Didactic Poem Research Articles

Medieval Irish medical verse in the nineteenth century: some evidence from material culture

AbstractThis article presents an edition and translation of an Irish didactic poem found in a large compilation of remedies, charms and prayers that was written in the early sixteenth century by the Roscommon medical scribe Conla Mac an Leagha. The contents of this poem, and of the treatise in which it occurs more generally, are of inherent interest for our understanding of the history of medical learning in medieval Ireland. However, the poem is also of particular significance due to the fact that its penultimate stanza, which invokes the authority of one ‘Colmán mac Oililla’, is attested in two much later sources that provide insight into the transmission and reception of medieval Irish medical texts in the early nineteenth century, as well as into the relationship between manuscript, print and material culture during that period. The two sources in question, one of which is a previously unprovenanced signboard now kept in the Wellcome Collection in London, can both be connected with the work of the Munster ‘herb doctor’ Michael Casey (1752?–1830/31), who in 1825 advertised the publication of a new herbal containing cures derived from much earlier Irish-language medical manuscripts.

Hybride Temporalitäten

Abstract When the astronomical clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral was inaugurated in 1574, Nicodemus Frischlin, humanist and professor of poetics in Tübingen, responded to this monumental, ‘time-defining event’ with a didactic poem – in Latin, and profoundly informed by the great models of Classical Antiquity – in which he embedded the stages of human life in an encompassing horizon of both secular and religious temporality. With his ‘carmen’, Frischlin aimed to complement the ambitious technological construction with an equally ambitious literary account, gradually tracing the building’s multiple and hybrid conceptions and semantics of ‘time’ in versified description. This article examines how Frischlin’s didactic poetry organizes knowledge of anthropological, historical, and eschatological times; moreover, illuminating the motifs of the moon disc, the ‘Lebensalterautomat’, and the mechanical figure of Death, it sheds light on the emulating adaptation of Classical tradition (Lucretius; Ovid). Frischlin portrays the Strasbourg clock as a technological masterpiece without equal in Classical Antiquity.

Carmen de viribus herbarum (GDRK 64): Between Magical Pharmacology and Homeric Didactic

This paper aims to assess the nature of magic and medicine in the extant fragment of the little-known Carmen de viribus herbarum (fr. 64 Heitsch), an anonymous didactic poem of considerable length (216 hexameters have been transmitted) from the third century CE. The Carmen, a poem concerned with the curative powers of some fifteen different plants, is an evident descendant of the didactic pharmacological verse tradition of Nicander of Colophon and the like, yet its method of composition, reusing large chunks of Homeric lines, is remarkable. What sets the Carmen apart from the tradition of didactic pharmacology, moreover, is its fascination with magic, a factor virtually absent from the Nicandrean legacy. Next to pharmacological knowledge it repeatedly discusses effective plants against ghosts, apparitions, and witches.

‘The Astronomic Muse’: Charles Burney and Astronomy

AbstractLate in life, musicologist Dr Charles Burney composed Astronomy: An Historical and Didactic Poem, a twelve‐canto poem on the history of astronomy, uniting his two amateur pastimes, poetry and astronomy. The poem led to friendship with Court Astronomer William Herschel, and for years Burney shared the work‐in‐progress, modelled (I argue) on Erasmus Darwin's scientific poems, in scribal coteries. Between 1807 and 1812, however, Burney burned the manuscript; only fragments survive. While biographer Roger Lonsdale attributes this destruction to Burney's ‘realization that for years he had been boring his friends’, I argue it was his fear, as he prepared the poem for publication, that the changing literary marketplace would damage his reputation as man of letters. My re‐dating of the major fragment reinforces this argument.

Crooked Instruments: Obscene Scribal Creativity in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416

In his didactic poem Instructions to His Son, Peter Idley tells the story of Semiramis, the notoriously lecherous queen of ancient Assyria. He emphasizes her sexual voracity with the rhyme royal refrain, “With hir croked instrument to encrees and multeplie” (2.B.1790–1825), repeating the pejorative female genital term “croked instrument” a total of six times. One late fifteenth-century scribe named Roger Newton, who copied the Instructions in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416, substituted a compendium of inventive, less-derogatory genital synonyms for “croked instrument.” This essay focuses on Newton’s act of scribal creativity and linguistic experimentation. It analyzes Newton’s unique passage in conversation with popular fifteenth-century discourses of father-son sexual education and medieval renditions of the Semiramis narrative. It closes by exploring the passage’s manuscript context and premodern readership, showing how nuns from Syon Abbey wrote their names in the manuscript in the early sixteenth century and probing the possibilities of nuns reading Newton’s bawdy textual interventions.

Ornithological Passions of American Poet Celia Thaxter

American poet Celia Leighton Thaxter (1835 – 1894) was shaped by both environmental beauty and destruction she witnessed in her New England community. As a woman who spent much of her life on a small wind-swept island, she was educated by seasons and migrations that later informed her work. A brief education among Boston’s literary elite launched her creative career, where she focused on her local ecology. At that time, over-hunting and newly fashionable plumed hats and accessories had created a serious possibility of avian decimation. By creating awareness of humans’ culpability for birds’ endangerment, Thaxter’s work evoked public sympathy and contributed to social and political change.
 This essay applies ecofeminist and cultural analyses to Thaxter’s work written as part of the 19th century bird defense movement, by examining the emotional rhetoric employed and activism implied in her poems and prose about birds, specifically: “The Kittiwakes,” “The Wounded Curlew,” and “The Great Blue Heron: A Warning.” Little attention has been paid to Thaxter’s didactic poems which use birds as subjects to instruct children and adults about the fragility of birdlife and to warn of humans’ destructive behaviors. These works illustrate Thaxter’s ecological sensibility and her use of emotion and reason to communicate an ecological message. Her poetry and prose about birdlife fortified the budding Audubon Society and contributed to the birth of the environmental movement. We can learn from such poetic activism, from attention to nature turned commodity, and the dangers of depleting finite resources. In our global environmental crisis, we recognize the interwoven relationships between birds and humans. Perhaps poems can help stymie our current ecological trajectory.

ПОЕТИКА ПОЕМИ ОРІЄНЦІЯ “COMMONITORIUM”

Poetry is a kind of discourse distinct from ordinary, everyday speech; it is an institution, a kind of speech that a society has marked as special, with special rules applying to its production and reception. Didactic poetry is a kind of poetry that it aims to instruct (Toohey, 2013: 2). In didactic poetry the reader is invited to consider not just the message and the brilliant language of its exposition, but what lies behind the message, the human values and the vision which the poem embodies. The article analyzes the work of Orientius “Commonitorium” and his role as an innovative writer of Latin didactic poetry as well as his position in the landscape of late antique literature of the 5th century AD. The aim of the article is to show to what extent the defining characteristics of the genre can be found in Orientius’ poem “Commonitorium” and to trace the permutations of these features throughout the text. A full range of issues, which scholarship on Orientius has hitherto neglected, will be studied: the “poetics” of the work, that is the poetic selfawareness expressed in the poem, as well as techniques of composition, rhetorical argumentation, strategies of persuasion and narration, intertextual allusions, relationship with contemporary works and other aspects. Scientific novelty. Whereas Latin poetry flourished under the reign of Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD) and the first century AD, only few poetic works survived which were produced in the later second and third century AD. After a long period of silence, Latin poetry had its comeback in late antiquity when in the 4th century AD various writers started composing poetic genres again. Instead of Rome, other locations became important breeding grounds for the production of literature, especially Gaul, where writers such as Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus, Sidonius Apollinaris and others were active. Whereas the genres composed by late antique writers were more or less the same as in Classical literature, most of their works differ in content and meaning (Gasparov, 1982: 2; Johnson, 2000: 335–337). Late antique writers were deeply familiar with their Classical literary predecessors, but due to the influence of Christian religion, the character of Latin literature produced in late antiquity also differs significantly from the works which were written by pagan writers in the preceding centuries. This article discusses the work of a poet who has been rarely studied so far. Orientius, whom the majority of scholars now identify with the homonymous bishop of Augusta Ausciorum (modern Auch, France) in Southern Gaul, is an important representative of didactic poetry and his work constitutes an important example in the history of the genre. His didactic poem with the title “Commonitorium”, in elegiacs was probably written around 430 AD. In conclusion, the “Commonitorium” presents itself as a serious poem concerned with issues of paramount importance to humanity. The question of what exactly the “Commonitorium” endeavours to teach is indeed of major importance for understanding the work. It claims to be truly universal work, encompassing everything that exists. Within two books, Orientius reveals to his readers/students the way to reach salvation, both gives us specific, concrete information and tells us how we should live our lives, how we should relate to our fellow human beings and to God.

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana

Reviewed by: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana Daniel DiMassa George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Coedited by Kellie Dawson and David E. Spiech. Introduced by James Seaton. Cambridge: MIT, 2019. xxxvi + 239 pp. Why might anyone turn now, more than a century after its publication, to Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets (1910)? Reading Santayana's essay is a bit like reading Erich Auerbach. It attunes one to concerns that, though fixed firmly in the field of philology, quite clearly hover in the spheres of philosophy. As with Auerbach, Santayana's preoccupations with nature and history result in an essay of daunting intellectual sweep and grand pretension: he aims to sketch—using the examples of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—tectonic shifts in the history of philosophy. The essay, unfortunately, only recommends Santayana as a poor man's Auerbach. Driven by his commitment to naturalism, the history he traces is clichéd and undifferentiated. His insights are rarely original or even interesting. Whereas Auerbach could take up Dante and make a case for him as the first "poet of the secular world," Santayana—in a tired recapitulation of rationalist readings—views him as a talent despite his age, a supernaturalist who peddles a "mirage" while neglecting the evidence of nature. This, despite the fact that Santayana, in a significant anticipation of Auerbach's key arguments, regards Dante's afterlife as a "fulfillment" of an individual's life on earth (as opposed to a punishment or reward). Santayana's affections lie with Lucretius and Goethe, the two naturalists among the three poets. But here, too, certain clichés govern the lines of his inquiry: Goethe, whom he writes about with reference only to Faust, is above all the poet of "Romantic immediacy," in Santayana's view, and no poet of special philosophical or scientific competence. To get at the philosophical dynamics at play in Faust, Santayana leans on Spinoza, which is helpful, save for the degree to which it shunts from view any other portions of Goethe's philosophical diet. Santayana treats Goethe's Romanticism as a historical affair, but ironically, we find in Santayana himself the traces of a lingering Romanticism. He may have been unaware of it, but his conjunction of precisely these three poets was an unusually Romantic gesture. Around 1800, Goethe and Schelling had planned a didactic poem of nature in the style of Lucretius's De rerum natura; when Goethe relinquished the project, Schelling planned to complete the poem in the style of Dante's Commedia. At the same time, Friedrich Schlegel, in his essay on changes in Goethe's poetic style, conceived of the Olympian in Weimar as a new Dante. Santayana's history of poetic philosophers, in other words, emerges from a peculiarly Romantic history of poetry. But whereas Romantics like Schelling and Schlegel located affinities across these texts, Santayana finds, by and large, differences. He is keen to summarize them as such: "Goethe is the poet of life; Lucretius the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation." In their differences they complement and complete each other; what conjoins the three poets, according to Santayana, is their status as representatives of a historical age. Perhaps it is that status, widely intuited as such, that has led many self-professed "amateurs" to write about Dante and Goethe. Indeed, these sorts of texts may amount to a semischolarly genre unto itself, with predictably mixed results. Santayana's essay announces itself as the "impressions of an amateur," and Vittorio Hösle, citing Santayana, has defended his own "amateur" contributions to the scholarship of Dante and Goethe. But Hösle and other scholars of diverse backgrounds, e.g., Josef Pieper, have rendered meaningful contributions to the knowledge of such poets and their texts. I am not convinced Santayana has. But, to be [End Page 373] clear, if Santayana's text is imperfect, it is rhetorically magnificent in its imperfection and, as such, a useful foil for budding scholars. The section on Goethe's Faust, for example, could easily serve as a usefully problematic commentary in an undergraduate seminar on Goethe. For the professor who wishes her students to see Goethe's...

Мас̱навӣ Фарӣд ад-Дӣна ‘Ат̣т̣а̄ра как форма репрезентации суфийского учения

The Persian didactic poem (mathnawī) served among the Sufis of the classical period as a popular form of presenting their doctrine. The article outlines and analyzes the Sufi poet Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār’s four main poems belonging to the end of XII – beginning of XIII centuries: “Book of Mysteries” (Asrār-nāma), “Book of Sorrow” (Muṣ ībat-nāma), “Divine Book”(Ilāhī-nāma) and “The Language of the Birds”(Mantiq al-ṭayr). The author examines systematically the composition, the plot and the content of them, showing the principle of their construction, which is the combination the “explicit” (narrative) and “hidden” (Sufi) levels of meaning. Taking this into account the author offers an interpretation of the general Sufi theme, that is the search for and knowledge of God.

Review of] Kilian Fleischer: The Original Verses of Apollodorus' Chronica. Edition, Translation and Commentary on the First Iambic Didactic Poem in the Light of New Evidence

Review of] Kilian Fleischer: The Original Verses of Apollodorus' Chronica. Edition, Translation and Commentary on the First Iambic Didactic Poem in the Light of New Evidence

Leo Choirosphaktes, Reader of George of Pisidia. Notes on the Language and Style of the So-Called Thousand-Line Theology

The paper deals with the linguistic and stylistic reception of George of Pisidia’s poetic work by Leo Choirosphak-tes in his didactic poem Thousand-Line Theology (Chiliostichos Theologia), offering a short overview of cases that reveal the close connection between these two authors. Choirosphaktes composed his poem “by means of” Pisides, a master carefully read and studied, whose poems he reworked with a cento technique for his selected readers, in the choice and disposition of the words into the verses, in the search for technical effects, eminently acoustical and structural, but mostly without constructing a literary allusive game with Pisides’ texts.

Н. А. НЕКРАСОВ И АНГЛИЙСКИЕ ПРЕДРОМАНТИКИ (К ИСТОКАМ ПОЭТИЧЕСКОГО МОТИВА НОЧИ)

The paper investigates the literary roots of «night-motifs» in N. Nekrasov`s epic «Who is Happy in Russia?» and his «night» poems «Knight for an Hour» and «Railroad» down to English poetry of XVII–XVIII cc.: metaphysical poetry by H. Vaughan (XVII c.) and greater didactic poem by E. Young (XVIII c.). Both mythological and lyrical «night» motifs of H. Vaughan`s poetry owed to ancient folk traditions of the poet`s Motherland – Wales, with its archaic Celtic language, rituals and sacred festivals (such as Samhein). E. Young`s poem «Complaint or night thoughts on life, death and immortality» (1743–1745) is closely related to later baroque culture, stressing the night-motif in the context of the poet`s contemplation of life, death and christian immortality of human soul. H. Vaughan`s and E. Young`s «night» poetry influenced greatly the sentimentalist and preromantic trends in European poetic traditions of XVIII–XIX cc. N. Nekrasov`s main epic poem with its profound night motifs, though continuing pre-romantic European traditions of H. Vaughan and E. Young, remains greatly indigenous and rooted deeply in both folk and poetic Russian orthodox culture.

Nāṣir-i Xusrav and his Raušanāīnāmeh (“The Book of Enlightenment”)

The article is a publication of the first commented translation into Russian of a large part of the philosophical and didactic poem (masnavi) Raušanāī-nāmeh – “The Book of Enlightenment” by the great Tajik-Persian poet and philosopher Nāṣir-i Xusrav (Nasir-i Khusrav). Nāṣir-i Xusrav (b. 1004 AD Kobadian d. 1072 AD Yumgan) later in his life adopted the teachings of Isma’ilism (a branch of Shi`a Islam). After traveling to the Middle East, he returned to Khorasan as da’i or Khujjat (the official preacher of Isma‘ilism). He had to hide from persecution in the mountain village of Yumgan. There he spent the last years of his life and wrote his main poetic and philosophical works, viz. Zād al-musāfirīn, Jāmi‘ al-ḥikmatayn and (masnavi) Raušanāī-nāmeh. The latter although comprises the main ideas of the two previous treatises, however, conveys them in a popular form. Nāṣir-i Xusrav’s mostly poetical heritage has already received sufficient attention of the Russian scholars of the 20th century (E. Bertels, V. Nikitina, A. Edelman and A. E. Bertels), however the translation into Russian of his philosophic works remains a desideratum. The translation offered in this article is an attempt to redress the balance. The authors offer a “philological translation”. Contrary to the “literary” translation, this type of translation in the most accurate way conveys the meaning and style of the original in particular, the lexical components, as well as the style. Out of the total 594 beyts the authors had published 162 beyts, which comprise the translation of the al-Ḥamd and the Faṣl fi al-naṣīḥat. The next 58 beyts were translated by M. Shakarbekova. Here we propose the translation of the the following 100 beyts. Nāṣir-i Xusrav deals there with the four elements, the three kingdoms of nature and the origin of the human body from these kingdoms. According to A. E. Bertels, the set of themes of this passage reflects “the scheme of the universe”, and, in general, contains the picture of the world, which was typical for Muslim authors. As one of the oldest poetic documents in the Persian language, this text is of great interest for the study of traditional ideas, as well as their evolution, among authors of other historical epochs and directions of Islam.

La representación de la sexualidad vegetal en Las bodas de las plantas de José de Viera y Clavijo

The objective of the article is to analyse the way the sexuality of plants is presented in the poem Las bodas de las plantas by José de Viera y Clavijo (1731-1813). The author of this didactic poem written in the early 19th century refers to some aspects of Linnaeus’ taxonomic system founded on the concept of “nuptiae plantarum” (the marriages of plants). We argue that Viera’s description of the anatomy and physiology of the plant’s reproductive parts, albeit reflecting scientific knowledge of his time, possessed some unique features. In particular, depicting the deeply sexualized portrait of the second kingdom thatbemerges from the Linnaeus’ treatises, the Spanish author tries to “save” the “innocence” of the plants, following a long tradition of their representation in the Western culture. To this end, he complements the picture of plants’ sexuality and reproduction by the idea of plants’ maternity.

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Şİ R-İ ES AD EFENDİ (KÂŞİF) DE TERKİM-İ MUKTESEBAT

Poetry, means the composition of the poem in verse. This verse is a matter of verse art. The artist is the one who prevails in this matter with his vinner and the ignorant whatch. Of course; poets are categorized on this axis. Our poet, who is instrumental in the study, is of the sufism and road of the God. This opened; the poet's importance is important. The justification of this irritation is reserved for the same doors. Kâsif Es’ad Efendi, XVII. century is one of the essential personalities. It is certain that Kâsif, who was a sufi poet, was one of the school of Ummi Sinân and Niyâzi-i Misri. Didactic (instructive) poems in addition to the poetry of poet's poetry, poetry was read through his poetry. As a result, supply was made through dissection and representation. Thus; divan poetry was reminded of what the meaning of literary poetry in the perspective of a poet and what proportion it could take in the century in which the his poets lived.

ГРАНИЦЫ ПЕРЕВОДА В СБОРНИКЕ М. СТЕПАНОВОЙ «ЗА СТИВИ СМИТ»

Problem statement. The book For Stevie Smith by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova is a free translation of the verses by a famous British poetess. Stepanova, relying on Grigory Dashevsky’s theory and practice, explains in detail the specifics of her work. However, due to specific features in Dashevsky and Stepanova’s commenting method, the status of this type of imitations in the literary process remains not fully clarified. Materials and methods. For the study, verses of the “gnomic” type were chosen. They express a single thought and allow one to see better mechanisms for constructing utterances that are different from those introduced by the rich imagery of plot poems. The main method was the reconstruction of the sources of Grigory Dashevsky’s views on translation and imitation, going back to classical philology. The works were also taken into account of Stepanova’s poetry experts and researchers, who posed close questions about the boundaries of art in creating new philosophical meanings similar to the philosopher and phenomenologist Anna Yampolskaya. Results. The study proved that the position of Maria Stepanova reproduces the position founded by Grigory Dashevsky in interpreting the legacy of Aratus: the return from the ideals of semiotics of the Middle Stoa to the simplicity of the Early Stoa. Stepanova, unlike Dashevsky, not only sacrifices accuracy (in the terminology of Dashevsky, “translation minus”), but also adds something. Thus, it enhances the ethical pathos of Smith’s poems, without any distortion of the plot of the poem, but due to a change in the coordinates in which didactic poem is read. Conclusion. The For Stevie Smith book should be recognized as a special achievement of Russian poetry, not limited to the concepts of poetic translation and poetic imitation. This is an important experiment on updating of ancient and Christian ethics by exclusively lyrical means. In this experiment, a new type of translator refuses not from specific features of the form, but from the inertia of the romantic type of an utterance.

Cats’ Self-stryt een Arminiaanse tekst?

Abstract In 1620 Jacob Cats published his didactic poem Self-stryt, about the biblical story of Joseph in Potiphar’s house (Genesis 39) the title of which he might have borrowed from the English translation by his friend Josuah Sylvester, of George Goodwin’s Automachia (1607). Self-stryt can be read as an Arminian text, as the protagonist Joseph fights off the advances of Potiphar’s wife, with God’s help surely but in the first place by his own good will. In 1620 this would be a dangerous view. The persecution of the Remonstrants was still in full flow. Maybe at instigation of the clergy of Middelburg, good friends of the poet, he therefore added an emblematic poem Sinne-beelt, plus commentary in which he defended the Counter-remonstrant theology, with a heavy accent on God’s grace through Jesus Christ. The real Self-stryt is now only to be found in born-again Christians and not in all well-meaning people. The combination of Self-stryt and Sinne-beelt makes the book acceptable for orthodox readers. My argument is that Cats himself did not want to be involved in the dogmatic quarrels of the period. When commenting on the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619), at the time but also later on, he always avoids taking sides. His own position might be characterized as semipela-gianist or synergist: man must be willing to accept God’s grace.

La tradición clásica en La Música de Tomás de Iriarte

The didactic poem The Music of the canarian fabulist Tomás de Iriarte (1750-1791) contains numerous references to the classical languages and their culture.They are an excellent example of the rich humanistic culture and knowledge of ancient and modern languages that Iriarte treasured. In this paper we analyze his treatment of characters and topics from the history literature and mythology of Greece and Rome, and the way in which he pours his extensive knowledge of the classical languages into a work, now forgotten, but which gained him international recognition as a great musical theorist and constitutes a worthy sample of the eighteenth-century didactic literature

Revolution and Modernity in Nazim Hikmet’s “The Epic of Sheikh Bedridden”

This paper aims to prove that the poem “The Epic of Sheikh Bedridden” by the first Turkish modernist poet Nazim Hikmet expresses a political unconscious of modernity by incarnating and adopting modernist, rebellious and revolutionary ideas in his poem in both form and content in order to subjugate repression and oppression. Throughout his didactic poem he urges his people for a better Turkey whose freedom of thought and expression and liberty are essential ideals. Hikmet’s proposal for a more tolerant and open Turkey becomes undeniable truth after a long history of contestation through the power of the words