The World is a problematic place if the prophesies Aeneas relies on are wilfully deceptive and superficially true. Dido curses Aeneas to ‘fall before his day/ unburied in the middle of the sand.’ 4.620 We glimpse an alternative future And are reminded that Virgil is writing with the gift of hindsight. The narratives we create…| world enough and time
From Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid Book VI (lines 258-294) followed by a brief commentary from Rachel Falconer’s recent volume dedicated to Heaney’s decades-long engagement with Virgil – Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry “procul o, procul este, profani,”conclamat vates, “totoque absistite luco;tuque invade viam vaginaque eripe ferrum:nunc animis opus, Aenea, nunc pectore … Continue reading By the hovering light of a moon that clouds and unclouds at Jupiter...| Extracts
To what extent are literary epics the children of their own times, expressions of their own particular zeitgeist, and to what extent are they expressions of perennial truths that transcend fads, fashions and other temporal ephemera? Considering the epics of Homer and Virgil will enable us to understand these questions and to move towards answering them. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative