All the Rage

But sad Ulysses, by himself apart,

Poured the big sorrows of his swelling heart;

All on the lonely shore he sate to weep,

And roll’d his eyes around the restless deep;

—Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer, "The Departure of Ulysses from Calypso," 5.81–84

Fearing to squander genius on a wife,

Put to one side his "long disease, my life,”*

Aware expense of spirit would be steep,

Pope wrote poetry, thinking it might keep.

Like Odysseus on Calypso's isle,

He doubted wisdom had gone out of style.

What, then, fear I, in this enchanted den

I’ve dug to keep apart from other men?

They mean well—but confabulation reigns

In societies long contrived for gains.

It seems our species loves truth too little—

Freaked-out jots detest a weighty tittle!

While in the Siberia of its cage

Observed, the panther's pacing’s all the rage.

*Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735):

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,

To help me through this long disease, my life . . .

Dr Johnson called Pope's translation of the Iliad "certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen . . . one of the great events in the annals of learning." But who reads Pope now (or Dr Johnson himself, for that matter)? My late friend Peter Green, in his own translations of Homer (which I copyedited for the University of California Press), dismissed "translators like [!] Pope" on grounds that "rhyming was unknown to Homer." Sic transit . . .

Jot: From the Latin iota, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.

Tittle: The dot over the letters “i” and “j,” from the Latin titulus, title or heading.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025