Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/594

 590 Gilbert Perhaps the ultimate source for the figurative use of the word furrow in modern poets is Virgil, who so employs sulcus as to suggest the meaning of cultivated fields. In one instance he associates ripened seed and furrows: Grandia saepe quibus mandavimus hordea sulcis, Infelix loldium et steriles nascuntur avenae. 11 Another example somewhat suggests Keats' picture: Nee requies, quin aut pomis exuberet annus, Aut fetu pecorum, aut Cerealis mergite culmi, Proventuque oneret sulcos atque horrea vincat. 12 Here we have a reference to granaries, and, both in the lines puoted and in their context, something of personification of the seasons. However, it should be remembered that Roman methods of agriculture were such that Virgil's words when written probably appeared less figurative than they do to a modern reader. 13 There is, then, no lack of precedent for making Keats' 'fur- row' a grainfield. Moreover, the interpretation finds support in the variants recorded in the Oxford edition of Keats by Mr. H. Buxton Forman. The reading of the Holograph is as follows: Or sound asleep in a half reaped field Dozed with red poppies while thy reaping hook Spares for some slumbrous minutes the next swath. But still the preposition gives trouble. Keats uses 'in' with 'field' ; if he had intended 'furrow' to mean field would he have changed the preposition to 'on' ('on a half-reaped furrow')? 11 Ed, 5. 36-7. 12 Georg. 2. 516-18. Perhaps the following is of the same nature: et sulcis frumenti quaereret herbam (Georg. 1.134). Conington, however, comments on the line: ' "Sulcis" seems to mean not in but by furrows. "Might get corn by ploughing." ' If his interpretation is correct, ripened corn and furrows are not associated here; but is it impossible that 'sulcis' is used here, as in the passages quoted above, to mean cultivated fields? Virgil also uses the word, with a meaning perhaps not purely literal, in the singular: Quis. . . taciturn. . . relinquat. . . te sulco, Serrane, serentem (Aen. 6.841-4)? For plural forms see Georg. 1. 216, 223. 13 Adam Dickson, The Husbandry of the Ancients, chaps. 21-4.