Orfeu’s Song in Elegiac Couplets: Lament and Exaltation in the Preface II of The Abduction of Proserpine
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/1983-3636.14.2.181-191Keywords:
The Abduction of Proserpine, Claudius Claudianus, Preface of the Book II, Orpheus, Hercules, elegiac coupleAbstract
The present work contains a brief study of the preface to Book II of The Abduction of Proserpine, by the Alexandrian poet Claudius Claudianus. It seeks to analyze the presence of Orpheus and his hymn to Hercules through the narrative of a mythological story, whose theme is the abduction of the daughter of Ceres by Pluto. The form of the preface, in elegiac couplets, is focused on and justified by a poem-prelude, a triumphal hymn to the arrival of Hercules to Thrace, and to the harmonization of Nature by the song of Orpheus. In the writing feathers of a skilled writer, it is the potentialities of the rhythm, in which the solemn hexameter is followed by the emphatic pentameter, that guarantees the tone of lament and exaltation that anticipates the suffering of the abducted and the joy of the abductor.
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