"The Mediterranean" is a 1933 poem by the American writer Allen Tate.
"The Mediterranean" is written from the perspective of an American in correspondence with a classical heritage, especially Virgil's Aeneid. The protagonist visits a vaguely Aeneidean setting at the Mediterranean Sea and ponders about himself, the mythic dimension of classical culture, and the United States.[1]
The poem has an epitaph which is a modified version of a line from book I of the Aeneid, where Venus pleads with Jupiter for her son Aeneas and his men. The original quotation is Latin: Quem das finem, rex magne, laborum?, meaning "What end, great king, do you set to their ordeals?" In Tate's version, Latin: laborum (labor) has been replaced by Latin: dolorum (pain). According to Lillian Feder, this change was a way for Tate to say that modern man cannot really justify labor because he lacks a "heroic goal", and is left only with pain.
In The Kenyon Review, Vivienne Koch described the poem as "Coleridgean in form, and Arnoldian in symbolism".[2] Robert Dupree wrote in The Southern Review that "The Mediterranean" stands out, together with "The Cross" and "The Last Days on Alice", as a poem where Tate explores "the difference between merely perceiving (German: erkennen) lifeless units and truly understanding (German: verstehen) vital forms".[3]