Late Spring

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Throughout the poems of Theocritus there breathes the freshness of a spring morning, but it was a very late spring. His times were much like our own, marked by the turmoil of great cities, the invigorating quiet of the country side, the industry, the commerce, the wars and rumors of war, the spirit of unrest, the shifting of old ideals and beliefs, the pathos of the individual who finds himself confronted with a strange world. His interpretation of this varied scene gives to his poems a more modern tone than that possessed by much of our own contemporary poetry. To make the present-day reader comprehend this fact and all it implies, has been the translator’s task in this version. Henry Chamberlin has succeeded; he has taken Theocritus out of the shadow of academic tradition and placed him in the tingling sunlight of modern life.