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of thought (nunc meaning 'now when you are young', not 'this instant').50 West called the poem a 'dramatic monologue' (with explicit reference to Browning), and thereby separated the levels of communication which were still conflated by Jani: whereas Jani asked where the poem was written, West asks where it is set. The poet has constructed a situation (the 'setting') in which a speaker (in this case 'the poet' himself, according to West) is supposed to have uttered a certain speech act directed to an addressee; the task of interpretation is to identify the situation and understand the speech act. But the term "dramatic monologue" implies still more: it presumes that we are primarily interested in the speaker, in the character and attitudes revealed during the speech act, not in the intended effect on the addressee. Thus another proponent of reading the ode as 'dramatic monologue', Kenneth Quinn, believes that in the final strophes the speaker is reminiscing, 'pursuing vanished youth as much as giving advice to his companion'.51 Here the idea of 'monologue' is radicalized in opposition to the 'dialogical' conception of the Horatian ode championed by Richard Heinze.52 But both the 'dialogic' and the 'monologic' emphases are articulated within one and the same convention: that of reading lyric poetry as something spoken in the context of a situation. This convention may be powerful; it is not uncontested.53
A competing convention may again be introduced from an old German interpretation, again written by someone who was not primarily a classical philologist. In 1840 the German Goethe scholar Heinrich Düntzer argued that the 'symbol', which played so important a role in his main object of study, was also very important 'in the ancients generally and particularly in Horace'.54 When interpreting the 'Soracte Ode', he suggested that the winter in the first strophe is an 'image' (Bild) of old age, to be connected with the word canities in verse 17, which Düntzer paraphrases with 'winter of life' (Lebenswinter); 'the images of winter and of old age correspond, and at the end there apparently is opposition (Gegensatz) between the joy of youth and oppressive age'. The unity is sought in a system of correspondences and oppositions, and this system can be built up with the help of metaphorical (or 'symbolic') connections: winter can correspond with age if the two are in some ways analogous or similar. If we look at the later
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50 West (1967) 112.
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51 Quinn (1980) 13942. This view is very common: it is also found e.g. in Pöschl (1991) 3051 and in Edmunds.
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52 See "Die Horazische Ode" (from 1923) in Heinze (1972) 17289. Without reference to Heinze, Gregson Davis has recently re-emphasized the rhetorical character of the communication represented in Horace's Odes: Davis (1991).
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53 For a theoretical criticism see Culler (1985).
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54 Düntzer (1840) 13; his general discussion on symbolism is at 1319, on opposition at 1920, and his interpretation of the 'Soracte Ode' at 17174. On his Goethe studies cf. e.g. Weimar (1989), 404406.

 
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