Alfred Denis Godley (22 January 1856 – 27 June 1925) was an

Anglo-Irish Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the establis ...

classical scholar and author of humorous poems. From 1910 to 1920 he was Public Orator at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, a post that involved composing citations in Latin for the recipients of honorary degrees. One of these was for

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...

who received an Honorary D. Litt. in 1920, and whose treatment of rural themes Godley compared to

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: t ...

. He is known for his humorous verse, including

macaronic Macaronic language uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages). Hybrid words ...

pieces such as ''

The Motor Bus "The Motor Bus" is a macaronic poem written in 1914 by Alfred Denis Godley (1856–1925). The mixed English-Latin text makes fun of the difficulties of Latin declensions. It takes off from puns on the English words " motor" and " bus", ascribin ...

'', in which the English phrase "motor bus" is declined as though it were Latin. He was a contributor to several periodicals, especially ''

The Oxford Magazine ''The Oxford Magazine'' is a review magazine and newspaper published in Oxford, England.''The Oxford Magazi ...

'', which he edited from 1890, and published several collections of his poems. Godley's published works include:
''Verses to Order''
(1892)
''Aspects of Modern Oxford''
(1894)
''Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day''
(1896)
''Lyra Frivola''
(1899)
''Second Strings''
(1902)
''Oxford in the Eighteenth Century''
(1908)
''The Casual Ward''
(1912) * ''Reliquiae A. D. Godley'' (1926) He also published translations of

Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known f ...

(1921) and

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...

's ''Odes'' (1898). Godley was a first-cousin of The 1st Baron Kilbracken, who, as Sir Arthur Godley, was the long-serving

Permanent Under-Secretary of State for India This is a list of Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State and Permanent Under-Secretaries of State at the India Office during the period of British rule between 1858 and 1937 for India(and Burma by extension), and for India and Burma from 193 ...

References

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* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Godley, A.D. English classical scholars 1856 births 1925 deaths People from County Leitrim English male poets