Links for After the Satires

 

I)

 

[link to header: “Who but the…/…root of the disorder”]

Author’s note:

Motto. Juvenal, Third Satire, Line 235-36

“…magnis opibus dormitur in urbe.

inde caput morbi…”

 

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[link to header: “Third Satire”]

The frustrated city dweller, Umbricius, is bound for Campanian Cumae where Daedalus, refugee from Minoan Cnossus and its attendant terrors of labyrinth and minotaur, once found comparable sanctuary (1-20). Umbricius muses on his urban past and country life in prospect (21-29). The poem begins in earnest with the unhappy lot of honest men in Rome (30-57), the manner in which foreigners (Juvenal’s xenophobia is deep-seated) displace freeborn Romans (58-125), and the helplessness of the poor in the city’s confines (126-189). The discomforts and perils of city life are concerns for the poor especially, for they live in dread of collapsing tenements and constant fire-alarms (190-231), avaricious arsonists, metropolitan rush-hours and wheeled transports (232-267), hit-and-run accidents, violence in the streets, thieves, and murderers (268-314).

            Umbricius seeks the vita umbratilis of the intellectual in the favourite vacation zone of wealthy Romans and the intelligentsia for centuries. The keynote of the satire is escape, a return to past blessings and quietude, a recovery of the pastoral dream in Vergil’s favourite inspirational terrain around Naples and coastal Campania.

            The poem’s structure is designed about antitheses, around a series of confrontations, of past and present, ghetto and asylum, impoverished Roman citizen and wealthy Levantine freedman, noble humanity and degraded city-dweller.

 

(Excerpted from: McKay, Alexander and D.M. Shepherd. Roman Satire. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976: 192.)

 

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[link to line 82: “A bullet…/…blood-heavy altar”]

Author’s note:

After the end of World War II and the universal arming of entire populations, a new age of civil crimes dawned: The Age of the Revolver, as Alfred Hitchcock once called it.

 

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[link to line 83: “In the blink…hysterical dream”]

Author’s note:

“Unfortunately, the shape of a city changes faster than the mortal heart.” Charles Baudelaire

 

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[link to line 86: “Pigeons, nodding pedantically”]

Author’s note:

Once, at the sight of pigeons on a park path, the indignant thought rose in him: “He is letting them nod off the whole time.”

 

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[link to line 207: “And the victor…was named Christ”]

Author’s note:

“The Galileans filled in everything with graves, said Julian, who never called Jesus anything other than the dead one.” E. M. Cioran

 

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III)

 

[link to line 73: “In the loam…something pale”]

Author’s note:

During the construction on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, half a century after the end of the war, the skull of a young Wehrmacht soldier turned up. The work in this section was halted for a time, until the remains of the unknown soldier were recovered.

 

* * * * *

 

[link to line 131: “glassy from watching TV”]

Author’s note:

Television: the dead grandmother, as it is called in the vernacular.

 

* * * * *

 

 

IV)

 

[link to French header]

Author’s note:

Motto. Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone, in Alcools.

“At the end of it all, you are tired of this ancient world.”