I come back to stress what I said about taking the text as it comes, in the order in which it comes, and not searching for subject and verb first, as if English word order were normative. (Qimmik’s contrary advice is no doubt meant as an interim strategy for dealing with a difficult text, but I don’t hold with it even as such.) I think it’s an extremely important habit to develop, from the very first stages of reading Latin. Whether in prose or verse, the author puts the words in a certain order, the first word up front, and so on from there, and we ought to respect that in our reading, and simply work our way through from beginning to end.
Here for instance otium is the opening word. As such it has salience, prominence. We don’t yet know whether it will be nominative or accusative, or anything about how it will fit into the sentence, but we know it’s important, and we proceed from that starting point. (Its importance will become clearer and more pronounced in the next stanza.)
And so on all the way through. The word order here is in fact fairly prosaic. There’s only the very mild hyperbaton of in patenti prensus Aegaeo, the participle intervening between adjective and noun (or quasi-noun), the specificity of Aegaeo rounding off the participial phrase. (Adjectives routinely precede their nouns, which we can be kept waiting for.) At this point we might be expecting a noun to go with prensus, but when we find there isn’t one we can recognize that the utterance is sufficiently complete as it stands. (The expected nauta will eventually come, but not until the stanza’s final word, in oblique form. So otium and sailors will bracket the stanza.)
However convoluted Horace’s word order may sometimes seem (though not here), it would be a big mistake to think that he’s just shuffling the words around to fit the meter. Every word is carefully placed in relation to every other, sequentially. If we want to develop good reading skills we won’t go dismantling it and rearranging it, or picking out particular bits of it.
In the continuation, simul atra nubes etc., we find atra nubes sitting together as in prose, but mildly contrasting with this is certa fulgent sidera in the parallel clause (the same pattern as in patenti prensus Aegaeo but with different syntax; it’s a very common and satisfying word order, adjective and noun distributed either side of a controlling vb/pple/adj. in the center).[In prose too, e.g. virgines longam indutae vestem, Livy.] We are made to wait for the concluding nautis, which not only completes this particular clause and its preceding partner (which end with “moon” and “stars” respectively, and are each potentially complete) but neatly bundles up the whole stanza. Final words carry weight too. Looking through the rest of bk.2 I see what I’ve never noticed before, that all but two of the poems end with a noun. The two exceptions end with a verb. Nouns and verbs are heavy items.
The meter is important, an integral component of the poem. Verse is the match between words and meter, after all. Echoing one another are
|otium divos
|prensus Aegaeo
|condidit lunam
‒⏑‒‒‒, with the word accents falling on the first and 4th syllables.
Then we hit the double-short (between two longs) which typifies meters such as this, then ‒⏑‒‒|, which in the 3rd line is continued to the closing ‒⏑⏑‒‒ (sidera nautis, both nouns) resolving the whole thing. So the metrical scheme is a single line twice repeated, the last iteration extended by the short closing cadence. This final cadence, the same ending as the epic hexameter, makes for a strongly marked close (note how the meter is reinforced by the word-accents, sidera nautis). And stanzas are regularly end-stopped, i.e. the end of a stanza tends to coincide with the end of a sentence or major sense-break. So syntax and meter march in step.
But not always. Occasionally the syntax runs over from one stanza to the next (“enjambment”), markedly breaking the self-containedness of each successive stanza. In this ode that happens with the final two stanzas, where the repeated “you”s spill over into the final “me” stanza, binding them together. (Compare e.g. Odes 1.2, where the penultimate stanza runs over to the final one by a single word; likewise 2.8.18, again the critical verb.) The interrelation between meter and syntax controls the movement of the poem.
This particular stanzaic form is known as the Sapphic, because Sappho made much use of it. But so did Alcaeus, her contemporary. They shared the same metrical repertoire but tended to write on different themes, and Horace models himself more on Alcaeus than on Sappho.
Horace prided himself on being the first to introduce the “Aeolian” meters (i.e. the meters of Alcaeus and Sappho) into Latin, but he had a predecessor in Catullus, who wrote one ode in Sapphics (#51)—the final stanza of which (if in fact it does belong to the same poem) begins Otium—as also do the other lines of the stanza. Maybe this ode of Horace’s Is a kind of hommage to that?
Sorry to go on so. But I hope you (and anyone else who may read this) will get something out of it. Hopefully it willl enrich your reading.