Dryden’s ‘Happy the Man’

By Scott Horton

Frans Hals, The Merry Drinker (ca. 1630)

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

–John Dryden, Horat. Ode 29. Book 3. Paraphras’d in Pindarique Verse, pt vii (1685) in: The Poems of John Dryden vol. 1, p. 436 (J. Kinsley ed. 1958)