Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Solvitur acris hiems...for the moment anyway

Around this time of year, my favorite 'spring poem' always makes its way back into my head:

Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni...

But my favorite line is the one about midnight dances:

Iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente luna,
junctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes
alterno terram quatiunt pede...

Horace has a capability to evoke such a captivating picture with so few words. Translations are painfully inadequate, but would run something like, in the first case, 'Bitter winter is dissolved by the welcome change of Spring and Favonis' (the West Wind unless I've gotten mixed again) and, in the second, 'Now Cytherean Venus leads dances with the moon hanging low, and charming Graces joined with Nymphs beat the earth with alternating foot.'

But the real problem with Horace is not the inadequacy of translations, but that he doesn't seem to have given me a poem for weather that keeps going from charmingly warm to bitterly frigid. I always recite this poem with a bit of trepidation, as if winter is going to 'come back and get me' for my audacity in proclaiming its defeat by Spring. Perhaps I could do a little substitution-work and use one of his railings against unfaithful girlfriends...