Goodbye Latin

I always hated Latin when I was a small child at school. I had a second-hand copy of Kennedy’s Latin Primer (I think that’s what it was called) where someone had changed “LATIN” into “EATING” on the front cover and written on the fly page:

Latin is a language

as dead as dead could be

it killed the ancient Romans

and now it’s killing me

I thought that was about right.  Not only did I have to translate in and out of the bloody stuff, but I also had to do the scansion on Latin verse, including the names of all the feet. Viz in particular:

• dactyl: ⁻ ᵕ ᵕ (example: nausea)
• spondee: ⁻ ⁻ (example: Oh Lord!)
• iamb: ᵕ ⁻ (example: despair)
• trochee: ⁻ ᵕ (example: boredom)
• choriamb: ⁻ ᵕ ᵕ ⁻    (example: When will this end?)

When I took my scholarship examinations aged 12, I scored 14% in Latin I and 7% in Latin II.  Unsurprisingly, Eastbourne College did not give me a scholarship, but instead pushed me up a year on my arrival, and conferred on me an exception whereby I would never have to study Latin again.  Together with one or two others, I went through my public school career amid people a year older than me. That was a mixed blessing. When I left school, happily with a bunch of A grades, which were rare in those days, Cambridge was unavailable, because I was too young. I think perhaps Oxford might have taken me at my tender age, but for the fact that I had no Latin O-level. That seemed to me at the time, and seems to me now, utterly daft.

And so I went to Kent in Canterbury with a view of reading theoretic physics. After a year, however, I was allowed to transfer, with the generosity of the lovely Professor Molly Mahood, to the faculty of humanities where I obtained my degree in English and American literature. And where I discovered, to my utter joy, that the best English poetry has nothing to do with Latin verse, being based on an entirely different system. Since then, I have loved English 4-stress alliterative verse, and it has always seemed to me that the best English poets were essentially grounded, not in the classics and their scansion, but in earlier Anglo-Saxon and Viking linguistic influences.

That great tradition, it seems to me, runs through the whole of the history of English verse, from Alisoun:

Bitweene Merch and Averil,
When spray biginneth to springe,
The litel fowl hath hire wil
On hire leod to singe.
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thinge.
Heo may me blisse bringe:
Ich am in hire baundoun.
An hendy hap ich habbe yhent,
Ichoot from hevene it is me sent:
From alle wommen my love is lent,
And light on Alisoun.

Through to Sir Thomas Wyatt:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change

And Andrew Marvell:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

And Rupert Brooke:

I have known the most dear that is granted us here,
More supreme than the gods know above,
Like a star I was hurled through the sweet of the world,
And the height and the light of it, Love.
I have risen to the uttermost Heaven of Joy,
I have sunk to the sheer Hell of Pain
But, it’s not going to happen again, my boy,
It’s not going to happen again.

and into the songs of Mark Knopfler:

We run along easy at periscope depth
Sun dappling through clear water
So went the dream of the drowned submariner
Far away from the slaughter

Your hair is a strawflower that sings in the sun
My darling, my beautiful daughter
So went the dream of the drowned submariner
Cast away on the water

The beauty of the English language is a wonderful thing. Let us hope it remains undamaged by morons who think it racist.