Nobody expects a defence of a Roman poet to sound like a barroom brag, which is the fun of Eugene Field's poem. Its speaker is indignant on Horace's behalf. Solemn scholars, whom he calls "fossils," insist that Horace was a prude, and the speaker knows better. With the ladies, Horace was "always raising Hades," and his best work is "imbued" with his escapades. The scholars would "squelch the muse caloric" and pass off as "metaphoric" what "old Horace meant for facts." By the last stanza the portrait is complete: a night owl who "made Rome howl" while his patron Maecenas "paid the freight."
The central idea is that a classic writer shouldn't be embalmed by respectable readers. The poem makes the point through its form as much as its argument. Each stanza has eight short, bouncing lines with the stress landing at the start ("It is very aggravating"), a rhythm closer to a nursery jingle than to Latin dignity. The rhyme scheme runs in two blocks of three lines on one sound, each block followed by a line that rhymes with the stanza's other tag line: "prude" with "imbued," "acts" with "facts," "alive" with "25," "date" with "freight." Those tag lines land like punchlines.
The triple rhymes are the real showpiece, and they are deliberately strained. "Ladies" and "Hades" pair neatly, but the third rhyme needs "escapade his," so the line breaks awkwardly and the little word "his" gets dragged to the end. "Harm in a," "carmina" and "alarm in a" do the same, ending lines mid-phrase and forcing the reader to hurdle the line break. The poet seems to be showing off, like someone at a party who can't resist one more trick. It also suits the subject, since a poem about unbuttoned behaviour has a rhyme scheme that bursts its own seams.
The rhymes also turn the scholars' vocabulary against them. "Caloric," "sophomoric" and "metaphoric" are exactly the long, learned words a stuffy critic might use, and here they are chained together in a drumbeat of "-oric" sounds that makes pedantry sound ridiculous. "Carmina," the Latin word for Horace's songs, gets the same treatment, rhymed with a casual "harm in a."
The diction mixes registers in a way that keeps the poem lively. Latin names such as Maecenas and Lydia sit beside American slang: "raising Hades," "a daisy," "You bet," "painted up the city," "paid the freight." Rome becomes a modern town with a nightlife, complete with a man who treats his friends and picks up the bill. The animal imagery adds to this. "Owl," "prowl" and "howl" form a chain of sound and a chain of behaviour, with Horace as a creature of the dark streets. Against this stands the central contrast of dead and living. The critics are fossils, stone and bone, while Horace is "very much alive."
The poem is also funny about argument itself. In the third stanza the speaker fires off a piece of evidence ("Go, read that virile poem,-- / It is No. 25") like a lawyer citing an exhibit, and the numeral wedged into the verse is deliciously unpoetic. A sharp reader might notice the weakness in the case, though. The speaker treats poems as a diary, a "record of his acts," and quotes no line of Horace. That is just the literal reading he accuses the scholars of avoiding. Judging by the swagger of the tone, we aren't meant to take the trial too seriously.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it is both a joke and a small act of rescue. It reminds students that the author on the syllabus was once a person with appetites and a sense of humour, and that school can bury a writer under solemnity. Field, best remembered for his children's verse, shows that light verse is not careless verse. Every comic effect here, from the forced rhymes to the slang, depends on tight technical control.