Staring at the sun

A couple of months back, my blog-friend JES mentioned the Bob Dylan lyric "Look at the sun sinkin' like a ship" in one of his regular Friday poetry posts.

That got me to thinking of one of my favourite expressions about the going down of the sun, in the third line of this famous Greek lyric (yes, sorry, showing off the Classical education again).

Poem XXXIV ('Heraclitus')

Εἰπέ τις, Ἡράκλειτε, τεὸν μόρον ἐς δέ με δάκρυ
ἤγαγεν ἐμνήσθην δ᾿ ὁσσάκις ἀμφότεροι
ἠέλιον λέσχῃ κατεδύσαμεν. ἀλλὰ σὺ μέν που,
ξεῖν᾿ Ἁλικαρνησεῦ, τετράπαλαι σποδιή,
αἱ δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδόνες, ᾗσιν ὁ πάντων
ἁρπακτὴς Ἀίδης οὐκ ἐπὶ χεῖρα βαλεῖ.

Callimachus (c. 310-240 BCE)

A famous Victorian translation of this follows below. It's a telling illustration of the conciseness of the Greek language that Cory's version is pretty nearly twice as long. The phrase I so love - ἠέλιον λέσχῃ κατεδύσαμεν - is very nicely rendered by him, but the original has a forceful simplicity about it: "we sank the sun with talk". ('Nightingales' - ἀηδόνες - is generally taken to be the title of a book of poems by the writer's deceased friend, Heraclitus; but I've always preferred to think that it is just an evocative metaphor for poems or poetry. Perhaps Cory thought so too, since he didn't capitalise it.)

Heraclitus

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou are lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are they pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

William Johnson Cory (1823-1892)

This in turn reminded me of this, the last poem from from the excellent Oxford Book of Short Poems (the title and opening line are, of course, taken from Wittgenstein's magnum opus, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

Tractatus
(for Aidan Higgins)

'The world is everything that is the case',
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face;
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.

The world, though, is also so much more -
Everything that is the case imaginatively.
Tacitus believed mariners could hear
The sun sinking into the western sea;
And who would question that titanic roar,
The steam rising, wherever the edge may be?

Derek Mahon (1941-)

And this latter always puts me in mind of a favourite cartoon I saw in Punch magazine during the 1970s:

Two cavemen are standing on a cliff top, watching the sun set far out to sea. One says to the other: "There must be a hell of a lot of those things down there by now."

It all depends on how you look at things.