The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils
The Odes of Casimire gathers G. Hils's 1646 English renderings of the neo-Latin verse of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), the Polish Jesuit hailed across Europe as "the divine Casimire" and a Christian rival to Horace. Reproduced here from the 1646 edition with an introduction by Maren-Sofie Røstvig, it is the earliest and most influential English collection drawn from his work. The poems range across Horatian odes, philosophic lyrics, and Biblical paraphrases—especially of the Song of Songs—fusing classical form with devotional feeling, and pastoral landscapes with moral reflection.
Sarbiewski's lasting importance lies in the philosophic lyric, where he learned to invest natural scenes with spiritual meaning long before Denham and Marvell, and to blend Stoic, Platonic, and Hermetic ideas with Scripture. His retirement themes, garden imagery, and praise of the golden mean shaped English poets from Vaughan and Cowley to Isaac Watts. This volume matters as the wellspring of that influence, a meeting place where Horace, Virgil, and Solomon converse and where European devotional poetry passes into the English imagination.
How it begins
This text uses utf-8 (unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. The Greek word παραφραστικῶς ( paraphrastikôs ) occurs three times in poem headers. There is no other Greek in the text. Spelling and punctuation are unchanged unless otherwise noted. The Latin -que was variously written out in full or abbreviated; the abbreviated forms are shown as -q ue . The original text used long “s” (ſ) consistently. In this e-text it is used only for titles and headers. Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups . Longer notes are at the end of the e-text. Editor’s Introduction The Odes of Casimire Augustan Reprints Transcriber’s Notes In addition to the ordinary page numbers, the printed text labeled the recto (odd) pages of the first five leaves of each 24-page quire. These will appear after the page numbers as A, A2, A3... Page numbers added by the transcriber are shown in [brackets]. The Augustan Reprint Society MATHIAS CASIMIRE SARBIEWSKI The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G.
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