"Uw lijden is mijn' pijne."

Abstract

The long consolatory poem for the blind, Ooghentroost, written by the Dutchseventeenth-century poet, Constantijn Huygens, looks like an intricate webof dialogues. The text is first of all a letter from Huygens to Lucretia vanTrello, an older friend of the author who suffered from cataract. One canregard this poem also as a collection of links between the lines in Dutch andthe margin of the poem, a subtext of references to the oeuvres of diverseauthorities such as playwrights (Euripides, Seneca, ... ), philosophers (Plato,Cicero, ... ), poets (Homer, Ovid, ... ), Church Fathers and the Bible. In thispaper I examine one specific dialogue - a conversation between Huygens andLucius Annaeus Seneca. Huygens frequently refers to Seneca's philosophicaland literary work but his entretien with the Roman writer is not in the leastunproblematic. To fit Seneca's stoic ideas into his own Christian discourse onthose who are morally blind the poet cannot but manipulate the words of hisillustrious interlocutor.