What Is Callida Iunctura?
On 'deft dovetailings' in Horace, Byron, Donne, and elsewhere
In verbis etiam tenuis cautusque serendis
dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum
reddiderit iunctura novum.Horace, Ars Poetica, ll.46-8
Linking your words together in a line,
if you’re precise, and careful, you can nail
each deft dovetail to make a worn, dull, trite
word new and bright.
Callida iunctura is Horace’s phrase for a verbal juxtaposition that clicks, a ‘deft dovetailing’ or apt adjacency. Horace’s devotion to this trope accounts for what Petronius calls the curiosa felicitas, “painstaking felicity” or “diligent happiness,” of his language. Petronius’ own phrase is a happy example of the phenomenon, of which the Ars Poetica passage contains three others. First, the word iunctura (‘juncture’ or ‘joint’) itself, which before Horace seems to have been a literal term, not a rhetorical one (the more usual word was iunctio). Second, the way the word notum, ‘well-known, worn-out,’ has been made, by the change of one letter, novum, ‘new.’ Finally, serendis, ambiguous to the ancients and to us, between ‘planting / sowing’ and ‘linking, combining.’ (I opted for “linking” because of the carpenteresque quality of iunctura, which ‘dovetailing’ tries to catch.)
In the Odes callida iunctura operates first of all on the level of the word. Because Latin is an inflected language, its word order is more flexible than that of English, so Horace can pick any two words and click them together like flints to make a spark. The phenomenon occurs throughout the Odes, but I’ll confine myself to a few examples in the famous Soracte Ode (1.9; see my translation here), where we find flumina constiterint and virenti canities. The first means “the rivers stand still” and contrasts the root of ‘river’, flumen, derived from fluere, to flow, with a verb for ‘standing’ to achieve a sort of yoked Heraclitean and Parmenidean paradox: the flows freeze. These two words are surrounded by gelu acuto, ‘piercing ice,’ itself a mild oxymoron, in which the adjective emphasizes the ice’s hand-feel or frangible quality rather than, what is more relevant, its stultifying effect. The word order, however, does the job of conveying stagnancy and containment, even as the rhythm (FLUmina CONstiterINT aCUTO) evokes the liquid movement which has, for the moment, been arrested. The second pairing, virenti canities, makes a colorful contrast between “green” youth (virenti) and the “whiteness” (canities) of old age. The sentence in which this pair is found means something like “as long as the gloomy hoariness of age is absent from you in the greenness of your youth.” We are struck, first of all, by the visual effect of the two colors juxtaposed, and second, by the way the word placement belies the meaning of the sentence: from youth to age, the gap will close, and soon.
The poem contains one other plausible callida iunctura: Sabina diota, the Sabine jar. Though not directly adjacent, these two words agree grammatically, and sit one on top of the other, at the end of lines 7 and 8, creating a partial rhyme. Further interest accrues from geography: a diota is a kind of two-eared Greek jar, while ‘Sabina’ refers to the rural area near Rome where Horace lived in the rustic villa gifted to him by Maecenas. The jar is Greek but the wine is Sabine; Horace’s stanza may be Alcaic, derived from Archaic Aeolia, but his content is Roman, charged variously with personal and national urgency. Similarly he elsewhere (with another callida iunctura) calls himself a lyricus vates, a “lyric bard”—a phrase unremarkable in English, but which in Latin creates a clash or fusion of the Greek lyric and the Italian vatic tradition. This collocation hints at a second, conceptual kind of dovetailing: ultimately the Odes as a whole are a callida iunctura of Latin sensibility and Greek technique.
I hope the slightly impressionistic translation of the Ars Poetica passage given above may suggest one of the chief ways English language poetry can accomplish callida iunctura: less through word placement, as in Horace, than through rhyme, especially what I will call “significant rhyme.” I mean by this that the words being rhymed can be seen to have some kind of relationship to each other independent of the context (though context helps). Relationships between rhyme words are of two broad types, viz., similarity or difference, concord or clash. “Nail” and “dovetail” are of the first type, both being means a carpenter might employ to fasten two pieces together. “Trite” and “bright,” by contrast, are semi-opposites—at least insofar as the root of ‘trite,’ tritus, means ‘worn down by use,’ and could thus be assumed to indicate a want of polish. Many rhymes of both types are institutions in English poetry: among rhyming similitudes, one might name “sight / light,” “share / pair,” “shame / blame,” “mate / duplicate,” “lewd / turpitude;” for oppositions, “glad / sad,” “glory / transitory,” “laugh / epitaph,” “love / remove,” and the venerable “breath / death.” In general, a rhyme is best if it contains elements of both similitude and clash, as indeed is the case in a standard rhyme, where the initial sounds differ, but the vowel and final consonant chime.
Significant rhymes alone, of course, are not enough to make a “known word new,” as many are themselves shopworn, for good reason. A defter dovetail will enhance the pleasure of the rhyme by introducing some other inconcinnity between the rhyme words, rhyming different parts of speech, or words of different lengths, or one word with two. “Boulder” is a fine rhyme for “shoulder,” but “bolder” is better, since we are no longer pairing two nouns, but a noun and a comparative adjective; “told her” and “beholder” are still better. Brad Leithauser in Rhyme’s Rooms observes that spelling makes “potpourri” vastly superior to “popery” as a rhyme for “papery.” Byron’s rhyme in the following couplet is hilarious for many reasons:
There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in
Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine. (Don Juan V.5)
This rhyme contains three differences (clashes) and one similitude. The differences are: part of speech (verb with noun), number of words (2:1), and register (low to high); but conceptually the jointure is tight, since the Euxine (or Black Sea) is indeed, as the couplet claims, stormy. The best part of it is the clash in register—Byron has yoked a snootily donnish toponym to a verb at home in the most roach-infested dive bar. Chapeau.
When turning to the conceptual callida iunctura in English, one thinks first of the “metaphysical” violent yoking of two unlike things by means of metaphor: Donne’s body, supine in sickness, as a “flat map,” or “restlessness” as a “pulley” to yank men up to God in Herbert’s poem, or Crashaw comparing Magdalene’s weeping eyes to “walking baths” (this last is redolent of Persian poetry, viz., Vis and Ramin as “walking cypress trees”). Of course, when listing metaphysical conceits, Donne’s comparison of two lovers to the legs of a compass is always Exhibit A. Ryan Wilson has brilliantly reversed Donne’s image in a sonnet called “Gather Ye,” which came second in the 2024 First Things Poetry competition:
Now, by exposed roots, I glimpse rusted shears
Half-buried in the mulch, the separate bladesLike hands of a stopped clock, for which all hours
Are one, the moment of eternity,
Boundless as space, and just as void, and frigid—
Or wronged lovers, whose sundered hearts grow rigid
With loneliness, until they cannot be
Coaxed by a touch, and do not care for flowers.
These lovers are physically together, but something has occurred which soon will drive them apart forever. They are compared to “rusted shears / Half-buried in the mulch,” whose blades will never again be joined, “rigid / With loneliness.” In this way Wilson’s shears are the opposite of Donne’s compass:
But though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
It is hard not to hear a bawdy pun on “erect” from the man who gave us “But sucked on country pleasures, childishly.” Yet the most Horatian moment in Donne’s Valediction comes a few stanzas earlier:
Dull sublunary lovers’ love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
The close juxtaposition with “sense” seems to suggest a new etymology for absence, as if it derived from ab-sentire, and meant something like “separation from sense / physical perception” (as ab means “away from,” therefore “away from sense”) though of course it actually derives from ‘absum, abesse,’ to be away. In this stanza, wordplay, word placement, and context deftly combine to render ‘absence’ new.