"Heu dolor! caveae membra fuere meae. / Pes compes, manicaeque manus, nervique catenae, / Ossaque cancellis nativa repagula claustri, / Damner ut hospitii compede vincta mei?" ["Alas, what misery! that the light poured me forth on these unhappy airs! My very limbs are a prison to me. Feet fetters, hands manacles, nerves chains, bones a cage for showing off a slave in a market, bound together with its own lattice-work of bars. To what end am I barred in by the natural barrier of a prison so closley kin to me, so that I am condemned to be bound in fetters in the guest-chamber which is my very own?"]
— Hugo, Herman (1588-1629)
Author
Place of Publication
Antwerp
Date
1624, 1628
Metaphor
"Heu dolor! caveae membra fuere meae. / Pes compes, manicaeque manus, nervique catenae, / Ossaque cancellis nativa repagula claustri, / Damner ut hospitii compede vincta mei?" ["Alas, what misery! that the light poured me forth on these unhappy airs! My very limbs are a prison to me. Feet fetters, hands manacles, nerves chains, bones a cage for showing off a slave in a market, bound together with its own lattice-work of bars. To what end am I barred in by the natural barrier of a prison so closley kin to me, so that I am condemned to be bound in fetters in the guest-chamber which is my very own?"]
Metaphor in Context
Libera quae potui spatioso ludere Coelo,
Cernis, ut angusto carcere clausa premar?
Heu dolor! caveae membra fuere meae.
Pes compes, manicaeque manus, nervique catenae,
Ossaque cancellis nativa repagula claustri,
Damner ut hospitii compede vincta mei?
(III.xxxx [sig.Bb2])
[I who could play freely in the wide heavens--do you perceive how I am now pressed close in a narrow dungeon? Alas, what misery! that the light poured me forth on these unhappy airs! My very limbs are a prison to me. Feet fetters, hands manacles, nerves chains, bones a cage for showing off a slave in a market, bound together with its own lattice-work of bars. To what end am I barred in by the natural barrier of a prison so closley kin to me, so that I am condemned to be bound in fetters in the guest-chamber which is my very own?]
Cernis, ut angusto carcere clausa premar?
Heu dolor! caveae membra fuere meae.
Pes compes, manicaeque manus, nervique catenae,
Ossaque cancellis nativa repagula claustri,
Damner ut hospitii compede vincta mei?
(III.xxxx [sig.Bb2])
[I who could play freely in the wide heavens--do you perceive how I am now pressed close in a narrow dungeon? Alas, what misery! that the light poured me forth on these unhappy airs! My very limbs are a prison to me. Feet fetters, hands manacles, nerves chains, bones a cage for showing off a slave in a market, bound together with its own lattice-work of bars. To what end am I barred in by the natural barrier of a prison so closley kin to me, so that I am condemned to be bound in fetters in the guest-chamber which is my very own?]
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Text quoted and translated in Kitty Scoular Datta's "New Light on Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'" Renaissance Quarterly, 22:3 (Autumn, 1969): 242-255, p. 243. Datta quotes from 2nd ed. of Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1628).
Date of Entry
10/27/2013
