No pledge you left me, faithless and unkind!
Nothing with me but wrongs was left behind.
"Jejune, flat, and ill expressed," is written against the last line in
the manuscript, and Pope profited by the criticism.]
[Footnote 22: This image is not in the original, but it is very
pleasingly introduced.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 23: The ten next verses are much superior to the
original.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 24: From Dryden's Ovid, Epist. vii.:
Their daily longing, and their nightly dream.
It was at first thus in Pope's MS.:
Thou art at once my anguish and delight,
Care of my day, and phantom of my night.
[Footnote 25: In the MS.:
Thy kisses then, thy words my soul endear.
Glow on my lips, and murmur in my ear.
[Footnote 26: Of this couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:
The charming phantom flies, and I complain,
As if thyself forsook me once again.
And,
I dread the light of cruel heav'n to view,
And close my eyes once more to dream of you.
[Footnote 27: "Antra nemusque" are not well rendered by "through lonely
plains." Ovid is concise and specific, Pope general. Better rendered by
Scrope:
Soon as I rise I haunt the caves and groves.--BOWLES.
[Footnote 28: In the first edition:
I find the shades that did our joys conceal,
Not him who made me love those shades so well.]
[Footnote 29: Scrope's translation:
Of Tereus she complains, and I of thee.--WAKEFIELD.
Tereus married Progne, and afterwards fell in love with her sister
Philomela. Both sisters conspired to revenge themselves upon him. They
killed Itys, his son by Progne, gave him some of the flesh to eat. When,
with savage exultation, they revealed the truth to him, and he was about
to slay them, Progne was changed into a swallow, and Philomela into a
nightingale.]
[Footnote 30: The Sappho of Ovid only says that she laid down upon the
bank worn out with weeping. Pope is answerable for the extravagant
conceit of "her swelling the flood with her tears." In the next verse
Pope calls the Naiad "a watery virgin,"--an expression which borders on
the ludicrous.]
[Footnote 31: There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the
top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it
was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and
afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the
sea; for it was an established opinion that all those who were taken up
alive would be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy,
but perished in the experiment.--FAWKES.]
[Footnote 32: Aleaeus arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very
evening, in order to take the leap on her account; but hearing that her
body could not be found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is
said to have written his 215th ode on that occasion.--WARTON.