More Old Shit

The dilettante philosopher,
Bewildered in logical jungles
Would do well to pursue
This fragment of wisdom,
Delivered from the hand
Of Scaurus Lecti Tityrus,
Roman, minor poet,
Of whom we learn
From Cicero,
In an equally brief
Piece of a longer letter, lost:

And you ought to peruse --
For its brevity and clarity,
Concision of expression,
The eloquence and wit
With which it sets forth,
In twelve books,
The general principles
Of Stoic logical discourse --
The work of a certain
Poet, lately published,
And more lately perished
Which I am equally tardy
(Though by the gods I had promised)
Myself in sending forth: Tityrus'
From the Ends, a perfect place to start.

That letter, evidently, in response
To Memmius, his dissertations
On physics and God. As for the poet,
We know little, and from extant
Remains have gathered less.
His turn of phrase is metaphorical,
His mode of thought is allegorical,
The hexameter at times deplorable,
But he abounds in common sense
And so memory gives him license.
We excerpt here a quaint bit of praise
For the study of logical nits:

Poorly hewn, the chop and turn of the axe
Hacking every which way, desperately, when
By careful craft, what was required
Was a pole to the eyes like the shaft
Of a blushing ship. Ply-wood drifts
About the streams of discourse,
And water reflects our heavenly dreams,
But what a rank pit of nonsense!
Would you fish without a hook,
Or hunt aside from dripping nets?
Let me teach you, lest the torrent of our speech
Rip apart your sails and blind you
As surely as Alcaeus' winds, vilely loosed
Along Libyan sands, and bearing dunes aloft,
The principles of syllogism,
Adzes for stippling a dark place,
And setting out doubtful giants of thought.