The other evening, in this cold winter which reminds me of earlier, cold, snowy, bright ones, I was doing just what the Roman poet Horace ordered, in the beautiful ninth poem of his first book of odes.

Darkness was falling and the temperature plunging so I lit a fire and opened a bottle of wine and curled up on the sofa to watch Powell and Pressburger’s subtle film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Well, Horace lived before the time of television, and the only view from our bay window was of the privet hedge, terraced houses opposite and a patch of ultramarine sky, not the snowy summit of Mount Soracte, or Soratte as it is now called, and the trees labouring under their heavy blanket of snow. Still, Horace’s winter recipe remains the best one around. “Pile logs on the fire, unfreeze the cold, Thaliarchus, and take down that jar of four-year-old Sabine wine” – Horace is talking about the unpretentious produce of his own farm.

Leave the rest to the gods, the poem goes on. The storm now raging will suddenly calm, and then the cypresses and the old ash trees will no longer be shaken. They are in the grip of the elements, and we too are at the mercy of those elements, just a layer of bricks removed; we are not immune from sudden shocks, including economic ones, and the immutable laws of nature. Who knows whether we, no less than the trees, can bear the weight of the snow?

Horace’s poem achieves its good cheer in the face of winter, cold, darkness, transitoriness and death. It does not deny them. With just a sudden change of mood, we could be facing the grim prospect which Eliot contemplates in East Coker, at the bleakest point of The Four Quartets: we all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces. Or in contemporary terms, we could be facing a re-run of the 1930s, with worldwide terror at its end. But that is not the direction in which Horace leads us.

What’s the secret of his cheer? Well, in a sense, there isn’t a secret. Horace’s secret is an open one, open to all. It’s all there, in front and around you, if you have your senses in play, and your heart in tune, or at least open to tuning. The snowy view, the mountains and labouring trees are not special in any way; they are what the day, this particular day, offers, here, now.

But one difference between Horace and Eliot, nearly two thousand years later, is companionship, or companionableness. With Eliot, the poetic seeker or explorer always seems to be alone, facing the dark prospect, hearing the half-forgotten, unobtainable laughter. Horace, on the other hand, celebrates companionship. We have no idea of the identity of Thaliarchus, addressed in this poem; he sounds more like a friend than a lover, but with Horace you can never be sure. But he is certainly a companion, a drinking companion (don’t broach that jar on your own), a winter, fireside companion, someone to share the view with.

Companionship may sound lukewarm compared to the ecstasies and apotheoses of romantic love. Horace doesn’t make great claims for Thaliarchus, or the other companions and lovers addressed in the odes, with the glaring exception of his patron Maecenas and his emperor Augustus. We don’t know how close they really were, or are. A certain distance is maintained. But that distance could be healthy. It guards against the excessive and ultimately egotistical identification which darkens the heart of romantic love.

Romantic love invites us to an intensity which denies death, or blanks it out – or perhaps even reproduces it, as in the greatest expression of romantic love in music, the “Liebestod” which concludes Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Horace’s warm companionableness, on the other hand, keeps death steadily in view, without trying to outface or vault over it. Death is always there in these poems, as the boundary set to our existence, and our friendships; it hangs equally over the head of the plutocrat and the peasant.

In the face of death, is it really enough to say “enjoy the view, pour the wine”? This is where transitoriness comes in. If you really look, and live, Horace says, you will see that everything is transitory: the wind will die down, the snow will melt, the frozen river will flow again. That jar of wine will not last long (though a great wine can last as long as a human being); let’s hope we outlive it. Living in the moment doesn’t mean we can hold on to it; it means we can appreciate its poignant aliveness, passingness and beauty.

But the Soracte ode doesn’t end there. If Horace might be sceptical about Wagnerian grand passion, he is not really sceptical about love. At the end of the poem, we are suddenly in quite another season and place. It is warm summer in Rome, and “under night, under darkness” the laughter of the girls draws the young man to the trysting-place.

This is where love-tokens are exchanged, symbolic promises of joys to come, the ring pulled from the finger of the girl who only pretends to resist.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres