proem

David Ferry more than succeeds in capturing the stateliness, as his rendering of the Proem, the epic’s introductory lines, into English blank verse shows:

Take the last line of the Proem, with its climactic vision of what Ferry renders as “The lofty walls of Rome.”

The proem, as the first few lines of an epic are known, establishes the backstory: our polytropos hero has been delayed on his return “after sacking the holy citadel of Troy”; having “wandered widely,” he has been detained by the amorous nymph Calypso, who wants to marry him despite his determination to get back to his wife, Penelope; all the men he took with him to fight in the Trojan War have perished, some through foolish misadventures on the journey home.

After a moment or two, I said, “Well, some died in the war, and, if you read the proem carefully, you’ll recall that others died ‘through their own recklessness.’

In the Proem to the first general collection of his poems, he wrote: Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, No rounded art the lack supplies; Unskilled the subtle line to trace, Or softer shades of Nature's face, I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.