cuculus, veniet sub tempore veris,
          Et nobis veniens carmina laeta ciet.
DAFNIS:
Quis scit, si veniat; timeo, est summersus in undis. (15)
                    Vorticibus raptus atque necatus aquis.(11)
MENALCAS:
Weep for our cuckoo, O beloved Daphnis
          Whom the cruel stepdame seized from his own.
DAPHNIS:
With querulous voice, let us weep for him together;
          As older man, Menalcas, pray begin.
MENALCAS:
Cuckoo, alas, once wont to sing to us, (5)
          What hour has now snatched you from your own?
DAPHNIS:
O cuckoo, cuckoo, in what land did I leave you?
          Unhappy was that day to all of us.
MENALCAS:
All tribes of men, of ibrds and wild beasts also,
          May they properly lament our cuckoo now. (10)
DAPHNIS:
Let every tribe of men weep for our cuckoo,
          Lost is our cuckoo, lo, he perisheth.
MENALCAS:
May he not die, but come in the early springtime,
          Coming to us be loud with joyous songs.
DAPHNIS:
          He may not come, I fear he is plunged in a maelstrom, (15)
          Snatched by its vortex and now dead by drowning.
MENALCAS:
Heu mihi, si cuculum Bachus dimersit in undis,
          Qui rapiet inuvenes vortice pestifero.
DAFNIS:
Si vivat, redeat, nidosque recurrat ad almos,
          Nec corvus cuculum dissecet ungue fero. (20)
MENALCAS:
Heu quis te, cuculus, nido rapit ecce paterno?
          Heu rapuit, rapuit, nescio si venias.
DAFNIS:
Carmina si curas, cuculus, citus ecce venito,
          Ecce venito, precor, ecce venito citus.
MENALCAS:
Non tardare, precor, cuculus, dum currere possis, (25)
          Te Dafnin iuvenis optat habere tuus.
DAFNIS:
Tempus adest veris, cuculus modo rumpe soporem,
          Te cupit, en, senior atque Menalca pater.
MENALCAS:
En tondent nostri librorum prata iuvenci,
          Solus abest cuculus, quis, rogo, pascit eum? (30)
DAFNIS:
Heu, male pascit eum Bachus, reor, impius ille,
          Qui sub cuncta cupit vertere corda male.
MENALCAS:
Woe to me, if Bacchus has drowned my cuckoo,
          Who loves to snatch young men in his poisonous gyre.
DAPHNIS:
If he lives, let him return, run back to the fostering nest,
          Let not the raven slash him with savage claw. (20)
MENALCAS:
Alas, who seizes you from the nest paternal?
          He has seized you, seized you. Who knows if you will come?
DAPHNIS:
If songs can move you, cuckoo, lo, come quickly,
          Come quickly, now I pray you, lo, come quickly.
MENALCAS:
Do not delay, while you have strength to hasten, (25)
          Your youthful Daphnis wishes to have you here.
DAPHNIS:
It is time for spring, cuckoo, break your slumber,
          Behold your father Menalcas wants you now.
MENALCAS:
Behold our bullocks graze in the fields of letters.
          Only the cuckoo is absent. Who feeds him? (30)
DAPHNIS:
Woe, it is Bacchus, I say, who feeds him badly,
          Hoping to captivate all human hearts.
MENALCAS:
Plangite nunc cuculum, cuculum nunc plangite cuncti,
          Ille recessit ovans, flens redit ille, puto.
DAFNIS:
Opto tamen, flentem cuculum habeamus ut illum, (35)
          Et nos plangamus cum cuculo pariter.
MENALCAS:
Plange tuos casus lacrimis, puer inclite, plange:
          Et casus plangunt viscera tota tuos.
DAFNIS:
Si non dura silex genuit te, plange, precamur,
          Te memorans ipsum plangere forte potes. (40)
MENALCAS:
Dulcis amor nati cogit deflere parentem,
          Natus ab amplexu dum rapitur subito.
DAFNIS:
Dum frater fratrem germanum perdit amatum,
          Quid nisi iam faciat, semper et ipse fleat.
MENALCAS:
Tres olim fuimus, iunxit quos spiritus unus, (45)
          Vix duo nunc pariter, tertius ille fugit.
DAFNIS:
Heu fugiet, fugiet, planctus quapropter amarus
          Nunc nobis restat, carus abit cuculus.
MENALCAS:
Carmina post illum mittamus, carmina luctus,
          Carmina deducunt forte, reor, cuculum. (50)
DAFNIS:
Sis semper felix utinam, quocumque recedas,
          Sis memor et nostri semper ubique vale.
MENALCAS:
Weep for the cuckoo, now all weep for the cuckoo,
          Joyous he left; I think he returns in tears.
DAPHNIS:
Even in tears, I wish that we might have him, (35)
          And we and the cuckoo all shall weep together.
MENALCAS:
Weep your fate with tears, weep, noble boy,
          Even your very bowels weep your fate.
DAPHNIS:
If no hard flint once bore you, weep, we all pray:
          Perhaps, remembering, you too can weep. (40)
MENALCAS:
Sweet love for his son forces a parent to sorrow,
          When his son is suddenly snatched from his grasp.
DAPHNIS:
When a brother loses his brother german,
          I say let him weep forever, if not now.
MENALCAS:
Once we were three, three joined in a single spirit, (45)
          Now hardly two, now that the third has fled.
DAPHNIS:
Alas he will flee, our bitter lamentation
          Now stays with us, as dear cuckoo withdraws.
MENALCAS:
Let us send songs after him, songs of lamenting
          Songs, I say, may bring the cuckoo down. (50)
DAPHNIS:
May you be happy, wheresoever you go
          Remember us, and be forever well.

“It would be wrong,” says F. J. E. Raby, “to inquire too closely into the mechanism of Alcuin's verse; for what shines forth is the poet's gentle and harmless spirit exercised on these simple themes.”¹² But the simpleness of the poem's language, imagery, and uncelebrated subject is deceptive. We must not overlook the device of evoking the elegiac Fifth Eclogue, nor the epitaphic subito rapuit, a formula from tombstones. In this solemn setting of a supposed death to the spirit, the whimsical plodding Plangamus cuculum creates an affective ambiguity at the outset, one in which love and irony are balanced. We understood what Virgil's Menalcas felt for Daphnis; even Catullus, commenting on the death of Lesbia's sparrow, is relatively direct and straightforward. But a mock-elegy for a homely human bird: this is a more complex emotion, and properly pastoral; inasmuch as the bird-identification again symbolizes spiritual friendship, and obstructs or sublimates the erotic responses of the reader. This fall of a human cuckoo is at once allegoric (the religious overtones recalled in the Fifth Eclogue—deus, deus ille Menalcas—are reinforced by a Paschal setting) and ironic (the cuckoo is no conventional symbol, and moves as a stranger amid such complex allusions). Allegory expands, irony diminishes, the extension of its subject. By this equilibrium the poem leaves us in clever suspense, between the timeless context of Virgilian pastoral (more timeless, indeed, than it could have been for Virgil himself) and the stridently earthly, personal figure of the cuckoo.

The poem's themes of spiritual death and redemption are dramatized as a conflict between hostile and good spiritual parents, and thus drawn into a single polar structure of fear and desire. This structure is not rhetorical; it can only be discerned by looking behind the words to the unified symbolic background, and most notably the dramatic personifications which symbolize the choice of a secular or spiritual life. The personalities of Daphnis and Menalcas are unimportant, since as members of a monastic fellowship they are unanimis, and speak with one heart and soul.¹³ But a dramatic situation is created for the uncommitted cuckoo, between the good spiritual father of the fostering nest, and the evil stepdame's maelstrom of the flesh. This dramatic personification represents a considerable poetic advance over the highly particularized allegories, rhetorical set-pieces, of early Christian poets like Prudentius. The tensions of Alcuin's poem are “as large as life.” The poem is characterized by an easy and rapid movement back and forth between the real and symbolic, foreground and background. Its polar structure is sustained by a series of resonant or symphonic allusions, triadic in their evocation, and emphasizing the alternatives of love and death. Perhaps these need to be spelled out to the modern reader. Qua te regione reliqui (ex Aen. IX. 390) is the cry of Nisus for his lost friend Euryalus, when he suspects that the latter is being overcome in battle by the enemy. Si non dura silex genuit te, plange, precamur is a portmanteau allusion: dura silex echoes Aeneas' vain loving appeal to Dido in Hades, just before she turns back to her dead husband; the whole echoes the commonplace lover's accusation by Dido (genuit te … Caucasus, Aen. IV. 366-7) in her last vain appeal to Aeneas while alive.¹⁴ The commonplace saeva noverca tag refers to both allusions. In a contemporary manuscript Phaedra is described as saeva noverca, and Hippolytus as mersurus amore novercae:¹⁵ in Alcuin's letter the male-female contest between father and stepmother typifies that between spiritual protection and the flesh with its vortices of lust. Behind this is the proverb that nature by herself is not a mother but a stepmother,¹⁶ and the Virgilian context (Geo. II. 126-30) in which the saevae novercae kill with their cups of black poison.

For the Carolingian reader this last allusion would suggest in turn the black venom of the serpent in Eden, and thus the diabolic calix pestifer or pocula Bacchi. This rationalizes the transition to the enemy as Bacchus in line 17 (with his pestiferous vortex), and again as a raven in line 20, since the raven was not only the antithesis of the dove of the waking spirit, and associated with death,¹⁷ he was an exegetical blazon of the devil,¹⁸ and proverbially known as a bad feeder of his children (cf. v. 33).¹⁹ To a modern reader these transitions may seem pedantic; but the Carolingian audience, accustomed to read narrowly but deeply, practiced in meditation upon a restricted canon of texts, and familiar above all with the exegetical habit of reference to archetype, would have been more readily perceptive of their symbolic harmony. For them such allusions were not a matter of forced contrivance, but of easy and indeed inevitable association. Alcuin must have written with the same fluency. The meaningful echoes of his poem are a matter not so much of conscious wit as of an archetypally attuned mind.²⁰

The mental movement between situations which are symbolically rather than temporally linked is a special feature of typological exegesis, which saw in each situation or “type” of the Old Testament a special significance for its corresponding New Testament antitype. The result, as Prof. Auerbach has written, confirms a new attitude towards time and the timeless: “The horizontal, that is the temporal and causal, connection of occurrences is dissolved; the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future.”²¹ Virgil's pastorals, although they blend with the persons and language of Theocritus, make no such pretensions or effort to present themselves as mediating the eternal. Even when most allegorical, there is never that equilibrium between symbol and actuality, timeless and temporal, that we now find in Alcuin's affective evocation of the monks as bullocks in the fields of books. It is not that Alcuin is a greater poet, but Alcuin can unselfconsciously avail himself of the mystically affective habits (such as the habit of “typing” just referred to) and the symbolic vocabulary of exegesis.

To suggest what the various blazons or symbolic objects of the poem might have connoted to the Carolingian reader, let us quote, by way of example, from the relatively early Formulae Minores of St. Eucherius of Lyons (d. 450).²²

Ver … Vitae renovatio
Nidus … Ecclesia
Currere … In bonis operibus proficere
Campi … Sancti, sive Scripturae divinae
Pascua … Refectio spiritualis
Pecora … Simpliciores homines
Unda … Tentatio
Corvus … Nigritudo peccatoris
Languor … Vitiorum morbus

And so on. One can see the poetic convenience of this agreed-upon symbolic language or dialect, though I do not mean to suggest that the language was unequivocal, nor that this particular list (which Alcuin may or may not have seen) was definitive. One can also see the disappointing tendency of such commentaries (either Biblical or Virgilian) to dwell on finite, mechanical allegories, directed rather to the part than to the whole. Nevertheless, if exegesis was not to be wholly incoherent, there had obviously to be at least a potential harmony between these separate components. After the period of the Fathers, the task of the exegete was not to be original, but to retell more coherently what had been written already. Thus we find that in later writers, and perhaps particularly in Bede, a structured relationship between the various tropes of Scripture is brought out more and more clearly:

Mystice autem mare, turbida ac tumentia saeculi hujus volumina significat; in quibus pravi quilibet injuste delectati, quasi profundis dediti pisces, mentem ad superna gaudia non intendunt. Unde bene idem mare Galileae, id est, rota cognominatur, quia nimirum amor labentis saeculi quasi in vertiginem corda mittit, quae ad perennis vitae desideria non permittit erigi. De qualibus Psalmista: In circuitu, inquit, impii ambulant.²³

Mystically however the sea signifies the troubled and disordered whirlings of this world, in which all the sinners unjustly gratified, like fishes devoted to the depths, do not lift up their minds to the joys above. From which the same sea is properly called Galilee, that is, “wheel,” for indeed love of the flowing world hurls hearts as if into a vortex, which does not permit them to be lifted up to the desires of eternal life. Of these men the Psalmist says [cf. Ps. xii. 8] “The wicked walk round in a ring.”

Here we are dealing with the sea, not merely as a fact or object, but as part of a structured vision (or orama, to use a favorite word of the Anglo-Saxons) of the universe. In the retelling of secular poetry, also, the whirling world had come to be described from such a polar, philosophic perspective. But if we think of Seneca's burning axle-tree, or Boethius' iusto foedere rerum (Cons. Phil. IV. vi), or even Eliot's “crowds of people, walking round in a ring,” (“The Waste Land,” l. 56) all of these may strike us as cosmic but hardly personal, not so intimately related to our affective poles, the desires and fears of the human heart.

I have been trying to suggest how Alcuin in the De Cuculo, despite his rapid train of friendly and hostile objects (the stepdame, the raven, the nest) has worked to reduce these into a single structured symbolic relationship, through the congruence of literary and exegetical allusions. It is as if the power and above all the exclusions of his faith had made of his mind an electromagnet, concerned to draw fragmented allusions, like particles of iron, out of their old literary contexts into a centripetal affective field. One pole of this field is the vortex pestifer of the passions in which our hearts may be easily drowned; the other vertex is the paternal nest which opens out miraculously to the peaceful fields of books. It is not a choice against, but between loves: intimacy is seen as the antithesis of profligacy. The paternus nidus, as we said, is for Alcuin a recurrent and intensely personal symbol of monastic friendship; as, for example, when he writes as a sparrow

Qui modo mense Septembrio nidum revisere volat amatum, ut pullos avidis hiantes rostris, pietatis pascat granulis.²⁴

who now flies back to visit his beloved nest [i. e. the monastery at Tours] in September, so that he may feed his fledglings, whose avid beaks are agape, with grains of piety.

The more we read his antitheses between the light of charity and the waters of the world which cannot put it out, between the floods of our cogitations and the port of quiet desire, the more we appreciate how consistently he saw the world in the light of his most central and ardent emotions: his cosmic and affective visions are indeed the same.²⁵ Yet the De Cuculo would be a static poem if it stated nothing but a structured vision of life and love; instead, as in the Conflictus, the symbol objects are a context for the symbolic action: in this case, for the poem's numerous verbs expressing movement, grief, and desire.

The verbs of moral urgency (Non tardare, precor, cuculus, dum currere possis)²⁶ find their symbolic correlative in the ominous raven. For the raven is not only the death-bringing devil and an unfeeding parent, he is also (as Alcuin reminds us in his prose) a traditional symbol of the sinner's slowness to repent:

Here again we must see the symbols in their relationship: the congress of beasts, the raven's perfidy and the church as nest amid the waters, all suggest that other, congruous type of the church, the ark. Against this background the cuckoo's return has a richer mystique of overtones: that of the dove which as the Holy Spirit brings in the springtime of history, and with its olive announces peace to the world:²⁸

En natat in liquidis mundi cum civibus area.
Ecce columba piam pacis tibi portat olivan.
Alba columba redit corvo pereunte nigello.(29)
Sola columba redit, quae totum circuit orbem
          Discedant corvi, sola columba redit.

The ark swims with its citizens in the waters of the world. Behold, the dove brings you the pious olive branch of peace. The white dove returns, while the black raven perishes.

These same verbs form the central optatives³⁰ and choice (Non pereat … redeat) of the De Cuculo: Alcuin's favorite theme of awakening from the drunken sleep of winter, and returning to the idyllic springtime fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Alcuin is not unique in superimposing the cuckoo upon the symbolic hoped-for return of the dove. His friend Bishop Arne, in a second letter to Dodo, plays in like fashion on the relevant part of the Canticle—that which was said (e. g., Alcuin, PL 100. 647) to prefigure the appearance of Christ:

Calamum in caritate tinxi, dum hanc cartulam scripsi. Surge, surge, gratissima avis. Iam hiems transit, imber abiit et recessit. Flores apparuerunt in terra, tempus carminis advenit. Fac amicos, id est angelicas dignitates, audire vocem tuam. Vox tua dulcis est illis, et facies tua decora sit domino Deo tuo, qui concupiscit speciem tuam. …

Adveniant aquilae cuculi, rogo, carmina nostri.³¹

I have dipped my reed in charity, while writing this letter. Rise up; rise up, most pleasing bird. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. Let your friends, that is, the angelic powers, hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and let thy countenance be comely to the Lord thy God, who desires your image. …

Let, I pray, the songs of our cuckoo come to the eagle.

Before these Paschal overtones break in upon the poem we have a succession of urgent minatory echoes, notably of the Apocalypse (Apoc. xxii.12 Ecce venio cito) and perhaps of Paulinus Nolanus:

Tempus adest mutare vias, exurgere somno
          Et tandem vigilare deo, dormire vicissim.(32)
Now it is time to change our course, to wake from sleep
          And at last awaken to God, and sleep in turn.

This mood of mystical imminence, slowly built up through the nervous rhythms of several hexameters, is then suddenly released into the pacific spondees of En tondent nostri librorum prata iuvenci—one moment of serenity, yielding in turn to a renewed agitation of pathos.

Though modern critics call the poem a pastoral, its pastoral imagery is condensed in this single line, a belated justification of the bucolic exordium. Yet this single line resolves the imagery that has preceded. At once we have moved from water to land, from silence to psalmody, from the disturbed sleep of that life which is more like death, to the exalted bucolic passivity of the paradisal prata librorum. The line cannot be passed over: its salient features of transition and equilibrium are sustained in what is neither violent nor clichéd imagery, but a fusion, or what we may call a catachresis of commonplace. The familiarity of the pastoral image tricks us into accepting what is in fact a very complex transition, first from the swift fellowship of birds to the passive community of bullocks, and from this in turn into the necessarily non-visual “mixed” allegory of the prata librorum. Modern critics often disapprove categorically of what they call “mixed metaphors,” which are taken to indicate the author's lack of control over his material. But we have seen throughout the De Cuculo a unified linking of words by their symbolic rather than their visual associations. The effect of this is to establish a central perspective of the inner eye: visually it may be remote, but affectively, in the optative expression of desire, it is intimate.³³ The result is to suspend the reader between the realm of fact which he knows (for this cuckoo was a real person) and the realm of letters which is so relevant to the poet's appeal. This, in other words, is properly pastoral allusion, one which sees our world in intimate relation with the timeless. Yet it is centripetal, where Virgil is centrifugal; our pastoral aspirations are not dissipated, but drawn to an ideal which can shape and contain the adult energies of a lifetime.

This unified symbolic vision, Alcuin's gift to the pastoral genre, is a subtle thing, a matter of balance and tact: too direct a concentration upon the poem's symbolic background would have destroyed the poem's contact with reality, its statement of a genuine concern. Hence, although the context may be rich, it is so implicitly. Most of the language is characteristically direct, and turns its back upon the antheron plasma or flowery style which Fortunatus cultivated in his poetry of friendship. Above all the glimpse of the eidyllion or little picture of perfection is succeeded by a deliberately halting, wistfully prosaic travesty of Alphesiboeus: Carmina deducunt forte, reor, cuculum,³⁴ in which the teacher's emotion cannot be doubted, any more than the sincerity of the forgiveness in the formulaic epistolary conclusion. Such an effortless balance between evocation and statement, idyll and prosa, allusive background and affective foreground, makes Alcuin the most important writer of pastoral between Virgil and Dante.³⁵ He shows that he has understood the Virgilian technique of games which are serious, an allusive handling of desire; but the result is new. Virgil's Eclogues establish their idealized suspension of desire by their studied irrelevancy; they are set off in a self-consciously fictive world of their own. We do not doubt Virgil's feelings for Pollio or Gallus, but these instants of self-revelation are swiftly obscured in thickets of private and unrelated allusions, to which the heavy glosses of Servius were an inevitable response. Even the Fourth Eclogue is a sphinx's riddle; and the Fifth is left in mid-air by the problem of the goodly crook “which Antigenes won not.” Alcuin is not so guarded. He too achieves a lusory multiplicity; his poem haunts us by hovering between the actual and idyllic worlds. But he does this without Virgil's bucolic lack of commitment, the final dismissal of the idyll as a tenuous basketry or gracilis fiscella. This is because he sees the world differently. His idyll is that of the perfectio monastica to which he had devoted his entire life: thus he sees it as desirable in the true sense, that is to say, incipiently real.

We read in Alcuin's correspondence the language of his ordinata caritas, how he saw the mystique of the Canticle surrounding his hortus conclusus on the Loire.³⁶ He means it when he hopes to create in France a new Athens, immo multo excellentior; in a way that Fortunatus never meant at all, when he once called Nantes a new Rome.³⁷ I believe that our civilization has partly been held together by just such a difficult faith, by a relatively few men who were able, in the face of the world as it is, to envisage and design a course towards a major ordo rerum. The Virgil of the Aeneid is of course such a man, giving utterance, “as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.”³⁸ Without the pain, the hope is spurious; and in the De Cuculo it is the presence of default, and the prevailing elegiac tone of deprivation and human failure, which make the vision of friendship an honest one. Yet (and I need imply no value judgment here) Alcuin's faith is easier and greater, less privately contrived, than Virgil's; his art is unequivocally for the sake of his vision, not vice versa. Thus his poetry is necessarily humble, and often trivial when it is not prosaic. Yet implicitly this monastic idyll involves not only his personal feelings for a friend but his life work as abbot and teacher. Based on an intimate community of endeavor, rather than on an uncertain political liaison, it manages to tease and convince us still; in contrast the Virgil of the Aeneid sounds disillusioned with respect to love, while the nova progenies of the Fourth Eclogue is little more than a hollow intellectual curiosity.

The Carolingian Renaissance was short-lived. In the next intellectual revival (after the “crisis of monasticism” in the eleventh century, and the secular dissipation or inward withdrawal of the reform movement) its spirit found a more articulate, but also more divided incarnation. Within the monasteries we see the conflict between Cistercians and Cluniacs: in St. Bernard we have the mystical charity without the charity of learned friendship, in Peter the Venerable we see rather the reverse. Poetry takes flight to the new secular cathedral schools; and ultimately its place in the curriculum is taken by prose—la bataille des sept arts is a rearguard action. Thus the Carolingian tension between actual and ideal breaks down: the curriculum is dominated by the rational and dialectical; the poets tend to take refuge in either satire or romance. The free allegory of personal allusion gives way to the systematic allegories of twelfth century Platonism, with their intricate allegiance to truth—more curious indeed, but also less persuasive. Soon utopian aspirations survive only among lay and heretical movements. The church is more guarded, its moral tone set by sermons De honesto et utile.

For Alcuin it was not prodigious to be at once a poet, a scholar, and a reformer. But after this fragmentation of the intellectual fraternity, the quest for pastoral unition becomes either more modest or more nostalgic. The tone is set by the alienated sensibility of Petrarch, the irresoluble dialectic of whose Eclogues is caught in their opening lines:

SYLVIUS:
Monice, tranquillo solus tibi conditus antro,
Et gregis et ruris potuisti spernere curas!
Ast ego dumosos colles sylvasque pererro
Infelix: quis fata neget diversa gemellis?
Una fuit genetrix: at spes non una sepulchri!
MONICUS:
Sylvi? quid puereris? cunctorum vera laborum
Ipse tibi causa es. quis te per devia cogit?
SYLVIUS:
Hei mihi! solus amor.(39)
SYLVIUS [i. e. Petrarch]:
Monicus, you, secure in your tranquil cave
Alone can spurn the onerous field and herd.
But I these thorny hills and woods must roam
Unhappy. Who'll deny these fates diverse
Lead us, twins from a single womb, to a diverse death?”
MONICUS [i. e. Petrarch's brother, a monk]:
Sylvius? Why complain? Of all this toil
You are the cause. What drives you out of way?
SYLVIUS:
Ah me! Love alone.

Petrarch, however unhappily, was tempted to accept art as a substitute for more primitive hopes of perfection. He understood that art, as a goal, imposed this radical price—which Alcuin clearly would not have thought of paying. In Alcuin's Christian perspective friendships were more true and valuable than the poems they inspired; he could not falsify a human friendship by seeking to make it immortal. Thus we must read his poems more as testimony than as achievement; but they testify to a unified sensibility which found strength in its settled aspirations. In one sense Alcuin was a more ambitious political poet than Virgil, Dante or Petrarch. Ultimately these three are poets less of persuasion than of acceptance, or of what the Marxists call mystification. I mean that, because of the times they lived in, they justified an external sword to pacify the world: that sword itself is not of their intellectual making, and their own desires cede to it. Thus they anticipate an idyll elsewhere, a vision before or after. Alcuin wrote from a lifetime of conversion in the community of the vita regularis. For him the unified fellowship of love is not an escapist dream, but a new reality, whose prospects and limitations can be measured in a new poetic style.

Notes

1. The term carmen pastorale may have had some limited significance in the context of epithalamium, but bucolic echoes abound during this period in all forms of verse. For Ausonius an ecloga is any short poem, but during the Carolingian period the word acquires its modern meaning of a short poetic dialogue (whether pastoral or not). Some of the numerous Carolingian pastoral eclogues are listed in E. Carrara, La Poesia Pastorale (Milan, 1906) and Frank Russell Hamblin, The Development of Allegory in the Classical Pastoral (Chicago, n. d.).

2. A fourth, more primitive example will be found in Riese, Anthologia Latina #765, Tityre, tu fido recubans sub tegmine Christi. Although de Rossi and Ferrua have reluctantly included it among the epigrams of Pope Damasus (d. 384), it has been thought to be the work of an Anglo-Saxon poet, probably Alcuin or Boniface. It is relevant as a prototype for the poems to Corydon and Cuculus.

3. P. D. Scott, “Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin Verse,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIII (April, 1964), 233-57.

4. Alc. Carm. XXXII, MGH [Monumenta Germaniae Historica] Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini (Berlin, 1881) I. 249. Notes: 1 Aen. I.545-6 Adsum / Troius Aeneas, Libycis ereptus ab undis; cf. Alc. LXV. iv. 1 Nauta rudis pelagi ut saevis ereptus ab undis. 3 Cutting or tmesis was accepted by Quintilian as a normal rhetorical figure. It is as old as Ennius, though not in this striking form; and later is cultivated as a conspicuous mannerism: vd. Eugenius Toletanus, MGH AA XIV. 262. 4 Verg. Ecl. II. 9 A, Corydon, Corydon. 5 Cf. Aen. XII. 474; Alc. Ep. 146 (MGH Epp. IV. 235). 10 Hebr. v. 12 facti estis, quibus lacte opus sit, non solido cibo; 14 Perfectorum autem est solidus cibus.

5. Ep. 251, MGH Epp. IV. 406; cf. Ep. 245, p. 393. For the monastic school as a nest of desired peace and friendship-feeding, cf. also p. 257 nidum dulcissimae quietis, p. 300.

6. Ib. vv. 19-25:

   Viscera tota tibi cecinerunt atque capilli,
             Nunc tua lingua tacet; cur tua lingua tacet? (20)
   Nec tua lingua valet forsan cantare camenas,
             Atque, reor, dormit lingua tibi, Corydon?
   Dormit et ipse meus Corydon, scolasticus olim,
             Sopitus Bacho. Ve tibi, Bache pater! (25)

7. Ib. vv. 31-5:

   Rusticus est Corydon, dixit hoc forte propheta
             Virgilius quondam: ‘Rusticus es Corydon’

   (Ecl. II. 56)

   Dixerat ast alter, melius sed, Naso poeta:
             ‘Presbyter est Corydon,’ sit cui semper ave.

8. Alc. Epp. 159, 146, 59 (MGH Epp. IV. 257, 235, 102). For the effect of sublimating erotic language compare Ep. 157, p. 255:

   Et utinam veniat volando aquila mea orare apud Sanctum Martinum; ut ibi amplectar alas illius suavissimas; et teneam, quem diligit anima mea, nec dimittam eum, donec introducam illam in domum matris meae (Canti. iii. 4); et osculetur me osculo oris sui (Cant. 1. 2); et gaudeamus ordinata caritate invicem.

   And would that my eagle might come flying to pray at St. Martin's; so that I might embrace his sweetest of wings; and might hold him, whom my soul loveth, and not let him go, until I bring him into my mother's house; and he might kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; and we might rejoice together with an ordained affection.

9. Alc. Ep. 65 (MGH Epp. IV. 107-8) Cf. Bonif. Ep. 73 (MGH Epp. III. 342) Si … voragine libidinis quasi puteo inferni demersus fueras, iam tempus est, ut memor domini tui a diaboli laques resipiscas.

10. Ibid.

11. Alc. Carm. LVII, MGH Poetae I. 269-70. I follow Dornau, Amphitheatrum (Hanover, 1519), p. 457, Carrara (La Poesia Pastorale, pp. 44-45) and Bulst, “Alchuuines Ecloga de Cuculo,” Zschr. f. deutsches Altertum, LXXXVI (1955), 193-196, in reading the poem as amoebean. Notes: 2 Verg. Geo. II. 128 saevae infecere novercae; Anth. Lat. 688c. 2 (de Phedra) saeva noverca; Alc. Ep. 65 (MGH Epp. IV. 107) Inmitiorque noverca tam tenerum de paterno gremio per libidinum vortices caro rapuit; Dam. (Ferr.) XXV. 2 Sanctorum subito rapuit quos regna coeli; cf. LXIII. 2; Fort. IV. xxvi.47 abripuit … subito; Paulus Diac. (Neff) XXVIII. 1 rapuit subito; cf. XXXIII. 3; de Rossi Inscr. Chr. II. viii. 97 Quem mihi tam subito mors … tulit. 4 Verg. Ecl. V. 10 Incipe, Mopse, prior; Alc. LVIII. 4 seniorque Palemon. 6 Alc. LXI. 1 Quae te … rapuit; Verg. Ecl. VI. 47 (de Pasiphaa) Quae te dementia cepit. 7 Verg. Aen. IX. 370 qua te regione reliqui, (Ov. Met. VIII. 232 qua te regione requiram (Daedalus Icaro), Luc. IX. 873 Qua te parte poli, qua te tellure reliqui, Claud. De raptu III. 428 Qua te parte poli, quo te sub cardine quaeram, Fort. VIII. iii. 231 qua te urbe requiram, Alc. LX. 15 qua te nunc parte requiram?). 8 cf. e. g. Verg. Geo. III. 242 Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, Alc. XXIII. 11 Omne genus volucrum, LXI. 5 volucrum simul … querere. 12 I Mac. vi. 13 ecce pereo, Ps. lxxii. 27, xci. 10 ecce … peribunt.

    17 Alc. IV. 35 Si non Neptunus pelago demerserit illos. 19 Alc. LX. 17 Sed citius redeat. 23 Verg. Ecl. II. 6 nihil mea carmina curas?, Ecl. VIII. 103; Alc. XL.9 Carmina non curat David; Alc. LVIII. 52 nunc ecce venito; Apoc. iii.11; xxii. 12 Ecce venio cito. 25 Alc. Ep. 52 (MGH Epp. IV. 96) Noli tardare. … Curre, dum lucem habes; cf. pp. 51, 325. 26 Alc. LVIII. 4 iuvenis Dafnis. 27 Verg. Aen. XII. 96, Arat. II. 706 tempus adest; Paulin. Nol. XXVIII. 255 tempus adest mutare vias, exurgere somno et tandem vigilare deo, dormire vicissim; Ps-Beda Hymn. I (PL 94. 584) tempus adest messis. 29 Verg. Geo. I. 15 tondent dumeta iuvenci; prata / tondentur; Ecl. VII. 11 per prata iuvenci, Ps-Beda Hymn. II (PL 94. 608) Tunc armenta mares repetunt et gramina tondent. 30 Fort. VII. xii. 107 quis rogo reddat eas. 31 Verg. Geo. l. 448 Heu male. 32 Num. xxxii. 9 subverterunt cor filiorum Israel; Alcimus II. 141. Non queat iniecto subvertere corda veneno; Alc. XXXII. 24-5 Ve tibi, Bache pater! / Ve, quia tu quaeris sensus subvertere sacros; Ep. 156 (MGH Epp. IV. 255) Non subvertat cor tuum ambitio seculi. 33 Eug. Tol. (PL 87. 399) Plangite me cuncti.

    37 Paul. Nol. VI. 180, Alc. LXIX. 55 puer inclitus. 39 Verg. Aen. VI. 471 quam si dura silex, IV. 366-7 duris genuit te cautibus … Caucasus. 45 Symphos. Aen. 82 Tres olim fuimus, qui nomine iungimur uno; Fort. VII. xix. 12 Tres amor unus habet; Alc. XVIII. 9-14. 47 Jer. vi. 26 planctus amarus; Beda De die Iud. 4 (PL 94. 633) planctum amaro. 50 Verg. Ecl. VIII. 68-9 ducite ab urbe domum mea carmina Daphnim / carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam; Ov. Am. II. i. 23 Carmina … deducunt.

12. F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1957), I, 185.

13. The ambiguity of the in arte names Daphnis and Menalcas cannot now be easily resolved. Alcuin, in his correspondence, uses both names to refer to real people. “Daphnis,” a student, could easily be the Daphnis of the poem; but we cannot say the same of “Menalcas,” the chief steward or seneschal of Charlemagne. “Menalcas” and “Daphnis” are here more likely to be Alcuin and Arne, whose letters to Dodo (MGH Epp. IV. 107-110) use common language and allusions in urging repentance. (Cf. Bulst, loc. cit., p. 196.)

14. Cf. Ovid, Tr. I. viii. 37-44, echoed in the ninth century by Engelmodus of Soissons (MGH Poetae III. 57)

    E saxis genitum hunc lactarunt ubera tigrum
              Durum perpetuo frigore Sarmatico

    The hard-hearted lover of the Eighth Eclogue is also recalled by Alcuin in his wistfully prosaic echo of Alphesiboeus: Carmina deducunt forte, reor, cuculum.

15. Riese, Anthologia latina, #688. The preceding leaves of the manuscript (from St. Gall) have the Conflictus Veris et Hiemis. Riese's emendation of moriturus is unnecessary.

16. Cic. De re publica III. i. 1, in Augustine Contra Iulianum IV. xii. 60; cf. Philo De posteritate Caini 160-2.

17. The raven frequently preys on the battlefield in Old English and Scandinavian poetry. Cf. N. Lukman, “The Raven Banner,” Classica et Medievalia, XIX (1958), 133-151. Mr. Lukman sees a specific allusion to the “Viking raven” in Sedulius Scotus' description of the Danish conversion of 845: ex corvis esse columbas (II. xxx. 51). But this is a topos of conversion to be found for example in Prudentius, Dittochaeus 192 Corvos mutare columbis; Aldhelm C. 491-2 corvos / Vertit in albentes … columbas; De Conversione Saxonum Carmen, MGH Poetae I. 381 corvos / Vertit in albifluas … columbas.

18. Joh. Chrysostomus, Serm. in Pentec. de Spir. sancto: diabolus, qui vere niger et tenebrosus corvus est, (quoted PL 99. 253); MGH Poetae II. 445.

19. The raven was supposed not to feed his children as long as they were white, and hence unrecognizable by him. Vd. e. g. Isid. Etym. XII. vii.43, MGH Poetae IV. 345. In secular literature the raven was also regarded as a harbinger of rain; and, in Biblical exegesis, he was supposed to have failed to return to the Ark in order to feast on the hosts of floating corpses (vd. e. g. Arat. de Act. Ap. I. 650ss; Ambros. lib. De Noe et arca XVII. Culpa tenebrosa est, et mortuis pascitur sicut corvus.)

20. Consider for example the phrase dissecet ungue fero, which seems unconsciously to echo the locus communis in Jerome's letter about the conversion of secular letters to Christian uses: si quid vero superfluum de idolis, de amore, de cura saecularium rerum, haec radimus … haec in unguium morem ferro acutissimo desecamus (Ep. xxi.., PL 22. 385; cf. Deut. xxi. 12) Perhaps no strict sense could be made of this alusion, yet the punitive distinctions it raises between secular and spiritual are affectively appropriate, and could easily have been near the surface of Alcuin's mind when he was writing. The passage was a popular one in this period. We find it echoed in Hrabanus Maurus (PL 107. 396) and again in the Vita S. Maioli (PL 137. 755). F. J. E. Raby seems to be unaware of the allusion, since he takes the latter passage literally: to mean that the Cluniac abbot St. Maiolus “made it his duty” to scrape manuscripts (History of Christian Latin Poetry, Oxford, 1927, p. 312).

21. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Garden City, 1957), p. 64; cf. “Figura,” Archivum Romanum, XXII (1938), 436-489. A helpful recent introduction to typology is H. Clavier's “Esquisse de Typologie comparée,” Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur, LXXIX (1961), 28-49.

22. J. B. Pitra, O.S.B. (ed.), Spicilegium Solesmense (Paris, 1855), III, 400-406. Cf. PL 50. 727ss.

23. Alcuin, Comment. in Joan. vi. 1, PL 100. 819: following Bede, Homelia XXI, PL 94. 111.

24. Ep. 181 (MGH Epp. IV. 300) ex Verg. Geo. I. 414 dulcis revisere nidos; cf. supra.

25. In the light of this polar vision, most symbols are ambivalent. To the pocula Bacchi are opposed the pocula fidei, to the vincula diaboli, the vincula Christi, etc.

26. An epistolary topos. Cf. Alc. Ep. 52 (MGH Epp. IV. 96) Noli tardare. … Curre dum lucem habes; cf. pp. 51, 156, 325, PL 100. 589, Boniface ep. IX (MGH Epp. III. 249) Currite dum lumen vitae habetis ne tenebrae mortis vos comprehendant; Joh. xii.35.

27. Alc. De Virt. et Vit. XIV, PL 101. 623. The passage borrows from St. Caesarius of Arles, Serm. XVIII. 6 (ed. Morin CCL. 103. 83-6). Cf. Alcuin's pupil Hrabanus Maurus (PL 111. 252): Corvus peccatorum el daemonum significat, vel pecatoris traditatem ad poenitendum (cf. Eucherius, PL 50. 748).

28. Alc. in Gen. viii.11, PL 100. 531 Columba Spiritus sancti, expulso alite teterrimo, ad Noe post diluvium, quasi ad Christum post baptismum devolat, et ramos refectionis ac luminis portans, pacem orbi annuntiat. In this substitution of the cuckoo (vernalis avis, as Alcuin calls Dodo in his letters, MGH Epp. IV. 370) for the allegoric dove of Genesis and the Canticle, we have the key to the poem's effective blurring of its symbolic overtones. The dove is a favorite symbol of earlier Christian poetry, and too often its connotations are written out at length. In the Versus de Cuculo their function is not rhetorical, but what we would now call poetic; they haunt, but cannot dominate the meanings of the poem. We find exactly the same device—of muting and transcending allegory by symbolic substitution—in the cuckoo of the Conflictus Hiemis et Veris; and this is perhaps the principal argument for Alcuin's authorship of that complex poem.

29. Alc. Carm. CXV. 12-14 (MGH Poetae I. 346) emended. Cf. Sedulius, Hymn. I. 103-4:

30. As Alcuin would have construed them: cf. his Grammatica, PL 101.877. It has been pointed out to me that a modern grammarian would construe redeat as a volitive.

31. MGH Epp. IV. 110.

32. Paul. Nol. Carm. XXVIII. 255-6; cf. Cant. v. 2.

33. This is as I have said the perspective made familiar and easy by exegesis, as for example in the following relevant passage:

    Qui dat iumenta escam ipsorum, et pullis corvorum invocantibus eum. (Psal. cxlvi. 9) Jumenta ecclesiasticos significant greges, qui competenti refectione pascuntur, alii lacte, alii cibo solido, prout dispensatori visum fuerit, ui solus novit quae sunt profutura praestare. Corvi sunt irreligiosi viri, qui peccatorum nigredine inseparabiliter vestiuntur.

    (Cassiodorus, PL 70. 1037)

    Professor Northrop Frye has written deprecatingly of what he calls naive allegory “or the translation of ideas into images,” and he has the Old Testament particularly in mind: “When the author of II Esdras, for instance, introduces an allegorical vision of an eagle, and then says, ‘Behold, on the right side there arose one feather, which reigned over all the earth,’ it is clear that he is not sufficiently interested in his eagle as a poetic image to remain within the normal boundaries of literary expression. The basis of poetic expression is the metaphor, and the basis of naive allegory is the mixed metaphor.” But the criterion of “normal boundaries” is elusive, and clearly will shift between Jerusalem and Toronto. Likewise the concept of the “mixed metaphor” presupposes a certain viewpoint and habitual context, which here does not apply. I would have preferred to distinguish between prophecy, which throws up these blazons for motives we cannot fully analyze; and the naive allegory which, in contrast, insists on explicating them. A consistently explicative allegory, by insisting on certain meanings, excludes others; and thus has the effect of deadening the tone of its allusions. Such allegory is finite; but it, like prophecy, can have a poetry of its own. What is “clear” to Prof. Frye would not have been to Alcuin: we are thrown back on the study of literature as habit, nomos, or convention.

34. Verg. Ecl. VIII. 69 Carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam. A commonplace: cf. Ovid, Amores II. i. 23.

35. I am tempted to say, between Virgil and Petrarch, since Alcuin forms such a natural bridge between the two. (I hope to demonstrate elsewhere that Petrarch was familiar with Alcuin's verse.) Dante's Eclogues, though considerable, are something of a literary accident; they show his genius, but do not help to shape it.

36. Alc. Ep. 121 (MGH Epp. IV. 177): Ideo haec vestrae excellentiae dico, ne forte vestro placeat totius sapientiae desiderantissimo consilio, ut aliquos pueris nostris remittam, qui excipiant inde nobis necessaria quaeque et revehant in Frantiam flores Britanniae, ut non sit tantummodo in Euborica hortus conclusus, (Cant. iv. 12) sed in Turonica emissiones paradisi cum pomorum fructibus, (Cant. iv. 13) ut veniens Auster perflaret hortos Ligeri fluminis et fluant aromata illius, (Cant. iv. 16) et novissime fiat quod sequitur in cantico, unde hoc adsumpsi paradigma: ‘Veniat dilectus meus in hortum suum, et comedat fructum pomorum suorum’ (Cant. v. 1); et dicat adulescentulis suis: ‘Comedite, amici mei, bibite et inebriamini karissimi. Ego dormio, (Cant. v. 2-3) et cor meum vigilat,’ vel illud exhortativum ad sapientiam discendam Esaiae prophetae elogium: ‘Omnes sitientes venite ad aquas. Et qui non habetis argentum, properate, emite, et comedite.’ (Isai. lv. 1). … Ego vero secundum modum ingenioli mei apud servos vestros in his partibus seminare sapientiae grana segnis non ero; memor illius sententiae: ‘Mane semina semen tuum, et vespere non cesset manus tua: quia nescis, quid magis oriatur hoc an illud, et si utraque simul, melius est.’ Mane, florentibus per aetatem studiis, seminavi in Britannia, nunc vero frigescente sanguine, quasi vespere, in Francia seminare non cesso; utraque enim, Dei gratia donante, oriri optans.

37. Alc. Ep. 170 (MGH Epp. IV. 279); Fort. III. viii. 20.

38. Cardinal Newman, quoted in Theodor Haecker (tr. Wheen) Virgil, Father of the West (London, 1934), p. 120.

39. Petrarch, Ecloga I. 1-7, 11.