Vincent Bourne, ‘Patience Lightens What Sorrow May Not Heal’ (1734)

I’ve been reading some Vincent Bourne (1695–1747), the English neo-Latin poet known familiarly as ‘Vinny Bourne’. This was not an altogether arbitrary reading-choice of mine: as you can see from the title-page of the posthumous 1808 edition of Bourne’s neo-Latin writing at the head of this post, he had his fans among the later 18th-century poets (Cowper’s praise is quoted there) and amongst the Romantics too: Coleridge owned The Poetical Works of Vincent Bourne (Oxford, 1734), and Charles Lamb translated eight of Bourne’s Latin poems into English, recommending him to Wordsworth: ‘since I saw you,’ Lamb wrote to WW in 1815, ‘I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day — the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town-scenes, a proper counterpart to some people’s extravagancies … what a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterfull creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything. His diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him!’ [Ainger (ed) The Letters of Charles Lamb (1904), 1:341]. The fruits of that dryasdust scholarly exploring will appear, soon, on another blog. [Update 25th Feb: the wait is over!]

Whilst we all wait my postings there with appropriate levels of anticipatory excitement, here’s one short Bourne poem to tide us over. Its title is a quotation from Horace, Odes 1:24: Sed levius fit patientia quidquid corrigere est nefas; ‘patience lightens what sorrow may not heal’.

Clauditur in cavea, laqueo quam prenderit auceps,
et silet, et fatum lugubre plorat avis.
Nec placet angustus carcer, quam limite nullo
aërias nuper juverat ire vias.
Nascitur, et longo patientia crescit ab usu;
nec jam, quæ dederat tædia, carcer habet.
Jam se solatur cantu captiva; nec ulla
suavius in campis libera cantat avis.

Encased in a cage, snared by a fowler,
he’s silent, a sad bird mourning his fate.
Never before imprisoned — no limit
had till now impinged his aerial joy.
But patience is born and grows with practice,
and the prison now loses its former boredom.
The captive consoles himself by singing now:
no field-bird ever sang a sweeter song.

A rather mournful, even depressing little poem, this. We all grow to accept our prisons, I guess.