ABSTRACT
This fragment is a translation of the opening lines of Moschus’s Idyll iii, which was to become an important source of Adonais. Moschus was a Gk Bucolic poet of the 2nd century bc; for S.’s translations of his Idylls iv and v see nos 107 and 204 (Walter Peck (TLS, 1 April 1921) has shown that the Gk edition of the Bucolics used by S. was Theocriti, Bionis et Moschi Carmina Bucolica, ed. L. C. Valckenaer, Edinburgh 1810). Mary’s jnl records that S. read Theocritus and Moschus in Gk in 1816 (Mary fnl i 97), but these lines probably date from January or February 1818 (SC v 192-3 suggests vaguer parameters for the date, ‘at Marlow’, i.e. March 1817— February 1818); Hunt’s translation of the Idyll was published in Foliage (1818), and as Forman 1876-7 surmises the two poems may well have originated in a timed competition of the kind that produced Ozymandias’ and To the Nile’ (see head-notes to nos 145 and 163; it is curious that Hunt, like S., also translated the same opening lines of Idyll iv, published as ‘Sea and Land’ in The Examiner, 21 January 1816: could these poems also have been written in a competition?). The opening of Hunt’s translation of Idyll iii is less free than S.’s: Moan with me, moan, ye woods and Dorian Waters, And weep, ye rivers, the delightful Bion; Ye plants, now stand in tears; murmur, ye groves; Ye flowers, sigh forth your odours with sad buds; Flush deep, ye roses and anemones; And more than ever now, oh hyacinth, show Your written sorrows: – the sweet singer’s dead. The poem is not now thought to be by Moschus, but by an unknown pupil of Bion (see The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Loeb) 1912, 443). S.’s translation was first published in Forman 1876-7 from a MS originally in Hunt MSS which was subsequently owned by S. R. Townshend Mayer and then H. Buxton Forman. The MS disappeared after its sale in May 1934, and re-entered the public domain only with the publication of SC v and vi in 1973, when it emerged that it had been acquired by the Pforzheimer. Forman had described the MS as ‘written upon the same paper with the concluding portion of the Essay on Christianity’ (then assumed to have been written in 1815, but now certainly datable to 1817), although SC v 192 explains that at some point between 1920 and 1934 the portion of the sheet containing the conclusion of the ‘Essay on Christianity’ was removed.
