Forbidding Mourning

Memory in Odes I — 3 looks forward: the monumentum does not so much preserve the past as project Horace’s future immortality. Death, for Horace, has no sting. How then to cope with the death of others, particularly with the primary impulse arising from death and memory that is mourning? Can poetry compensate for death? Does a place exist for mourning in a poetics of presence? The usual threat to the ethics of carpe diem arises from anxiety about the future (death); less frequent, but no less disruptive, is brooding over the past (mourning). The injunction of C. I. 24, I. 33, and 2. 9 offers a simple answer: ‘don’t mourn’. But — there is always a ‘but’ — the very injunction not to mourn inscribes others’ mourning on the tombstone of the monumentum. Furthermore, the alternative Horace offers in C. 2. 9, praise Augustus Caesar, disturbs (Putnam 1990).

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