In my last post, I looked at Luther’s use of Horace, Epistles 1.16.79, in his lectures on Psalm 90. For convenience, I’ll quote Luther’s words again:

Ibi extenuata est mors etiam a recentioribus doctoribus, ut Itali faciunt mortem contemptibilem ex hac causa, quod mors finis malorum, mors ultima linea rerum. Ista est caecitas et superaddita miseria originali peccato…

[In the search for a remedy against death,] death has been minimized by more recent teachers, too. For example, the Italians make death an object of which one should think little, because it death is the end of evils; death is the final boundary-line^[1] of things. This is blindness and an additional misery added to original sin…^[2]

That phrase–mors ultima linea rerum–was used about a century later by the Danish poet Henrik Harder (who must have been, it seems to me, a Lutheran, though it is maddeningly difficult–thus far it has been impossible, in fact–to find a source that says so explicitly) in a short poem about Pyramus and Thisbe.^[1]

My version of this poem is somewhat experimental, because I’ve attempted to use the same meter that Harder does, though it is not a customary English meter: This is usually the case with Greek and Latin meters, which are quantitative, whereas English meters are accentual. For that matter, the meter is not even common in Greek and Latin.

Meter

The meter of the poem is first pythiambic, which Horace uses in Epodes 14 and 15. The form consists of couplets of dactylic hexameter and iambic dimeter. The schema thus looks like this, where “_” is a long syllable, “u” is a short syllable, and “x” is anceps (long or short):

__ uu __ uu __ uu __ uu __ uu __ x
x __ u __ x __ u x

Again, I have tried to adapt this to English accentual meter. Readers can judge the results for themselves.

The Poem

Below, I give the Latin text from Book 2 of Harder’s Epigrams, followed by my translation. One may detect the hint of a Christological interpretation of the story that, I gather, comports with Ovide moralisé, though I haven’t confirmed this for myself.

First, in Latin:

Mors ultima linea
Ad Pyramum & Thisben

Dum tandem ad fructum longi properatis amoris,
     mors vota vestra discidit.
An magis implevit? Dum morte probatis amorem,
     extrema amatis linea.

Now, my version:

"Love Minus Zero"
Pyramus and Thisbe

When, finally, you hastened to harvest the field distant love plowed,
     Death cut in pieces all you'd vowed.
Or was it death that fulfilled it? When death proves love by its own loss,
     No limit stays for love to cross.