Soracte white with deep snow

Mountains in the Classical Tradition was a research project based at St. Andrews University from 2017 to 2023. It incorporated a blog which considered, among other cultural topics, 'William Golding at Thermopylae' and 'Edward Dodwell on Mt. Hymettos' (the subject of a post here back in 2013). In 'Augustus Hare on Mt. Soracte' Jason Konig discusses the travel writer and watercolourist who published two books about his walks near Rome. These volumes not only described Hare's own impressions of Mount Soracte (now called Monte Soratte) but also referred to twelve other nineteenth century writers who wrote about it. These included Byron, whose Childe Harold lists this rather modest peak alongside the most famous mountains of classical Greece. Soracte's unlikely fame was entirely down to just a few words of Latin verse: the first stanza of Horace's Ode 1.9, in which it stands covered in snow. 

As Jason Konig points out, 

It seems extraordinary that such a brief glimpse could have haunted the imagination of centuries of later readers. It was the opening line of this poem that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s German captive, General Kreipe, quoted to him in looking at the sunrise on Mt Ida in Crete in 1944; Leigh Fermor claims to have quoted the rest of the poem to him from memory in response, an incident which united the two men temporarily in their shared mastery of the classical heritage.

After describing the winter landscape Horace turns to his young companion, Thaliarchus, and urges him not to waste his youth - a similar theme to the famous carpe diem lines in Ode 1.11. There are numerous translations of the full poem online - at the Pantheon Poets site, for example, where you can hear it in Latin. I'll just quote here the start and end of a modern version by David Ferry. 

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.
See how the laboring overladen trees
Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.
Bring in the wood and light the fire and open
The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars.

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,
Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods. [...] 

[...] While you’re still young,
And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,
There are young people out in the city squares together
As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

The American literary scholar H. T. Kirby-Smith, a witty historian of poetry, discusses the Soracte Ode in his book The Celestial Twins.   

Critical commentary on this poem usually neglects the metrics and settles on the issue of whether it consistently develops its subject. One reads indignant objections to the idea of sending some young man out into the streets in the dead of winter in hopes of picking up a girl, or suggestions that Horace simply meandered away from his original intention of evoking a winter landscape and contrasting it with the consolations of a roaring fire and a drink. Others, more sensibly, suggest that as Horace turns from himself to his young friend he imagines a more hospitable season — of life as well as the year — when the perils of senescent hypothermia are less threatening. 

It is easy to find online images of snow on Mt. Ida (height 2,456 m) but I failed to locate any of Mt. Soracte (height 691 m). I guess we live in warmer times, but perhaps it was a rare event even in Horace's day. Kirby-Smith thinks the poem's familiar landscape transformed by snow sets the poem going with 'Alpine excitement and novelty.' Neither August Hare nor his literary sources mention seeing the kind of scene described by Horace - they describe Soracte as a distant blue peak. This is how it appears in Edward Lear's panoramic vision (below). Corot painted it several times and you can see pale areas of rock on its slopes, but no sign of snow anywhere. Perhaps Horace was only ever using it as a metaphor - in Kirby-Smith's phrase, 'age as the season of snow.'

Edward Lear, Monte Soratte near Rome, 1880s(?)

The Bandusian spring

O fons Bandusiae, splendidior uitro,
dulci digne mero non sine floribus,
cras donaberis haedo,
cui frons turgida cornibus...

- Horace, Ode 3.13

Landscape poetry often evokes the sounds of nature and it would be interesting to take a subject like rivers and survey the ways words have been used to convey the different forms a river can take, from spring to sea. Modern writers like Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting have considered sound and musicality central to poetry, even to the extent that an audience can take pleasure from verse in another language when they do not understand the meaning of the words. Bunting once said ‘... all my life, since I was a youngster, I wanted to do the ‘O fons bandusaie’ and I can’t even get the first line. Like nearly all the great poets, Horace depended on sound and the ‘O fons Bandusiae creates throughout, but especially in the first lines, the actual sound of the running water of a stream. You might be able to create a spring in English, perhaps if you were skilful and able, but it wouldn’t bear any resemblance, however unique, to Horace’s sounds’ (quoted in Victoria Forde’s Basil Bunting).

The full text of Horace’s poem can be seen here along with various translations (including one by William Ewart Gladstone!) There are also a couple of paragraphs from Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria - he spends a chapter looking for the Bandusian spring. Gilbert Highet, whose visit to the springs of Clitumnus, I’ve mentioned here before, also went looking for the site of the poem. ‘We came to a slope, from which rushes a stream of clear water, absolutely clear and transparent, and – even in July, under the burning Dog-star – deliciously cold... This little place, because of Horace’s eloquence, became one of the ideal spots in the imagination of thousands of readers. It is not wildly romantic: not a savage place, holy and enchanted, beset by demoniac presences; nor even hallowed by the memory of a thirsty hero or a benign nymph or a saintly hermit. It is merely a spring, quiet and beautiful.’