The following essays have as their theme the “ translation” of three conventional tropes in ancient and medieval poetry: the long simile of Homer and his imitators, the personified landscape of Roman pastoral, and the nature parallelism of the medieval love lyric. This book describe the uses of natural imagery in a few of the classic loci of each trope and to assess some of the conceptual and rhetorical demands to which these uses answered. Then selected a later version of the trope and considered the ways in which the imagery and its analogical function changed as these demands lost some of their original force or were supplanted by new ones.