Horace Keats echoed the opening of Horace's "Epodes" 14 in the opening lines of "Ode to a Nightingale". The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackeray produced a version of "Odes" in which Horace's questionable 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic "Odes" and "Epodes" 8 and 12. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.
Carmen Possum Carmen Possum Carmen Possum is a popular 80-line macaronic poem written in a mix of Latin and English. Its author is unknown, but the poem's theme and language enable one to surmise that he or she was from the United States of America and was either a teacher or at least a student of Latin. The poem's title represents a multilingual play on words: "Possum" is Latin for "I can"/"I am able to" and colloquial English for "opossum." While "carmen possum" sounds like a well-formed Latin phrase to untrained ears, its meaning in context reveals that at least this instance