Ionica

A slim book of lyric poems that William Johnson Cory first published anonymously in 1858, Ionica gathers verse steeped in Greek and Latin learning: elegies, love lyrics, and quiet meditations on youth, friendship, and the passage of time. Its most famous piece is the elegy for Heraclitus, beginning “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,” a free English rendering of an epigram by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus that has since become an anthology staple. Cory wrote as a schoolmaster at Eton, and the poems carry the hush of a classical education felt as personal feeling rather than dry scholarship. For readers who prize tight, musical Victorian verse, it is a small volume that has outlasted many noisier ones.