Podcast transcript
This is a very well-known story – the tale of Daedalus and Icarus. I’m sure you were familiar with it even before I read this version, and it would have been equally familiar to the earliest readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written around the time of Jesus. The first recorded references to Daedalus, the master craftsman, engineer, and artificer of the ancient Greek world, go back to about 1400 BC, so by the time Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses, the story of Daedalus was already very old.
Ovid – full name, Publius Ovidius Naso – was a Roman poet born into a wealthy family at a time when the Roman authorities were particularly keen on poetry. Augustus was the first Roman emperor, and his regime used poetry as a tool for political propaganda and cultural consolidation. It saw poetry as a way of legitimising Augustus’ rule and celebrating Roman values, emphasising the stability of his reign after years of civil wars. That’s why the poets of this era are known as Augustan poets.
So this was a time of great opportunity for poets, but, as Ovid learned the hard way, it was a fine line to walk. While having the authorities’ attention was great if you were saying what they wanted to hear, crossing the line could land you in big trouble.
Which is exactly what happened to Ovid: at the height of his fame he was exiled to what Romans considered the barbarian wastes of Moesia, a province on the Black Sea. The exact reason for his exile remains a mystery to this day. According to Ovid himself, in one of his poems, it was due to ‘a poem and a mistake’. There’s been much speculation about what the mistake was, but the poem in question was almost certainly the racy and explicit Ars Amatoria, (The Art of Love).
And we get a sense of a poet walking a fine line all the way through the Metamorphoses. On the one hand, it’s a poem written in the grand epic style – Ovid was clearly aiming to compete with Virgil, who had already produced his great Augustan epic, The Aeneid. So this is a high-flown compendium of famous and supposedly edifying myths from ancient Greece.
But on the other hand it’s a, highly entertaining collection of tales that are not only dramatic and exciting, but also, dark, violent and disturbing. As well as lots battles, betrayals and deceptions, there is an extensive catalogue of sexual crimes and transgressions.
Now fast forward 1,500 years, and we find this poem being translated by Arthur Golding, an English gentleman born in the 1530s. Golding was a keen translator, like many of his contemporaries. Sixteenth-century England was a time of great enthusiasm for rediscovering Greek and Roman literature, just as the artists of Renaissance had been rediscovering the sculpture and visual art of the ancient world. So this translation is very much part of that broader cultural trend.
At the time, knowledge of Latin and Greek literature was considered something an educated person really ought to have. Which is how a book like the Metamorphoses, despite its X-rated content, ended up as a standard set text in grammar schools across England. Any child lucky enough to receive that kind of education would have learned Latin, and very likely encountered Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
One such student was a William Shakespeare, at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. He would have had enough Latin to read the original, but it’s also clear he knew Golding’s version extremely well, and it was one of his favourite books, providing source material for his poems and plays. So when I read this translation, it feels like I’m reading over Shakespeare’s shoulder.
And it wasn’t just Shakespeare. The Metamorphoses is one of the most influential books in European culture. If you walk into any gallery of paintings from the 16th to the 19th century, it’s like stepping into a lavishly illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses, scenes from the poem are all over the walls.
And the poem continues to be a source of inspiration for poets. In 1998 Ted Hughes published his versions of the Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid – it’s one of his best books, definitely worth checking out. Around the same time, there was also an anthology called After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, featuring versions of Ovid’s stories by some of the best-known poets of the nineties.
So what kind of poem is the Metamorphoses? It’s a huge anthology of stories, organised around the theme of metamorphosis – an ancient Greek word meaning ‘transformation’. That’s Ovid’s great insight. He looked at all these ancient Greek myths and realised the common thread running through them was change – people, gods and other beings transformed from one shape into another.
And that becomes the organising principle of the poem. It’s a sequence of tales of transformation – ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange’, in the very first line of Golding’s translation. That’s the central theme of the poem. It’s also the big theme of life, is it not? You and I are not the same as we were a few years ago, and we’ll be very different a few years from now. The world will be different too. So yes, it’s a cliché – and it was a cliché even in Ovid’s time – but one that still rings true: change is the only constant.
Zooming in on today’s story, Daedalus and Icarus, I deliberately chose one you’d already know, so that we can share the same experience as its first readers: that moment of recognition – ‘Ah, I know this one’ – followed by curiosity to see what Ovid does with it.
And what strikes me is that in the modern imagination, when we think of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, we tend to focus on Icarus as the symbol of hubris – a Greek word meaning pride and presumption, ambition that oversteps the mark, when he flies too high and gets too close to the sun. And then of course the wax melts, the wings disintegrate, and Icarus plummets into the sea.
But in this version it’s Daedalus who is the focus of the cautionary tale. It’s his ambition, as a craftsman, as an artist, as an engineer, that is under scrutiny. He’s the one who creates the plan, designs the wings, devises the escape – and it’s his hubris, his daring to meddle with nature, that ultimately leads to tragedy.
An apparently this was an innovation in Ovid’s version of the story – earlier Greek versions focused on Icarus’ disobedience in ignoring his father’s advice. But in Ovid, Icarus is a passive, almost peripheral figure. He doesn’t speak. We’re told that he cries out to his father as he falls, but we don’t hear his voice. He’s introduced a little earlier in the narrative – just before the passage I read – and described simply as ‘Icarus, his son, a pretty lad’. Later on, he’s referred to as ‘his little son’. And when we see Icarus fly, it’s only as a follower, Golding uses the words ‘follower’ and then ‘follow’ to describe him, within four lines of each other, so it’s clear what his role is.
In the earlier part of the story, before the passage I’ve just read, both Daedalus and Icarus are prisoners of King Minos on Crete. Daedalus has been engaged by Minos to built the labyrinth to house the Minotaur. And once the job is finished Minos, doesn’t want to let such a valuable asset walk free. But Daedalus looks up at the sky and thinks, ‘Well, Minos may control the sea and the land, but he can’t rule the air.’
And then we get this wonderful passage describing Daedalus’ construction of the wings out of feathers and wax:
to uncoth Arts he bent the force of all his wits
To alter natures course by craft. And orderly he knits
A rowe of fethers one by one, beginning with the short,
And overmatching still eche quill with one of longer sort,
That on the shoring of a hill a man would thinke them grow.
His skill is described as an’ uncouth art’ used ‘to alter nature’s course by craft’. And the implication is that this is not a good thing. It’s unnatural in the pejorative sense – he’s interfering with the order of nature, bending it to his will. He’s crossing a line. And in doing this he is just one of many characters in the Metamorphoses who try to imitate the gods or to compete with their abilities, like Ariadne, who dared to claim she was a better spinner than the goddess Minerva, or King Pentheus who mocks the worship of Bacchus and refuses to recognise him as a god. It’s a recurring theme of the poem – mortals who are foolish and daring enough to challenge the gods, and then come unstuck.
And because this is such a familiar tale, we all know Icarus is going to die when the wax holding his wings together melts in the sun. And that allows Ovid to foreshadow the tragedy, to point the finger first at Daedalus, whose ‘uncouth art’ was altering nature. And then, just before the passage I’ve read for you, theres is a really unsettling description of Icarus playing with the very wings that, as we know, are going to bring about his death:
There stoode me by him Icarus, his sonne, a pretie Lad.
Who knowing not that he in handes his owne destruction had,
With smiling mouth did one while blow the fethers to and fro
Which in the Aire on wings of Birds did flask not long ago:
And with his thumbes another while he chafes the yelow Wax
So here’s Icarus playing in his father’s workshop, while his dad hammers and glues and whistles. Icarus is just playing with the wings. He doesn’t know he’s holding his own destruction in his hands. He’s blowing the feathers to and fro with that smiling mouth, and with his thumbs, he’s rubbing the wax. And, of course, we know that it’s the wax that’s going to kill him.
The sense of foreboding gets stronger when Daedalus gives Icarus the lecture before they set off:
I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe.
For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe
Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie,
The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie.
I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie.
Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby,
Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie
To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right.
And this is every parent ever, isn’t it? Giving their child instructions before they set off on a journey: ‘Don’t talk to strangers. Always keep your ticket handy. Do what the teacher says.’ That sort of thing. It’s Polonius in Hamlet, talking to Ophelia and warning her about the dangers of men and the big bad world. And again, it’s poignant because we know that this is exactly the fate that is awaiting Icarus. It’s foreseen, foreknown, foreshadowed – and yet utterly inescapable.
Then we get the Daedalus’s final farewell to his son before they take flight:
He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings.
And as he was in doing it and warning him of things,
His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave
His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have.
And after that, Ovid expands on the moment with this slightly ridiculous but also oddly moving image of the mother bird flapping her wings, trying to teach her fledglings how to fly:
And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way
Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day
That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie
Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie.
So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him
A hurtfull Art.
Note that phrase: ‘a hurtful Art’. The art that is going to hurt, that’s going to kill his son.
And then they’re off! They’re up in the sky. It’s like the moment in the famous animation of The Snowman, when they take a few steps forward and suddenly they’re walking in the air. And we get this great description of their flight through the eyes of people on the ground: a fisherman, a shepherd and a ploughman:
The fishermen
Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then
On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough,
Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through
The Aire could flie were Gods.
This is terrific isn’t it? Like a movie shot where the camera pans across a crowd of onlookers, looking up in wonder at Superman flying overhead. And they think that those flying through the sky must be gods. And this is another way of highlighting the ambition – the presumption – of Daedalus, daring to compete with the gods.
Let’s take another look at that ploughman on the ground – because you may well have seen him before, even if you’ve never read Ovid’s poem. If you’re an art enthusiast, you probably thought of Bruegel’s famous painting of Icarus – depicting the boy plunging into the sea while a large and ploughman in 16th century dress drives a horse-drawn plough in the foreground.
And if you’re a poetry enthusiast, then you may remember that same ploughman in W. H. Auden’s famous poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Auden writes about how, in Bruegel’s ‘Icarus’, ‘the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure’.
So what we have here is an intriguing artistic lineage: Ovid’s poem provides the best known version of this well-known story. Bruegel paints the scene, probably in the late 1550s. About ten years later, the story is translated into English by Arthur Golding, but Golding has almost certainly not seen the painting. Then in the 1930s Auden writes his poem about the painting, where the ploughman appears again.
So the ploughman is emblematic of the conversation between artists and poets that is being carried on over thousands of years. When people talk about ‘artistic tradition’, it can sound dry and academic. But to me it’s more accurate and more fun to think of it as a conversation or maybe a ball game – Ovid booting the ball upfield to Bruegel, Bruegel tossing it to Auden, and Golding racing up on the other side of the pitch. And if you’re a poet or an artist yourself, then maybe you too can join in the game…
OK, so Daedalus and Icarus fly past a series of islands and it’s all going swimmingly, until the boy, ‘with honeyed thoughts’, catches a ‘frolic courage’, a playful urge, and suddenly breaks away. He can’t resist flying higher and higher, and he forsakes his guide. ‘Of fond desire to fly to heaven, above his bounds, he stide.’ – and that’s it, that’s his downfall. The nearness of the sun melts the wax. And as soon as the wax is softened, ‘his naked arms he shakes’ – he’s flailing, with nothing to keep him aloft, like a cartoon character who’s run off a cliff and suddenly realises there’s nothing beneath him. He calls out for his father, but he’s too far gone – ‘he drowned in the wave’.
Then the perspective shifts to Daedalus:
His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare:
‘O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where
That I may finde thee, Icarus.’ He saw the fethers swim
Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him.
That line – ‘His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear’ – is devastating. The main clause is ‘His wretched father… cried in fear’, but inserted into it is that haunting parenthetical phrase: ‘but as then no father’; from that moment, he was no longer a father. He had been a father, but now the child is gone. I can’t speak to the Latin original, but in Golding’s English, the syntax does so much emotional work. Sometimes, grammar can bring a tear to your eye.
Another notable aspect of Golding’s translation is his use of rhyming couplets, which are a great tool for maintaining momentum and knitting the poem together. And Golding takes his place in a long line of poets who have used rhyming couplets for narrative poetry, from Chaucer before him and to later poets such as Andrew Marvell and John Dryden, and eventually to the great master of the English couplet, Alexander Pope.
And some of these couplets provide moments of wit or even poignancy – like the couplet describing Daedalus’ reaction to Icarus’ death:
He saw the fethers swim
Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him.
The feathers swim – but Icarus, does not. That contrast is brutal. The very invention Daedalus has been so proud of is what kills his son. The wings survive, the feathers float, but the boy is gone. So I think Golding’s use of rhyme here is superb.
There’s also something very interesting going on in the metre of Golding’s translation. You may have noticed when I read the poem aloud, and you’ll certainly notice it if you look at the text on the website, that the lines are very long. For example, let’s go back to the beginning of the passaged I read:
As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by
That’s one line. And then:
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie
That’s another line.
Now, if you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ve heard a lot of poetry written in iambic pentameter – ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM – five beats to the line, typically ten syllables. But Golding’s lines are much longer than that, they are in iambic heptameter, meaning they have seven iambic feet: ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM.
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie
This line is normally called a ‘fourteener’, because it typically has 14 syllables. The extra syllables give the line a roomier feel, like ordering a grande coffee, or flying business class and enjoying the extra legroom.
Why did Golding choose the fourteener meter instead of iambic pentameter? One reason is that he didn’t feel a pressure to use the pentameter the way later poets would. By the end of the 16th century, iambic pentameter would become a popular metre in England, and a dominant one in the 17th century. But in Golding’s time, English poetry was still finding its way. Poets were experimenting with different metres and verse forms. For example, this was the time when the sonnet form, which was an Italian import, became popular among English poets, beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Blank verse first appeared in English in Howard’s translation of Virgil; he wrote this about 1540, but it wasn’t published until the 1550s, and it was only in the 1560s that blank verse was used for plays on the London stage. Which meant it would have been a new and experimental form when Golding translated Ovid in the 1560s.
So this was a time when poets were trying out different metres and seeing what English poetry could do. And Golding wouldn’t have felt the same pressure to conform to iambic pentameter as he might have done a hundred years later.
Another reason Golding uses fourteeners is that the metre used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, dactylic hexameter, is also a pretty capacious line. In Latin, the metre was based on long and short syllables rather than stressed and unstressed syllables in English, so they don’t map across exactly. And translators sometimes struggle to compress the amount of information in the six feet of a typical Latin hexameter into the five feet of an English pentameter. By using fourteeners, Golding gets a little more room to play with the language and stay true to the expansive feel of the Latin original.
I think there’s also an element of personal taste in his choice. Golding’s style in his Metamorphoses is lush, expansive, and sensuous, it’s as though his Muse likes a little extra room to breathe, and the fourteener gives that room.
Yet another influence on Golding’s meter comes from English ballad metre, which we heard back in Episode 22 with the traditional ballad ‘The Unquiet Grave’. Now, at first this might seem counterintuitive, because ballads and fourteeners look very different on the page. But listen to the opening lines of today’s passage:
As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie
Can you hear it? The seven beats of the fourteener are starting to fall into groups of four beats, then three beats – four beats, then three beats. So these are two lines of heptameter, but they could easily be read as four lines of a ballad stanza, which alternates lines with four beats, then three. Like this stanza from ‘The Unquiet Grave’:
‘Cold blows the wind to my true love,
And gently drops the rain,
I never had but one sweetheart,
And in greenwood she lies slain.
This is a natural quirk of English poetry: once you go beyond five feet, the line has a tendency to break into two smaller parts. You may remember Episode 58, where we looked at a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, which was written in iambic hexameters, and the six feet in each line sounded like they were breaking into two shorter lines of three beats each.
So, in many of Golding’s fourteeners, we can hear that four-beat and three-beat pattern:
As soon as that the worke was done, *comma* the workman by and by
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, *pause* and in the Aire on hie
This pause within a line is known as a caesura, and many lines in Golding’s Metamorphoses follow the same pattern, with the caesura after the fourth beat. Which means he’s tapping into the English ballad tradition, which would have been very familiar to English readers and listeners at the time, as a metre associated with storytelling.
Golding does make an effort to vary the pattern. For example, sometimes the pause occurs earlier in the line, like in this one:
Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie.
And in that line we looked at earlier, we can hear two pauses, before and after that heartbreaking phrase ‘but as then no father’:
His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear
So it looks like Golding was aware of the dangers of slipping too comfortably into the four-three pattern. And I think we can see why other poets have found the fourteener a bit tricky to handle. It’s like driving a car where the steering feels a little off or the gearbox is a bit sticky – you have to keep compensating for it if you want to have a smooth ride.
But Golding was certainly not the last person to use the fourteener. A great example is George Chapman’s translations of Homer later in the 16th century, which we’ll probably explore in a future episode. The fourteener has even survived into niche corners of modern culture, such as in the video game Dragon Quest XI, where Queen Marina, one of the characters, speaks exclusively in fourteeners. So it’s a meter that still pops up in surprising places!
So let’s take one more listen to Ovid’s version of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and appreciate the gorgeousness, the energy, and the emotional resonance that Golding brings to his translation.
