INTRODUCTION.

Poseidon is implored to tend the growth of Agesias even as he had watched over Iamus. Yet Bergk is led by the indications of some manuscripts to adopt in his text:

We shall meet many instances of this kind in the Nemean Odes. But what one may lose through mere inattentiveness of the ear to words and their intentions, most readers have perhaps at some time or other experienced in the case of really careful poetry written in their own language. In this stanza for example of Tennyson’s In Memoriam—

And up thy vault with roaring sound
Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
And hide thy shame beneath the ground,

—the felicity of the word disastrous in the context might easily pass unnoticed.

And words have the habit of investing themselves, through associations, with a certain atmosphere, sometimes palpable, sometimes very subtle—these associations being often the secret of the whole aesthetic effect, and withal of so volatile a nature as to elude inquiry. In the poetry of an ancient, in the poetry even of a foreign language, much is missed by the impossibility of feeling instinctively such associations; but in some words at least, used by Pindar, we may detect special significances. Phengos (light), for example, seems to have been charged with a mystic import, designating most probably, in the mysteries, a divine Light; it was an abroton epos, a ‘mystic word’². And thus Pindar’s phrase of the Graces, katharon phengos Chariton, will suggest (as phaos could not) a wonderful light—as it were, ‘the light of ineffable faces’. But the delicate potencies in words tend to vanish when you try to define them, for in definition there is mostly a certain violence or rudeness. Of modern poets, Rossetti was a master in handling the subtle suggestiveness of words. In one of his sonnets in the House of Life, for instance, these lines close the octave:

Such fire as Love’s soul-winnowing hands distil
Even from his inmost ark of light and dew.

To this curiously happy effect it is clear that the choice of the word ark and its accompaniment by ‘light and dew’ most largely contribute; and yet if we let the mind force into full consciousness the associations

¹ Another objection to this reading is that in an Olympian Ode, Poseidon could not be the receiver of the poet’s offering.
² See below, note on Nemean IX. 42 (p. 180).