Drawing On Horace-- and Shakespeare, The Ancients and modern Ancients like Options

[Guest_RonPrice_*]

PERHAPS

As forests change their leaves with the declining years....so the old generation of words perishes, and those newly born blossom and flourish like young men. -Horace in Enemies of Poetry, W.B. Stanford, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, p.113.

Shakespeare has more meaning and value now than he had in his own day.  -A contemporary critic of English Literature in ibid., p.114.

So may my words perish
after this spiritual springtime,
after the leaves of men’s lives
have been arrayed with fresh blossoms
and fruits of a consecrated joy;
but it may be, just maybe, that
they come to have more meaning in a future age
when the deluge has gone,
the frenetic busyness has abated,
the mental tests have swept past:
purging, purifying and preparing us
for the noble mission which is
our future as a race. Then, perhaps then,
there will be people who can submit
themselves to time’s process, to this
dance of words and ideas that I have
drunk with my mind in these darkest hours
before the dawn of peace.

Ron Price
3 December 1995