A Sylvan Scene

Abstract

One way to gauge the vitality of the descriptive tradition that grew out of classical ecphrasis, and to suggest its impact on the poets of Romantic Britain, is to follow the trail of one historically significant example. For this purpose I have chosen the sublime mountain landscape that forms the Carthaginian harbor at Aeneid 157–72, where Aeneas and his crew find safe refuge after a ruinous storm. Virgil modeled his place description on Homer’s lengthy discourse on the Ithacan harbor sacred to Phorcys at Odyssey 13 (Gordon Williams 637–46), one of the major Homeric descriptions that Lessing’s Laocoön fails to mention. Because most elements of the passage are impossible to salvage as narrative, Lessing’s theory would have to reject the description as “static,” though it is anything but emotionally static in its context. It occurs at one of the great climactic moments of the poem, when Odysseus finally arrives home at Ithaca. But the hero, having slept through the voyage, is unaware that he has arrived and been left “on the sand, still overpowered by sleep” (13.119; Murray trans.) and that many travails still await him before he can reclaim his wife and his throne:

There is in the land of Ithaca a certain harbour of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and at its mouth two projecting headlands sheer to seaward, but sloping down on the side toward the harbour. These keep back the great waves raised by heavy winds without but within the benched ships lie unmoored when they have reached the point of anchorage. At the head of the harbour is a long-leafed olive tree, and near it a pleasant, shadowy cave sacred to the nymphs that are called Naiads. Therein are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there too the bees store honey. And in the cave are long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave webs of purple dye, a wonder to behold; and therein are also ever-flowing springs. Two doors there are to the cave, one toward the North Wind, by which men go down, but that toward the South Wind is sacred, nor do men enter thereby; it is the way of the immortals. (13.96–112; Murray trans.)

and, as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view.

—Milton, Paradise Lost