[In the following essay, Bush compares Sandys's translations of and commentaries on Ovid's Metamorphoses to those of John Dryden, Arthur Golding, and others.]

We may look first at the translator, who, like so many writers of his robust and stirring age, was not merely a man of books. George Sandys (1578-1644) came of a prominent family. He was the son of Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, and a younger brother of Sir Edwin, one of the chief promoters of the Virginia Company. He attended Oxford (1589 f.) and in 1596 was admitted to the Middle Temple, where probably for a year or two he read law. A youthful marriage, previously arranged by the parents, led within a decade to separation and prolonged litigation. So far Sandys had followed the normal pattern of life for young men of his class (unless the ill-starred marriage is excepted as only seminormal), but in 1610 the Yorkshire squire embarked on travels of a kind not yet common. They resulted in a book which—with the unusual asset of illustrations—was one of the first and most lastingly popular accounts of the Middle East, A Relation of a Iourney begun An: Dom: 1610. Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Ægypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote parts of Italy, and Ilands Adioyning (1615). Like other serious travelers of the Renaissance, Sandys was intent upon amassing solid information, and, like others, he wrote up his notes at home, adding historical and literary materials from books. He had the further wish, typical of himself and his period, “to draw a right image of the frailty of man, and mutability of what so ever is worldly.” Three illustrious readers were Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, and Milton; Milton may have used details in several works from On the Morning of Christ's Nativity to Samson Agonistes.

Sandys' interest in the troubled affairs of the Virginia Company led in 1621 to his becoming resident treasurer of the colony. In the same year he published The First Five Bookes of Ovids Metamorphosis and during his voyage to Jamestown he translated two more books. His chief work was the collecting of the company's revenues and the promotion of agriculture and manufacturing, and he had plantations of his own to operate. He was an intelligent, firm, and active administrator who candidly reported on difficulties caused largely by the London directors' lack of foresight in handling a novel enterprise. One special disaster in 1622 was a massacre by the Indians of between three hundred and four hundred people; “Master George Sands” was celebrated in a ballad about a punitive foray. In his spare time he went on with his translation, the earliest piece of English verse written in America (apart from the crude ballad just mentioned). In 1625 Sandys returned to England (barely escaping Turkish pirates on the way) and in 1626 he dedicated the completed translation to King Charles. The king granted him exclusive rights in the book for twenty-one years and soon made him a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Until his death in 1644 Sandys was occupied with his duties at court, with Virginian affairs, and with literary work. Both personal piety and current fashion prompted a series of versified paraphrases from the Bible, and he translated Hugo Grotius' drama, Christus Patiens. In London and in the country Sandys had many friends, from the sturdy veteran Michael Drayton, who had encouraged his Ovidian labors, to the elegant amorist of Whitehall, Thomas Carew, and one group of special note, Lord Falkland and his circle at Great Tew near Oxford.

From the Middle Ages up into the eighteenth century Ovid (43 b.c.-a.d. 17/18) ranked next to Virgil among the Roman poets, and the Metamorphoses, “the Arabian Nights of the Roman world,” was in general his most popular work. Ovid aimed to make it his masterpiece and in the last lines—which many poets were to echo—he asserted a proud claim to immortality. The poem was published by his friends after its author had been exiled by Augustus to the shores of the Black Sea (a.d. 8), where he poured forth laments of endless fluency; the precise reasons for his banishment are unclear, but evidently the emperor was cracking down on the licentiousness of the Roman smart set, of which Ovid, in such works as The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) has been the poet laureate. Trained, like other young men of his class, in the schools of rhetoric, Ovid turned his training to poetical account. He was one of the cleverest poets in the world; in English perhaps Pope suggests something of his quality, although Pope, much more often than Ovid, could be more than clever. Romantic and erotic material, brilliant storytelling, infinite verve and inventiveness, easy and witty exploitation of every rhetorical trick, bright, concrete scene painting, and, on occasion, sound moral aphorisms—such qualities, both genuine and artificial, made the Metamorphoses for ages by far the most attractive treasury of Greek and Roman myth. This and Ovid's other works were enjoyed and drawn upon by all the great and minor poets of Europe, in England by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest.

While all boys read Ovid's Latin at school, many in later life might prefer the ease of a translation; and many Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, like Shakespeare, might use both the original and Arthur Golding's version of the Metamorphoses (completed in 1567). But Golding, though not without virtues (which have been exalted by Ezra Pound), wrote in rather pedestrian and diffuse fourteeners and did not go far toward rendering Ovid's distinctive manner. Our own time has brought forth translations in the modern idiom, yet for the historical student of English poetry Sandys' version is the best. He was a respectable poet who used the fresh, muscular English of a great age of poetry. Like other men of that age, he had been trained in a tradition of rhetoric which had come down unbroken since Ovid's day, and he went much further than Golding in reproducing the patterns and figures which—through study at school and such handbooks as George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589)—were well known and appreciated by both writers and readers. Sandys was, moreover, one of the early molders of the Augustan heroic couplet and of Augustan poetic diction.

For a random basis of comparison we might take the opening lines of the Metamorphoses:

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!
          Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum
unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
quem dixere chaos: rudis indigestaque moles
nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem
non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.

Golding:

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate;
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they that wrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
Before the Sea and Land were made, and Heaven that all doth hide,
In all the worlde one onely face of nature did abide,
Which Chaos hight, a huge rude heape, and nothing else but even
A heavie lump and clottred clod of seedes togither driven
Of things at strife among themselves for want of order due.

Sandys (1632 edition):

Of bodies chang'd to other shapes I sing.
Assist, you Gods (from you these changes spring)
And, from the Worlds first fabrick to these times,
Deduce my never-discontinued Rymes.
          The Sea, the Earth, all-covering Heaven unfram'd,
One face had Nature, which they Chaos nam'd:
An undigested lump; a barren load,
Where jarring seeds of things ill-joyn'd aboad.

Dryden (Examen Poeticum, 1693):

Of Bodies chang'd to various Forms I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these Miracles did spring,
Inspire my Numbers with Cœlestial heat;
Till I my long laborious Work compleat;
And add perpetual Tenour to my Rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's Birth, to Cæsar's Times.
          Before the Seas, and this Terrestrial Ball,
And Heav'ns high Canopy, that covers all,
One was the Face of Nature, if a Face;
Rather a rude and undigested Mass:
A lifeless Lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd;
Of jarring Seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.

In substance Golding here follows Ovid with relative fidelity, but his tone is hardly Ovidian and the movement of his long lines is monotonous. Sandys aims always at extreme conciseness and does not admit the padding that translations in verse commonly invite; here he has one line less than Ovid. His fourth line causes at least momentary puzzlement because of his employing “Deduce” in the sense of its Latin original and because of “never-discontinued” for perpetuum; both Golding and Dryden are less literal and more lucid. Dryden, who censured “the so much admir'd Sandys” for condensed, prosaic, and obscure literalness (though he later praised him as the best versifier of the former age), was obviously not above echoing his first line (which in 1626 read “Of formes, to other bodies chang'd, I sing”) and a number of words and phrases. He adds somewhat to Ovid and, using twelve lines to Sandys' eight, achieves a less tight and more elegantly readable texture.

Dryden's taking over “deduce” in its Latin meaning is one small reminder of the considerable share Sandys had in the early development of what became Augustan poetic diction. The seeds, fairly conspicuous in Spenser, were watered by Sylvester in his version of Du Bartas' epic of creation and by Sandys and others, and by Milton. The use of latinate words in their original sense is further illustrated in Sandys by such words as “error” for “wandering” and “obvious” for “in the way” or “confronting.” And we think of Milton's “I travel this profound” (Paradise Lost, ii. 980) when we come on Sandys' “that Profound” and “the vast Profound” (Ovid, xi. 700, Fluctibus; xiv. 478-79, alta … aequora). Other elements of poetic diction, mainly derived from Latin poetry (and sometimes scientific in origin), were abstract or generic epithets and nouns, periphrases, and participles used as adjectives. In the Augustan age such things were often mere automatic elegance, but in earlier verse they were often functional. Thus in translating two of Ovid's lines on the creation of the earth (i. 41-42),

in mare perveniunt partim campoque recepta
liberioris aquae pro ripis litora pulsant,

Sandys makes the whole conceit a little more pointed, and Augustan, by turning campo into the oxymoron “liquid Plaine”:

When, in that liquid Plaine, with freer wave,
The foamie Cliffes, in stead of Banks, they lave.

(The “foamie Cliffes” is a somewhat pictorial heightening of litora pulsant.) The concrete becomes partly abstract metaphor when nunc mihi qua totum Nereus circumsonat orbem (i. 187) is rendered as “Where-ever Nereus walks his wavy Round”; the god is still the ocean, but in the guise of an army officer making his rounds, in a maritime setting.

Translation, before and after Sandys, played a notable part in the development of the closed couplet. The technical discipline involved in the adaptation of Ovid's elegiac distich (alternate hexameter and pentameter) can be seen in such early examples as Marlowe's version of the Amores, Drayton's England's Heroical Epistles, done in imitation of the Heroides, and Thomas Heywood's translation of the Ars Amatoria. Sandys, like Drayton, has run-on lines and occasional run-on couplets, but his staple unit is the closed couplet, and the normally longer units of Ovid's hexameters are fitted into the couplet pattern. Also, while Ovid has balanced or antithetical half-lines, he often links the parts of a line through related words, a practice hardly possible in a noninflected language which requires syntactical order. Though Sandys skillfully varies caesuras, he goes beyond Drayton in accentuating Ovidian balance and antithesis in lines and half-lines, and, like Drayton and others, he carries on Ovidian alliteration and assonance. The result tends to be both even and epigrammatic. An example is this passage (ii. 88-93), where Phoebus is admonishing the too ambitious Phaethon:

at tu, funesti ne sim tibi muneris auctor,
nate, cave, dum resque sinit tua corrige vota!
scilicet ut nostro genitum te sanguine credas,
pignora certa petis: do pignora certa timendo
et patrio pater esse metu probor. adspice vultus
ecce meos. …
Then, lest my bountie, which would save, should kill;
Beware: and whil'st thou maist, reforme thy will.
A signe thou crav'st, that might confirme thee mine:
I, by dehorting, give a certayne signe;
Approv'd a Father, by Paternall feare:
Look on my looks, and reade my sorrows, there.

The allegorical commentary that Sandys added to his edition of 1632 was one of the latest, fullest, and most readable things of its kind in English. Allegorical interpretations of myth had begun in Greece before Plato (witness the comments in the Republic) in an effort to elevate the dubious behavior of the Homeric deities. From the Greeks and Romans the method was taken over by patristic interpreters of the Bible; Augustine, for example, rejoiced in having some of his doubts cleared away by the explanations of Ambrose. The next step was the moralizing or Christianizing of the chief pagan classics. The Aeneid was interpreted as a pilgrim's progress; the exposition was not foolish, except in its explicitness. General reverence for the ancients, a desire to make the much loved Ovid acceptable, and the allegorical habit of mind contrived also to give moral or Christian significance to the tales in the Metamorphoses. One huge work was the Ovide moralisé, and there were smaller books in Latin. An example of one kind of formula is this: Pyramus (Christ) loves Thisbe (the human soul) but they are kept apart by the wall (sin); their meeting under the mulberry tree (the Cross), at the fountain (the baptismal font), is frustrated by the lion (the devil), and Pyramus commits suicide for Thisbe's sake (the Crucifixion). If we are tempted to mirth or condescension, we may remember that similar vagaries are appearing all the time in our highbrow and scholarly criticism.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the older books, like that of Boccaccio, were giving place to the new ones of Natalis Comes (Natale Conti) and others. These much more scholarly works assembled various versions of the myths, with quotations from the ancient writers, and included various kinds of traditional interpretation, euhemeristic, moral, scientific, and so on. They were Renaissance equivalents of The Golden Bough and were widely used by such more or less learned poets as Spenser, Chapman, and Ben Jonson. Writers like these, with a willing suspension of disbelief, found in such allegorized mythology a storehouse of poetic symbols, a universal language. In a somewhat different way the power of the tradition is exemplified in Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum (1609), translated in 1619 as The Wisdom of the Ancients; Bacon showed some characteristic bias in taking his selected myths as embodiments of political wisdom or scientific concepts. One general support for the tradition which remained active in the seventeenth century was the belief that the pagan myths were a distorted version of biblical truth—as in the parallel between Noah's flood and Ovid's tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.

Golding had prefaced his translation with two versified expositions of the moral lessons contained in the Metamorphoses, lessons for people of both sexes and all ages. Sandys, two generations later, is more sophisticated; at least his traditional interpretations may have a tincture of something like anthropology. As his chief sources Sandys names a dozen Greek and Roman authors, some church fathers, and nine Renaissance writers, including Comes and Bacon. His exposition of Ovidian myths is agreeably diversified with items from miscellaneous reading and a few American observations; the second page refers to Copernicus and the uneven surface of the moon “discovered by Galileos Glasses.” Since most of his mythological material was available to others in the scattered sources or as assembled in handbooks, it is hard to say whether or when English poets read him; yet the commentary is of great value in illustrating countless things in poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably Milton. The text of Sandys' translation yields a number of parallels with Milton in phrase as well as matter, though these may be only natural in two poets saturated in Ovid and writing English in the same period. But a few illustrations may be cited from the commentary. On the verbal level, we may wonder if “scaly Triton's winding shell” (Comus 873) came from an account of Triton (in the commentary on Ovid's first book) which includes “a body covered with small and hard scales” and “winding a shell.” On a higher level, Sandys (on Ovid's fourteenth book) expounds fully, and in a Platonic strain, the age-old conception which lies behind Comus, of Odysseus (the rational and celestial soul) protected from Circe (sensuality) by the magical herb moly (temperance). While, as the Nativity showed, Milton knew much about the heathen gods from various sources (Sandys' Relation probably among them), the more elaborate roll call in the first book of Paradise Lost may be aptly illustrated from the commentary. Milton's reference to Pharaoh as Busiris (Paradise Lost, i. 307), which has somewhat puzzled editors, has perhaps a partial warrant in Sandys' identification of Busiris with “that king of Ægipt who so grievously oppressed the Israelites” (book nine). To add one more item, in addition to sources commonly cited for Milton's allusion to battles seen in the sky (Paradise Lost, ii. 533-38), Sandys (book fifteen) comments on such visions, including one of 1629.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century the rising tide of scientific and critical rationalism washed away allegorical and “mystical” modes of thought. However, the rationalistic temper of the eighteenth century did not prevent the rise of another and antirationalistic tide which swelled into the romantic movement, and on the crest of that wave came a revival of myth and symbol. Not to mention early manifestations, Wordsworth, in the fourth book of The Excursion, translated his own religion of nature into the myth-making terms of Greek polytheism and local piety. In Keats and Shelley myth became the vehicle for the most seriously imaginative visions of human experience and aspiration. Keats, though no scholar, was even in boyhood an instinctive participant in that European phenomenon, romantic Hellenism. He absorbed mythology first from classical dictionaries, then from the Elizabethan poets, and he may have drawn a good deal from Sandys, how much we cannot be sure. We know that he used the 1640 edition, which, unlike that of 1632, had the translation in double columns and hence a different pagination. Keats's modern editor, De Selincourt, suggested that the general scheme of Endymion was indebted to Sandys' prefatory verses on the symbolism of the four elements, and that Sandys' text colored a number of details, such as the impressive picture of Cybele (Endymion, ii. 639-49; cf. Sandys' rendering of x. 696 f.). Keats would of course read the story of Glaucus, Scylla, and Circe in books thirteen and fourteen, for the third book of Endymion. He evidently looked up Sandys' notes on some of the Titans who figure in Hyperion. In Lamia the opening incident of Hermes and the nymph may be elaborated, with echoes of Sandys, from the tale of Mercury, Herse, and Aglauros in Ovid's second book. Sandys may have contributed, along with miscellaneous “sources,” to incidental bits in these and other poems. One bit is the Miltonic turn in Hyperion, i. 35-36:

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

Sandys (near the end of book seven) has the couplet,

She still was sad: yet lovelier none than she,
Even in that sadnesse: sorrowfull for me.

If the Elgin Marbles and other things were blended in

          To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

Sandys (at the beginning of book three) may have been one of the other things. He thus describes “a Heifer”:

Shee made a stand; to heaven her fore-head cast,
With loftie hornes most exquisitely faire;
Then, with repeated lowings fill'd the ayre.

Although the “soulless” Ovid does not now hold a high rank, for many centuries he cast a spell over European readers and poets great and small, and, at least indirectly, he still does; and if the Metamorphoses contained less gold than silver and brass, many of the poets who drew upon it possessed alchemical powers. The reading of Sandys, both the translation and the commentary, gives us the feeling and flavor of Ovid in the last age of his full fame.

Bibliography

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