- Source: Tithonus (poem)
- Source: Tithonus poem
"Tithonus" is a poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), originally written in 1833 as "Tithon" and completed in 1859. It first appeared in the February edition of the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. Faced with old age, Tithonus, weary of his immortality, yearns for death. The poem is a dramatic monologue with Tithonus addressing his consort Eos, the goddess of the dawn.
Overview
In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a Trojan by birth, the son of King Laomedon of Troy by a water nymph named Strymo ("harsh"). Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, abducted Ganymede and Tithonus from the royal house of Troy to be her consorts. When Zeus stole Ganymede from her to be his cup-bearer, as a repayment, Eos asked for Tithonus to be made immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever but grew ever older. In later tellings, Eos eventually turned him into a cricket to relieve him of such an existence. In the poem however, it is Eos, and not Zeus, who grants Tithonus immortality.
In the poem, Tithonus asks Eos for the gift of immortality, which she readily grants him, but forgets to ask for eternal youth along with it. As time wears on, age catches up with him. Wasted and withered, Tithonus is reduced to a mere shadow of himself. But since he is immortal, he cannot die and is destined to live forever, growing older and older with each passing day.
The main classical source that Tennyson draws upon is from the story of Aphrodite's relationship with Anchises in the ancient Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. In this Aphrodite briefly tells of Eos's foolishness in neglecting to ask Zeus for immortal youth for Tithonus along with his immortality.
The original version of the poem, named "Tithon", was written in 1833 shortly after Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam's death but was not published. When William Makepeace Thackeray asked him for a submission to the Cornhill Magazine to be issued in January 1860 which he was editing, Tennyson made some substantial revisions to the text of the poem and submitted it under the title "Tithonus". It was published in the February edition. It was finally published by Tennyson in an anthology in the Enoch Arden volume in 1864.
Synopsis and structure
The poem begins with Tithonus speaking to Eos "at the quiet limit of the world" (line 7) where he lives with her. Confronted with old age and its attendant pains, he meditates upon death and mortality, and mourns the fact that death cannot release him from his misery. He recounts how Eos, choosing him to be her lover, had filled him with so much pride that he had seemed "To his great heart none other than a God!" (14). Though she carelessly granted him immortality at his asking, he could not escape the ravages of time. The Hours aged him and his youth and beauty faded away−-"But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills / And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me" (18–19). He asks Eos to set him free−-"Let me go; take back thy gift" (27)−-and questions why anyone should desire that which is unattainable.
Eos departs at dawn without replying to his wish that she take back the boon of immortality. As she leaves, her tears fall on his cheek. This fills him with the foreboding that the saying he had learnt on earth, that even "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts"(49), might be true. He remembers his youth when he would feel his whole body come alive at dawn as Eos kissed him and whispered to him words "wild and sweet" (61), which seemed like the song Apollo sang as Ilion (Troy) was being built. In the final section, weary of life and immortality, he yearns for death to take him. He feels that "men that have the power to die" (70) are happy and fortunate. Since his "immortal age" (22) can no longer be reconciled with Eos' "immortal youth" (22), he once more begs her:
Interpretations
The first version of "Tithonus" was one of four poems ("Morte d'Arthur", "Ulysses", and "Tiresias") which were written by Tennyson following the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. His death greatly influenced much of Tennyson's later poetry. According to critic Mary Donahue, "It is not that anything so obvious and simple as the identification of Eos with Hallam is possible or that the emotional relationship between Tennyson and Hallam is wholly clarified by 'Tithonus', but it is clear that, in choosing the mask of Tithonus, Tennyson reached out to two of the most basic symbols, those of love between man and woman and the frustration of love by age, to express the peculiar nature of his own emotional injury." Victorian scholar Matthew Reynolds wrote, "Grieving for Arthur Hallam, Tennyson wrote poems which describe what they themselves possess: a life unusually, but not eternally, prolonged through time."
Tithonus's suffering is a reminder of the futility of attempting to "pass beyond the goal of ordinance" (30). It is a poignant expression of the inevitability of death and of the necessity of accepting it as such. Tithonus has to bear the consequences of varying from "the kindly race of men" (29). Though he succeeds in defying death, his youth and beauty desert him in his old age. He can only ask for release. But death does not come to him later even when he begs for it. He is destined to live forever as a "white-haired shadow" (8) and forever roam "the ever-silent spaces of the East" (9). In being immortal, Tithonus ceases to be himself, sacrifices his mortal identity.
Tennyson described "Tithonus" in a letter as "a pendent to the "Ulysses" in my former volumes." Tithonus's character offers a strong contrast to that of Ulysses. The two poems are matched and opposed as the utterances of Greek and Trojan, victor and vanquished, hero and victim. According to critic William E. Cain, "Tithonus has discovered the curse of fulfillment, of having his carelessly worded wish come true. He lives where no man ought to live, on the other side of the horizon, the other side of the border that Ulysses could only plan to cross.
According to Victorian scholar A. A. Markley, "Tithonus" offers a viewpoint opposite to that of "Ulysses" on the theme of the acceptance of death. He writes that "while 'Ulysses' explores the human spirit that refuses to accept death, 'Tithonus' explores the human acceptance of the inevitability, and even the appropriateness, of death as the end of the life cycle. The two poems offer two extreme views of facing death, each one which balances the other when they are read together− clearly one of Tennyson's original intentions when he first drafted them in 1833. Nevertheless, reading 'Tithonus' purely as a pendant to 'Ulysses' has led to unnecessarily reductive readings of both poems."
Legacy
The title of After Many a Summer, a novel by Aldous Huxley originally published in 1939 and retitled After Many a Summer Dies the Swan when published in the USA, is taken from the fourth line of the poem. It tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who, fearing his impending death, employs a scientist to help him achieve immortality.
A season 6 episode of The X-Files entitled "Tithonus" tells the story of a man cursed with immortality who works as a photographer taking photos of individuals whom he can sense are close to death. He snaps these photos hoping to see the Grim Reaper and to die, finally, after having spent decades trapped in the land of the living.
The character of Max Schreck quotes a passage from the poem in the film Shadow of the Vampire.
Notes
References
Markley, A. A. (2004). Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-8937-2.
Rowlinson, Matthew Charles (1994). Tennyson's Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry. University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1478-7.
Cain, William E. (1984). Philosophical Approaches to Literature: New Essays on 19th and 20th Century Texts. Bucknell University Press. ISBN 0-8387-5055-9.
Bibliography
Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son. Kessinger Publishing, 1899. ISBN 0-7661-8373-4
Campbell, Matthew. Rhythm & Will in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-64295-7
External links
Alfred Tennyson's "Tithonus" from The Victorian Web
The Setting of "Tithonus" from The Victorian Web
Balancing Passion and Reason in Tennyson's "Tithonus" and Jane Eyre from The Victorian Web
Audio reading of the poem by John Derbyshire
Tithonus public domain audiobook at LibriVox (multiple versions)
The Tithonus poem, also known as the old age poem or (with fragments of another poem by Sappho discovered at the same time) the New Sappho, is a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. It is part of fragment 58 in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of Sappho. The poem is from Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. It was first published in 1922, after a fragment of papyrus on which it was partially preserved was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; further papyrus fragments published in 2004 almost completed the poem, drawing international media attention. One of very few substantially complete works by Sappho, it deals with the effects of ageing. There is scholarly debate about where the poem ends, as four lines previously thought to have been part of the poem are not found on the 2004 papyrus.
Preservation
Two lines of the poem are preserved in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae. In addition to this quotation, the poem is known from two papyri: one discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and first published in 1922; the other first published in 2004. The lines quoted by Athenaeus are part of the poem as preserved on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, but not the Cologne papyrus.
= Oxyrhynchus papyrus
=Part of the Tithonus poem was originally published in 1922 on a fragment of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. This fragment preserved part of 27 lines of Sappho's poetry, including the Tithonus poem. The papyrus appears to be part of a copy of Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry, as all of the poems appear to be in the same metre. From the handwriting, the papyrus can be dated to the second century AD. Today the papyrus is part of the collection of the Sackler Library in Oxford University.
= Cologne papyrus
=In 2004, Martin Gronewald and Robert Daniel published three fragments of papyrus from the Cologne Papyrus Collection, which taken with the existing fragment from Oxyrhynchus provided the almost complete text to five stanzas of the poem. The Cologne papyrus, preserved on cartonnage, is from the early third century BC, making it the oldest known papyrus containing a poem by Sappho.
The papyrus is part of an anthology of poetry, with poems on similar themes grouped together. Along with the Tithonus poem, two others are preserved on the papyrus published by Gronewald and Daniel: one in the same metre, one written in a different hand and in a different metre. The metre of this last poem has characteristics which do not appear in any known metre used by the Lesbian poets. It also contains word forms which appear not to be in the Aeolic dialect used by Sappho, and refers to the myth of Orpheus in a form not known to have existed in Sappho's time. For these reasons, the poem cannot be by Sappho.
Poem
The Tithonus poem is twelve lines long, and is in a metre called "acephalous Hipponacteans with internal double-choriambic expansion". It is the fourth poem by Sappho to be sufficiently complete to treat as an entire work, along with the Ode to Aphrodite, fragment 16, and fragment 31; a fifth, the Brothers Poem, was discovered in 2014.
The poem is written as an exhortation to a group of young women, putting forward the singer as an example to emulate. It discusses the singer's old age, and tells the audience that while they too will grow old and lose their beauty, their musical abilities will be retained. Anton Bierl suggests that it was originally composed as a didactic work, intended to teach young women about beauty and mortality. It is one of a number of Sappho's poems which discuss old age.
The poem's common name comes from the Greek myth of Tithonus, which is mentioned in lines 9 to 12. According to legend Tithonus was a Trojan prince, loved by Eos, the goddess Dawn. She asked that Zeus make her lover immortal; he granted the request, but as she did not ask for eternal youth for Tithonus, he continued to age for eternity. The story of Tithonus was popular in archaic Greek poetry, though the reference to him in this poem seems out of place, according to Rawles. However, Page duBois notes that the use of a mythical exemplum to illustrate the point of a poem, such as the story of Tithonus in this poem, is a characteristic feature of Sappho's poetry – duBois compares it to Sappho's use of the story of Helen in fragment 16.
Martin Litchfield West considers that these lines seem like a weak ending to the poem, though Tithonus functions as a parallel to Sappho in her old age.
= Text
=—via R. Janko, see also W. Annis
= Metre
=The metre of the Tithonus poem was already known, before the discovery of the Cologne papyrus, from four quotations of Sappho. Two of these are preserved in the Enchiridion of Hephaestion; he describes the metre as aiolikon and says that Sappho used it frequently. The metre is of the form "× – ◡ ◡ – – ◡ ◡ – – ◡ ◡ – ◡ – –", which is part of the larger class of aeolic metres. The poems in this metre by Sappho are conventionally thought to have been from the fourth book of the Alexandrian edition, though no direct evidence either confirms or denies this.
= Continuation after line 12
=Before the Cologne papyri were published in 2004, lines 11 to 26 of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1787 were considered to be a single poem, fragment 58 in the Lobel-Page (and subsequently Voigt) numbering systems. The poem on the Cologne papyrus, however, only contains 12 lines. These begin with line 11 of P. Oxy. 1787, confirming the long-standing suggestion that the poem began there. The Cologne version of the poem is thus missing what were long believed to be the final four lines of the poem.
Much of the scholarly discussion of the poem has concerned the difference between the endings of the Tithonus poem preserved in the two papyri. Scholars disagree about how this should be interpreted. André Lardinois lists possible explanations which have been put forward: firstly that the Cologne papyrus did not contain the full poem, but only the first twelve lines; secondly that the poem does end after line twelve and the final lines on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus were part of another poem; and thirdly that there were two different endings for the poem, one at line twelve and one continuing on to line sixteen.
West argues that the four lines missing from the Cologne papyrus were part of a separate poem, though Lardinois comments that there is no evidence in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus to confirm or deny this. However, other scholars, including Gronewald and Daniel, who originally published the Cologne fragments, believe that the poem did continue for these four lines. Lardinois suggests that there may have been two versions of the poem current in antiquity, one ending after the twelfth line, the other continuing to line 16. Gregory Nagy agrees, arguing that the two versions were appropriate for different performance contexts.
If the four contested lines were part of the Tithonus poem, its tone would have changed significantly. The sixteen-line version of the poem has a much more optimistic ending than the twelve-line version, expressing hope for an afterlife.
Reception
The publication of the Cologne papyri in 2004, making the Tithonus poem almost complete, drew international attention from both scholars and the popular press. The discovery was covered in newspapers in the US and the UK, as well as online. The Daily Telegraph described the discovery as "the rarest of gifts", while Marilyn B. Skinner said that the discovery was the find of a lifetime for classicists.
Since the discovery, there has been a significant amount of scholarship on the poem. At the 138th annual meeting of the American Philological Association, two separate panels discussed the poems, and papers based on these panels were later published as The New Sappho on Old Age, edited by Marilyn B. Skinner and Ellen Greene. At least two other collections of essays on the Cologne papyri have been published. The discovery has been seen as particularly significant for understanding the transmission and reception of Sappho's poetry in the ancient world.
Notes
References
Works cited
External links
(archive copy) Tithonus poem, text, translation by M. L. West, and notes by William Harris.
José-Antonio Fernández-Delgado, "On the Cologne Sappho Papyrus" ZPE (2014)
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