Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 16

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 16 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear, Neptune [Poseidon], ruler of the sea profound, whose liquid grasp begirts the solid ground;

2

Primary

Who, at the bottom of the stormy main, dark and deep-bosom'd, hold'st thy wat'ry reign;

3

Primary

Thy awful hand the brazen trident bears, and ocean's utmost bound, thy will reveres:

4

Primary

Thee I invoke, whose steeds the foam divide, from whose dark locks the briny waters glide;

5

Primary

Whose voice loud founding thro' the roaring deep, drives all its billows, in a raging heap;

6

Primary

When fiercely riding thro' the boiling sea, thy hoarse command the trembling waves obey.

7

Primary

Earth shaking, dark-hair'd God, the liquid plains (the third division) Fate to thee ordains,

8

Primary

'Tis thine, caerulian daemon, to survey well pleas'd the monsters of the ocean play,

9

Primary

Confirm earth's basis, and with prosp'rous gales waft ships along, and swell the spacious sails;

10

Primary

Add gentle Peace, and fair-hair'd Health beside, and pour abundance in a blameless tide.

Text notes and edition context

Work

Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns compress cosmology, prayer, ritual address, and divine epithets into compact devotional poems especially suited to meditative and oracle-like reading; the corpus now also carries an Abel-based Greek witness aligned as honestly as possible against the existing Taylor English sequence.

Hymns | Original language: Ancient Greek

Late Hellenistic to early Imperial Greek religious poetry, often dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE

You are reading Hymn 16.

Primary Edition

Thomas Taylor

English | Verse

Late 18th-century English verse translation

Taylor's version is archaic, charged, and openly mystical, making it one of the strongest public-domain oracle-friendly English renderings of the Orphic Hymns.

This edition uses canonical hymn numbering and line-level segmentation, omitting the prefatory Musaeus proem from the main corpus model.

Source family: English aggregate translations

Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi | Public-domain source texts

English prose and verse classics consolidated into a single aggregate dataset.

Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.