George Buchanan, ‘Missing Paris’

The ‘Desiderium Lutetiae’ (1552/1567)

In George Buchanan's allegorical idyll ‘Desiderium Lutetiae’ (probably written in 1552, first published as the third of Buchanan's Silvae in 1567), the poet, unhappy in Portugal, addresses his beloved Paris as ‘Amaryllis’, styling her a pastoral maid and himself a lovelorn pastoral swain called Daphnis. It was one of Buchanan's most famous poems (at least, among his secular poems) and Buchanan himself was for centuries Scotland's most famous writer—indeed, arguably he was sixteenth-century Europe's single most celebrated poet, although because he wrote in Latin he's more or less been forgotten now.

Desiderium Lutetiae

O formosa Amarylli, tuo jam septima bruma
Me procul aspectu, jam septima detinet aestas:
Sed neque septima bruma nivalibus horrida nimbis,
Septima nec rapidis candens fervoribus aestas
Extinxit vigiles nostro sub pectore curas.
Tu mihi mane novo carmen, dum roscida tondet
Arva pecus, medio tu carmen solis in aestu,
Et cum jam longas praeceps nox porrigit umbras:
Nec mihi quae tenebris condit nox omnia vultus
Est potis occultare tuos, te nocte sub atra [10]
Alloquor, amplector, falsaque in imagine somni
Gaudia sollicitam palpant evanida mentem.
At cum somnus abit, curis cum luce renatis
Tecta miser fugio, tanquam mihi tecta doloris
Semina subjiciant, et solid moestus in agris
Qua vagus error agit feror, & deserta querelis
Antra meis, silvasque & conscia faxa fatigo.
Sola meos planctus Echo miserata gementi
Adgemit, & quoties suspiria pectore duco,
Hæc quoque vicino toties suspirat ab antro. [20]
Sæpe super celsæ prærupta cacumina rupis
In mare prospiciens, spumantia cœrula demens
Alloquor, & surdis jacto irrita vota procellis:

O mare! quæque maris vitreas, Nereides, undas
Finditis, in vestros placidæ me admittite portus:
Aut hoc si nimium est, nec naufragus ire recuso,
Dummodo dilectas teneam vel naufragus oras.
O quoties dixi Zephyris properantibus illuc,
Felices pulchram visuri Amaryllida venti,
Sic neque Pyrene duris in cotibus alas [30]
Atterat, & vestros non rumpant nubila cursus,
Dicite vesanos Amaryllidi Daphnidos ignes.
O quoties Euro levibus cum raderet alis
AEquora, dicebam, Felix Amaryllide visa,
Dic mihi, Num meminit nostri? num mutua sentit
Vulnera? num veteris vivunt vestigia flammæ?
Ille ferox contra rauco cum murmure stridens
Avolat irato similis, mihi frigore pectus
Congelat, exanimes torpor gravis alligat artus.
Nec me pastorum recreant solamina, nec me [40]
Fistula, Nympharumque leves per prata choreæ,
Nec quæ capripedes modulantur carmina Panes:
Una meos sic est prædata Amaryllis amores.

Et me tympana docta ciere canora Lycisca,
Et me blanda Melænis amavit, Iberides ambæ,
Ambæ florentes annis, opibusque superbæ:
Et mihi dotales centum cum matribus agnos
Ipsi promisere patres, mihi munera matres
Spondebant clam multa: meum nec munera pectus,
Nec nivei movere suis cum matribus agni, [50]
Nec quas blanditias teneræ dixere puellæ,
Nec quas delicias teneræ fecere puellæ.
Quantum ver hyemem, vietum puer integer ævi,
Ter viduam thalamis virgo matura parentem,
Quam superat Durium Rhodanus, quam Sequana Mundam,
Lenis Arar Sycorim, Ligeris formosus Iberum,
Francigenas inter Ligeris pulcherrimus amnes:
Tantum omnes vincit Nymphas Amaryllis lberas.
Sæpe suos vultus speculata Melænis in unda,
Composuit, pinxitque oculos, finxitque capillum, [60]
Et voluit, simul & meruit formosa videri.
Sæpe mihi dixit, Animi male perdite Daphni,
Cur tibi longinquos libet insanire furores?
Et quod ames dare nostra potest tibi terra, racemos
Collige purpureos, & spes ne concipe lentas.
Sæpe choros festos me prætereunte, Lycisca
Cernere dissimulans, vultusque aversa canebat
Hæc, pedibus terram, & manibus cava tympana pulsans;
Et Nemesis gravis ira, atque irritabile numen,
Et Nemesis laesos etiam punitur amores. [70]
Vidi ego dum leporem venator captat, echinum
Spernere, post vanos redeuntem deinde labores,
Vespere nec retulisse domum leporem nec echinum.
Vidi ego qui mullum peteret piscator, & arctis
Retibus implicitam tincam sprevisset opimam,
Vespere nec retulisse domum mullum neque tincam.
Vidi ego qui calamos crescentes ordine risit
Pastor arundineos, dum torno rasile buxum
Frustra amat, (interea calamos quos riserat, alter
Pastor habet,) fragiles contentum inflare cicutas. [80]
Sic solet immodicos Nemesis contundere fastus.

Hæc & plura Melænis, & hæc & plura Lycisca
Cantabant surdas frustra mihi semper ad aures.
Sed canis ante lupas, & taurus diliget ursas,
Et vulpem lepores, & amabit dama leænas,
Quam vel tympana docta ciere canora Lycisca
Mutabit nostros vel blanda Melænis amores,
Et prius æquoribus pisces, & montibus umbræ,
Et volucres deerunt silvis, & murmura ventis,
Quam mihi discedent formosae Amaryllidos ignes: [90]
Illa mihi rudibus succendit pectora flammis,
Finiet illa meos moriens morientis amores.

‘O lovely Amaryllis’: O formosa Amarylli is Vergilian (Eclogue 1 line 5 praises formosa Amaryllida, echoing Vergil’s Theocritan original, both the 3rd and 4th of whose Idylls address ὦ χαρίεσσ᾽ ᾿Αμαρυλλί) as is Buchanan's pseudonym, Daphnis. The two lovely nymphs Melaenis and Lycisca are the Portuguese towns of Coimbra and Evora, at both of which Buchanan had taken academic posts, whose charms are outshone by those of the University of Paris. Likewise the generic pastoral rivers mentioned in the poem, Durius, Munda, Sycoris and Oberus are the Iberian rivers Douro, Mondego, Segre and Ebro. Here's my line-by-line Englishing:


Missing Paris

Lovely Amaryllis! Seven winters gone
and seven long summers since I saw your face,
but endless sevens, wintry clouds of snow,
hot blasts of fervid summers, nothing
could ever quench the ardour in my breast.
You’re the song I sing at dawn, as the flock returns
to crop the dew-wet grass; it’s you at hot noon
and when the night is long and shadow stretches
night embalms everything, but not for me
since you're there, hidden behind the darkness: [10]
in dreams I talk to you, embrace you, share
the complex joys of my mind’s idea of you.
When sleep is lost to day my cares are reborn
I leave the town—the houses blanks to me
units of subduing pain—and run through fields,
sad-hearted fugitive, hopeless escapee:
through caves, through woods I haul my weary thoughts.
Grieving Echo hears my rough-edged groans
and groans back at me to my chest’s tempo,
the very caves sigh round me as I do. [20]
Sometimes I loiter on tall, rugged cliffs
watching a sky-blue sea thrash itself foam-mad
and yell my yearning at the deaf-eared storm:

“Carry me over waves of sea-coloured glass
Nereids, gently across to my safe harbour.
If safety's too much, I'm fine with shipwreck,
provided such dangers bring me to my love.
How often I've addressed the quick winds, saying:
fortunate breeze, you will see Amaryllis;
I pray no Pyrenees crags bruise your wings [30]
no clouds chafe you as you go rushing on
to tell Amaryllis of Daphnis’s wild desires.
How often I've asked Euro, as his wings
scrape foam from wavetops: is Amaryllis well?
does she still remember me? does she feel
the pain I do? Does our flame still live in her?
But the wild wind recoiled with a rasping
angry rush, dashed off, chilled the soul in my breast
seizing up my veins, freezing my helpless limbs.
Nor can I take comfort now in rural thoughts: [40]
meadow nymphs dancing to a shepherd’s pipe
nimble-footed, singing songs of feasting—
all tainted now by thoughts of Amaryllis.”

Lycisca taught me her tambourine rhythms,
and gorgeous Melaenis is crowned with love;
both rightly proud of their youthful beauty.
And I've been promised a hundred fatted lambs
as dowry by their fathers, their mothers,
promising extra gifts. Pledges that don’t move me,
no matter that the lambs are white as snow; [50]
erotic words, low-spoken by these girls,
such promises could never change my mind.
Wizened winter to the boyish blush of spring—
that, times three, is how far they fall short of my girl;
As Durius trumps the Rhone, Seine the Munda,
Sycoris than Saone, Ebro than the Loire,
(though the Loire is France’s loveliest river!)
so Amaryllis bests Iberian nymphs.
Melaenis saw her face in the waters' mirror,
her powder, painted eyes, her fine-dressed hair, [60]
thought to herself she was the lovely one.
“Such agony” (she said), “in Daphnis’s soul!
Why waste your love on what is far away?
Why blank the attractions of our earth, our clustered
black-purple grapes—why yearn for what's not here?”

I've watched Lycisca at the festival
pretending she can’t see me, sly-glancing, beating
her foot, pounding the hollow drum, singing:
“Nemesis is cruel, my lad, a wild god,
Nemesis will punish your transgressions. [70]
I've seen the hunter chase the hare, and ignore
the easy hedgehog, only to return hungry
at dusk, bringing home neither hare nor hog;
seen fisherman lay nets for deep-swimming mullet
ignoring the rich schools of small tench; returning
home at last with neither tench nor mullet.
And I, I sneered at basic reeds, desiring
instead the polished lathe-turned shepherd's flute
vainly wanting what I could not have, ignoring
slender hemlock: though it's fine for playing! [80]
So Nemesis works, crushing insolent pride.”

This (and more) Melaenis and Lycisca sang
to ears that were quite deaf to all their words.
Dogs shall love wolves and bulls shall yearn for bears
hares adore foxes and deer pair off with lions
before the rhythms of Lycisca’s music
or Melaenis’s smooth beauty shall change my love.
Fish will leave the sea and mountains lie down,
birds quit the woods, the winds give up their roar
before my Amaryllis-ardour fades. [90]
She it was who lit these flames in my heart;
only when she dies will my death put them out.

Buchanan, born 1506, first went to Paris in 1520, to study at the university. His main subject was composing Latin verses. He throve at this, and owes his poetic career to it but his two years in the city were hard. The first of his Elegies is titled, ‘Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humanitores Lutetiae’, ‘how immiserating is the condition of literary humanities in Paris’, which recalls his time as a student:

Scarcely has the fourth hour sounded when the fifth hour clangs: iam ianitor urget/cymbala, tirones ad sua signa vocans. Following it, in comes the master, terrible in his flowing robe (longa metuendus veste); Vergil, perhaps, in his left hand, a cruel rod in his right. He sits upon the only piece of furniture in the room, a stool, while the pupils crouch on the rush-covered floor and write upon their knees. Buchanan's health, which was never robust, broke down under these conditions. [D. F. S. Thomson, ‘George Buchanan: The Humanist in the Sixteenth-Century World’ Phoenix 4:3 (1950), 78]

Buchanan, who did not come from a wealthy family, was having his tuition paid by a better-off uncle. After two years this uncle died and Buchanan could no longer afford what (the poem says) were ‘the exorbitant charges by which the inhabitants of the university city exploited its intellectual reputation.’ He came back to Scotland, studied for a time at the cheaper University of St Andrews, and then served as a soldier in the Duke of Albany’s army, during the Duke’s ill-fated attempt to avenge Flodden by attacking Wark Castle. In 1527 Buchanan returned to Paris, finishing his degree there and becoming a tutor (a ‘regent’) at the Collège Ste. Barbe, one of the places most hospitable to the ‘new learning’. Ignatius Loyola had studied there, as had Rabelais (before Buchanan’s time of course). In 1535 Buchanan was back in Scotland. At this time James V had taken against the Franciscans, believing them to have engaged in a plot against him: the king commissioned Buchanan to write some anti-Franciscan satires, which the poet did, with gusto—these would later get him into trouble. Buchanan was still a Catholic, but his sympathies to Protestantism were known. When, in 1538, James cracked down on the new religion—in 1539 five ‘heretics’ were burned to death in the king’s presence—Buchanan was arrested. He was put in a room without bars on the window, either by accident or by a secret contrivance, perhaps of the king’s, so that he was able to escape and make his way to Henry VIII’s England and thence to France: first Paris (which proved unsafe to one of his Protestant-y sympathies) and then Bordeaux. Here he was engaged as professor of Latin in the newly founded College of Guienne. He translated Medea and Alcestis into Latin, and wrote two tragedies of his own, again in Latin. Amongst Buchanan’s students was Michel de Montaigne, and he befriended Joseph Scaliger, who ‘wrote an epigram on Buchanan which contains the couplet, famous in its day’: Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes;/Romani eloquii Scotia limes erit. ‘Just as the Roman empire once reached its limit in Scotland, so [now] shall Roman eloquence reach its limit in a Scot.’ In Bordeaux he wrote some of his most famous poems (in Latin, of course).

By 1543 it was safe for Buchanan to return to Paris, and in 1544 he was appointed regent in the Collège du cardinal Lemoine. Three years later a group of French humanists were invited to Portugal to lecture in the University of Coimbra: Buchanan went too, and taught at the university, and at other places in the country. But his sympathy to Protestantism was known, and in 1549 he was investigated by the inquisition and accused of ‘Lutheran and Judaistic practices’. His old anti-Franciscan satires were brought up. Convicted, he was imprisoned in 1550 in the monastery of São Bento in Lisbon, sentenced ‘to abjure his errors’ and to attend edifying lectures by the monks (he later said the monks were friendly, but wholly ignorant of religion). In 1551 he was released on parole, promising to remain in Lisbon, but in 1552 he fled the city and sailed back to England and thereafter travelled to Paris where, in 1553, he was appointed regent in the College of Boncourt.

So this poem, written whilst he was in Lisbon, either in 1551 or 1552, anticipates the, for Buchanan, happy ending of a Parisian return.

It wasn’t to last: Paris was not doctrinally hospitable to one of Buchanan’s religious mindset. In 1561 he returned to Scotland for good, and at last he actually converted to Protestantism, joining the Presbyterian Church. He was an active member of the church: sitting on the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 1563 onwards, and in 1567 becoming, though he was a layman, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (‘he was the last lay person to be elected Moderator until Alison Elliot in 2004, the first female Moderator’).

The ‘Desiderium Lutetiae’ was one of Buchanan’s most famous, and most praised poems. D F S Thomson thinks it a poem ‘whose music and atmosphere are strangely like that of Lycidas’: Milton certainly read Buchanan.