Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

POETRY
while adopting the latter. The whole universe of mythological allusion, which
had supplied so much of the imagery of classical poetry, is excluded from his
verse, its place being taken by biblical or hagiographic matter. Conventions
like the invocation of the Muse are firmly rejected — negant Camerds nee patent
Apollini | dicata Christo pectora ' Hearts dedicated to Christ reject the Muses and
are closed to Apollo' (10.22—3) ~ an< ^ replaced by invocation of Christ (6.iff.,
21.672). His marriage poem banishes Juno, Cupid and Venus, condemns
dancing, merriment and finery, holds up the example of Eve, Sarah, Rebecca
and the Virgin Mary, and ends with a prayer that the marriage be not consummated
or that if it is the children may adopt the religious life. Yet his
verse follows classical models closely in metre and diction and is filled with
echoes of classical poetry, which stand side by side with elements of specifically
Christian language. Thus God is called both tonans and creator; caro is used of
the incarnation; Tartara vies with Gehenna; technical terms like euangelium,
apostolus, mysterium, sacramentum, martyr occur cheek by jowl with Virgilian
flosculi like nee inania murmura miscet (io.m~^cn. 4.201), inlnsas auro
uestes (25.43 ~ Geo. 2.464) or odoratum nemus (31.587, of Heaven ~ Aen. 6.685,
of Elysium). Moreover Paulinus sets out clearly his poetic principle of taking
over old forms with a new content in Epist. 16 and poem 22. His exchange of
letters in prose and verse with his old teacher and friend Ausonius, who was
shocked by his abandonment of his life-style and career, is a revealing and
sometimes moving example of total lack of comprehension between two men
apparently inhabiting the same intellectual world. (Aus. Epist. 19—25; Paulin.
Poems 10, 11; the dossier is not complete.) Ausonius uses all the traditional
arguments of the schools to re-establish contact while Paulinus replies in an
anguished poem expressing the unbridgeable gap between them.
Though he displays the taste of his age for the declamation and the descriptive
set-piece, Paulinus lacks the brilliance of Claudian and the neatness of
Prudentius. His poems are inordinately long, and punctuated by digressions
and personal reflections. He conveys the impression of one who does not know
when to stop. The structural principle of his sentences is not antithesis and
balance, but subordination. He composes in enormous clumsy sentences
full of qualifications expressed in subordinate clauses of first, second and third
degree, sentences which sometimes get out of control, which are never easy for
the reader, and which must have been peculiarly difficult for those to whom
they were recited aloud. His is no longer the confident, declamatory voice of
the traditional poetic persona, but the slow, hesitant, private tone of one who
thinks aloud, and who thinks about matters of supreme importance to himself.
The poet and the man are no longer distinct. His attempt to preserve the
classical forms while throwing overboard the whole of classical content had
only limited success. His long-windedness, his didacticism, and his inability
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