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Title: Virgil & Lucretius
Passages translated by William Stebbing
Author: William Stebbing
Release Date: September 27, 2021 [eBook #66399]
Language: English
Produced by: Sonya Schermann and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGIL & LUCRETIUS ***
VIRGIL AND LUCRETIUS
VIRGIL & LUCRETIUS
PASSAGES TRANSLATED BY
WILLIAM STEBBING
HON. FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF
‘SIR WALTER RALEGH: A BIOGRAPHY’
‘FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE: IMPRESSIONS’
‘TRUTHS OR TRUISMS’
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1917
Contents
PAGE
_VIRGIL_
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 3
PRAISE OF ITALY 14
HAPPY HUSBANDMEN 17
A TARENTINE GARDEN 25
A GOLDEN AGE 29
LIMBO AND TARTARUS 36
ELYSIUM 72
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD 90
THE GATES 91
THE GHOSTS 92
EURYALUS AND PALLAS 93
THINGS 94
_LUCRETIUS_
_‘DE RERUM NATURA’_
HYMN TO VENUS 97
PHILOSOPHY 101
‘MUSICAL AS IS APOLLO’S LUTE’ 105
THE FEAR OF DEATH 107
EARTH’S DECAY 121
PRIMEVAL MAN 124
IPHIGENIA 139
MATERNAL LOVE 142
ECHO 144
THE SEASONS 147
VIRGIL
Orpheus and Eurydice
P. VIRGILII MARONIS Georgicon, Bk. IV. vv. 453-527
This is the tale old Proteus by the sea
Erst told of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Virgil at Parthenope overheard,
And has resung it, if not word by word.
Orpheus had been espoused but one short hour,
And went to gather roses for the bower,
When a rejected wooer, mad with love,
Sprang upon the light-footed nymph, and strove
For an embrace; she, heeding nought, alas!
Trod on a serpent sleeping in the grass;
And when on the instant, answering her cries,
Her Bridegroom knelt there, kissing her closed eyes,
Half fainting with the sense of all her charms,
Sudden he woke, a dead Bride in his arms!
Not his alone the woe and misery;
Nor he sole mourner for Eurydice;
From Rhodope to Pangæa’s peaks, above
The cave where Boreas hid his Attic love,
Through the fierce realm of Rhesus, echo bore
The wail to the wild Getes, to the shore
Of Hebrus, while in forest, hill, and dale
The tuneful Dryads told the tearful tale.
But how conjure by the best ordered show
Of grief an irremediable woe!
Orpheus fled Pity, and neighbourly Care;
All human fellowship but his despair.
With but that and his lyre communion still
He held, from dawn to sunset, then until
The planets rose and sank, banishing sleep,
Keeping sad vigils by the moaning deep,
Thinking each shadow on the desert shore
Was his lost Bride restored to life once more.
And was it days, weeks, months, or years?—at last
From the ghost-haunted waters coastward passed—
Whether Goddess, or Woman—a pale shape,
That beckoned to the far Laconian Cape
Of Tænarus, where the dread cavern draws
Each generation down its hungry jaws.
At the first touch of his lyre opened wide
The lofty gates of Hell; he paced inside
The grove impenetrable by but him;
A darkness that might be felt, stark, and grim,
Where bide the awful ministers of Dis,
With hearts that never beat at prayer but his.
And still the notes rose bravely; and still he
Came, calling on his lost Eurydice;
On her, sole burden of his love-lorn cries—
One theme informing countless melodies.
At the sweet sorrowing, awhile a hush—
Amazement—throughout Hades; then a rush—
A quick rustling rather, as when a flight
Of birds seeks where to sleep at fall of night,
Or, cow’ring, courts, against an icy breeze,
Multitudinous foliage of trees.
Thus—for the jailers ceased from watch and ward,
Witched themselves by the wailing, wandering bard—
Flocked, from the unamiable swamp, which feeds
Nothing on its black slime but grisly reeds—
Where steams and groans Cocytus, and Styx holds
Prisoners within its nine coils and folds—
A legion of the newly dead, entombed
In Limbo, till ripe to be tried and doomed;
A fearful gathering, bodies stripped of life,
Yet moving; some in pairs, husband and wife,
Girls who had virgins died, and beardless youths,
With parents’ kisses warm upon their mouths;
And some though freed from flesh ignorant where
Their dwelling fixed, sad phantoms, thin as air.
Each waiting judgment; now forgetting all
Griefs in a greater, in the musical
Challenge to Dis to yield its prey; while, on
And on, the chant rolled, till its way it won
Past the black realms of ancient Erebus,
Past too the torture cells of Tartarus,
Where cold-blue snakes, the Furies’ locks that tied,
By the trespassing strain, charmed, stupefied,
Drew in their fangs, Ixion’s wheel made pause,
And, one shocked wide gape, stood Cerberus’s triple jaws.
At last, at last! a Palace flaming high
With angry flashes from a mocking sky;
And, seated on twin thrones, the King and Queen,
Garbed in life-which-is-death’s Infernal sheen;
Both silent; but, as whispered soft and low
The lyre, stern Proserpine remembered how
A girl plucked flowers. As nursery rhymes
On dying ears, returned old happy times,
Sunshine, and the sweet thought, if mixed with pain,
A mother’s toil to have her child again.
Paradise for Hell’s Queen once more to know
That She had heart to feel for others’ woe!—
For her Lord to see, transfigured, ere a crown
Burned on her brow, the maid he had brought down
To Hell; and she answering his eyes, cried:
“Minstrel, depart in peace, and with thy Bride!”
The Manes registered the high decree,
Adding that, since no mortal eyes may see
Spirit take flesh, Orpheus must be resigned,
Till Earth was reached, never to look behind.
And as they wrote and sealed what their Queen spoke,
From unseen instruments weird music broke,—
An owlet’s hooting, a swan’s dying cry—
A rapture near akin to agony.
Orpheus turned, or was led; more felt than heard—
Passing the gates—as when a babe has stirred,
Dreaming—a sigh; but, venturing no glance
Anywhere, or speech, walked as in a trance.
Save, as if strings snapt, the lyre stammered out
A spasm of jarred notes wandering about,
Nor glad nor sad; the harper scarce aware
Of the music that he made; or how far
He had gone, through what scenes of bale or bliss,
Since he quitted the royal halls of Dis;
Trembling only lest the whole dream might take
Flight, like his rapt girl-Bride, and he awake
To find himself, widowed, lost, as before,
Companionless upon the wild sea-shore.
And yet. Was it not breath, a woman’s breath,
Fanning his cheeks? Could even unkind Death
Have the heart to cheat, with the goal so near?
Was not the light he saw day’s, warm and clear?
And, sure, the landscape spread before his view
Was of meadows and woods, all which he knew?
Phantoms, begone! Here was his spring-tide come,
And his Bride with him, out of Hades, home!
Sudden, an avalanche—compound—Earth, Hell—
Long chained—irresistible passion—fell,
Defying thought, fear! his hand left the string
But just caressed; his throat forbore to sing—
That he might clasp and kiss;—one look behind!
A world of travail scattered to the wind!
Heav’n forgives seven sins if love the cause;
The plea doubles guilt when Hell’s the brok’n laws.
Hark how the grinning host of demons howls!
And oh! the crash pealing over Hell’s pools!
Naught heard he, but that cried Eurydice,—
Regained, re-lost:
“Alas! for Me and Thee!
I feel hands, the inexorable Fates,
Speeding back within the Infernal gates;
My swimming eyes, just tasting of Earth’s light,
I know are being sealed by a large Night.
See! how I stretch vain arms around, and grope
For thee in darkness, hoping without hope!
E’en now how lightly should I life resign,
Could I remember I had once been thine!”
Silence! From sight, hearing, passed she apart,
Leaving measureless void within his heart.
He ran, striving to clutch a ghost in vain;
Pursuing with vain words; never again
Looked he upon her; nor could he prevail
Upon Hell’s Ferryman to let him scale
The walls, swimming the moat, and again win,
By weeping, or by music, his way in,
Then move or force its warders to restore
His stolen Bride to his fond arms once more.
Poor Ghost! No third time destined she to float
Over foul Styx in Charon’s crazy boat!
But, hapless, doomed to swell the cavalcades
Of lifeless bodies, and of fleshless shades;
Nor one, nor other she; just borne along,
Drift on the tide—refrain to an old song—
Yet, flickering, like shadows on a wall,
Or rainbow gleaming from a water-fall,
A throb, a thrill, a joy though set in dole—
For Lethe could not wash away the whole—
That she reward had been of each sharp pang
By Orpheus borne, theme of each song he sang.
Conscious if voiceless, she. And he? The lyre
Which, while its master hoped, had quenched its fire,
Was ever confidant of his despair,
The instrument commissioned to declare
His wrongs. They tell who know, that in a cave
Humid and bare, desolate as new grave,
At the foot of a tall cliff, hung with ice,
By Strymon’s gloomy waters, for full twice
A hundred days and nights, singing he wept;
Like a nightingale cruelly bereft
Of all her young ones in the poplar grove,
With nothing for her any more to love,
Or live for, but to gaze upon her nest,
And mourn, the night through, all she once possessed,
Till overflows the wood where she complains,
With the sweet melancholy of her strains.
So longed he, and so played; changing at times
To lands yet lonelier, and harsher climes;
Arctic ice-fields crossed, forded snowy Don,
Camped on Scythian heaths, where yews keep-on
Eternal pall of frost;—always in quest
Of postern into Hell, whence he might wrest
Audience of its Lords, and with his tale
Of unreal gifts, all pre-ordained to fail,
Oblige them to repeat for very shame
A boon Hell granted only to reclaim.
No more than this? This his one hope and theme?
This, sum of his powers? And this a dream!
A dream? And yet the key—magic of Art!—
Which could unlock at will a tiger’s heart,
And, as notes rose and fell in cadence, made
Triumphal arches of each sylvan glade;
For true passion a hearing aye commands,
And speaks a tongue all Nature understands.
No more than that it had killed care to bless
More than one life, and left a wilderness!
And that it fell on Virgil to recall
A legend—would that it lied!—how, when all
The land’s women, Bacchus-fired, and distraught
By hymns that Orpheus in glad days had taught,
Had pressed him into the wild dance they led
Nightly through torch-lit forests, and he fled
In horror, as at treason to his love,
They, infuriate more the more he strove,
Followed, reckless of all but the mad chase,
Down to the Hebrus from the hills of Thrace,
And tore him limb from limb: but still the tongue,
As the wild current rolled the head along,
Called on “Eurydice”; and till the sea
Received it, bank to bank returned “Eurydice”!
Pardon, my Master, if I’ve dared re-think
A thought, or, standing on the outer brink
Of a deep pool, would with a pebble thrown
Measure your depth of feeling by my own.
But You the cause, the tempter;—who could read
A tale like yours, and not pursue each deed
From impulse to the act—complete a scene
With such small details as there may have been?
So cunningly you made romance to live—
I trespassed on your stage; You must forgive!
Praise of Italy
P. VIRGILII MARONIS Georgicon, Bk. II. vv. 136-176
This our world has beauties everywhere;
Grand are your forests, Medes, and wondrous fair;
Travellers to Blest Araby have told
Of sands that grow frankincense, streams of gold;
Strange legends run of bulls with fire for breath,
Dragons sowing plains with myriad teeth,
Till in the place of harvest’s yellow ears
A battle field gleamed with steel helms and spears.
Leave me the land I live in, where kind earth
Yields real grain, a hundredfold at a birth;
And purple grapes of every laden vine
Laugh with the girls that tread them into wine.
Glad all life! In the olive, as each day
Ripens its juices; cattle, as they play
Amid rich herbage; the warrior steed,
Curvetting with arched neck about the mead.
Even the snow-white ram, and mighty bull,
Joy, as, Clitumnus, on them dashes full
Thy hallowed flood, to be chosen to escort
A Roman Triumph to Jove’s Temple-Court.
Ever; from young Spring, that, keeping the doors
Of Winter and of Summer, with soft show’rs
Melts March frosts, and returning with a gay,
Late Zephyr laughs the Dog-star’s heats away;
To Summer, that at call, whate’er the Hour,
Re-stocks the fold, and bids the orchard flow’r.
Fruitfulness everywhere—all things good;
No savage lions, tigers mad for blood,
No scaly pythons, gathered, coil on coil,
Into one orb, to hurl it on the spoil;
No wolf’s-bane, with its mystic-purple bloom
Tempting rash herb-collectors to their doom;
But Nature, kind in that which She denies,
Kind above all whenever She allies
With human effort.—
Mark how She has filled
The vales with rocks that cry: “Come, take, and build!”
How, to crown the work, She has bid beside
Each citadel’s sheer walls a river glide.
No Libyan desert ours, but a land
Of many streams, where in cool shadows stand
Knee-deep the still kine; and of lakes good store,
Como’s to Garda’s sea-imitating roar;
Of highways for her navies, east and west,
To circulate, world-through, Rome’s high behest;
Glorious service theirs, though the salt waves,
Sulking outside new ports in echoing caves,
Affect to murmur at decrees they know,
When Cæsar sets them bounds, they must allow.
Even for silver, brass and gold itself,
If Italy deigned boast of vulgar pelf,
She might just claims to be considered raise.
But she has titles, nobler far, to praise.
Hers the seed-bed, harvest, ever have been
Of men, of fighters, hardened, sharp, and keen,
Bred north and south, east and west, with, from Rome,
Chiefs to lead forth, and bring them victors home.
Band of mighty Shades! Ah! mightiest Thou
Who schoolest the insolent Hindoo now,
How weak is strength, valour no better than
Cowardice, when our Cæsar leads the van!
Hail to Giver of wane, and oil, and corn!
Hail, Shrine of ancient peace, ere Jove was born!
Hail, Mother of Men, real Men, source and spring
Of precious arts I love, of all I sing!
At thy call, my Italy, parent, nurse,
Unsealing primal well-heads, I rehearse
Pure rustic themes long since discoursed upon
Myrtle-clad slopes of musical Helicon!
Happy Husbandmen
Georgicon, Bk. II. vv. 458-540
Of all rewards that Heav’n bestows on toil,
Which is the peer of yours who till the soil!
Would you exchange with them who sue the great
For place or alms? Read, as they pass the gate,
On this face wrath, envy on that, and gall;
And, worst, the death of self-respect on all.
’Tis yours to breathe an atmosphere of peace,
Suitors of earth that knows not of caprice;
That grieves to disappoint a hope, and pours
Into expectant laps a choice of stores,
Sounding changes high and low, grave and gay,
On the vast organ Nature loves to play.
Learn from a farm to work, and never tire;
An acre is various as a shire;
Labour and rest there alternating meet,
Each indistinguishably good and sweet;
Ah! the murmurous quiet in the wide
Homesteads, where, in the intervals, beside
Bubbling brooks, in cool valleys, ’neath green boughs
You slumber, lullabied by lowing cows.
Winter anon, earth’s holiday; and then
To rouse the wild boar in his fenny den:
Sport dear to youth’s blood racing fast and pure,
Content with simple joys, trained to endure.
Nor at one season, but throughout the year,
Be sure the Gods fail not of love and fear:
While no chimney corner but makes a shrine
Where to tend a grandsire all but divine.
If Justice has not yet forsaken Earth,
’Tis that she lingers on some cottage hearth!
Ancestral guardians of my home forgive,
Pan, too, and Sylvan, if I do not live
The life I praise; but ere I knew its charms,
The choir of Muses wooed me to their arms,
Taught me an eager child their sacred lore,
Arts I still love; and fain had taught me more—
To map Heav’n’s paths, number its stars, and trace
Why wanes the moon; when veils the sun his face,
Hastes purple-clad to sink on Ocean’s breast,
And stays Night’s course for him and Man to rest;
Where growling earthquakes breed; and why seas feign
To roar in wrath, and straightway laugh again.—
Something I learned; and blest had been my state,
If gifted with the will and powers by Fate
To follow Nature to her primal cause,
And coax from her the meaning of her laws;
Like him, too early lost, who told us how
To spurn at all it is not Man’s to know,
To count it shame to dread Death, as to weep
At putting off our shoes to go to sleep.
But my blood chills—poor thing, it cannot find
Air it may breathe—where soars aloft sheer Mind.
Yet why lament that the Seer’s part is not
For me, when mine the sweet, if humbler, lot—
To light and feed a poet’s holy fire;
Rapt from myself to feel a God inspire
The visions that I see, the words I pen—
The message that I bring my fellow men—
Bound, if the Muse decrees, to soar away
Where rolls Spercheios, or girls dance and play
On Spartan hills, or to some forest dell
Of snowy Hæmus; while, I know it well,
That far so ever as I seem to roam,
My spirit always will return to home,
Predestined to no inglorious themes—
My native fields, and woods, and sparkling streams,
And the race no less that those vales frequent,
Simple husbandmen, wholly innocent
Of ill, though shrewd, keen to resent a wrong;
For whom I meditate my pastoral song.
Fancy will wander oft to lands unknown,
But finds the thoughts to dwell on in its own.
Italian peasant I, and would rehearse
Our peasants’ virtues in Italian verse.
Let me recall a neighbour good and kind,
Loving the ancient methods, disinclined
To quit his fathers’ ways; nor bard nor sage;
Who just has served the soil from youth to age.
No Mysteries for him; enough to adore
The rustic Gods his sires revered of yore.
All one to him who shall the Consul be—
This or that—our Rome stands eternally.
He cares not about Kings; so much he knows;
Rome crowned; and, when she wills, Rome can depose.
Faint echoes reach the country from the Town
Of swarms of Dacian pirates rowing down
Ister; and of brothers by brothers slain;
Cæsar’s charge that—and his to garner grain.
Sometimes the calm is broken by the wealth
Of courtiers seeking country air for health;
Why envy when the whole that they possess
Has not distilled a drop of happiness!
Or one may stumble by, diseased and old,
With scarce a rag to shield him from the cold;
The good-man helps; he pities; does not grieve;
Is grateful he can give, need not receive.
Statesmen will strive, he counts his orchard’s yield,
And reaps his harvest from the willing field.
A realm may fall, loud lawyers rule the Court,
Heirships be changed by some forgot report,
Adventurers new seas explore, or rush
On foreign swords in thirst for gold, or push
Into proud palace halls; while he instead
Drives his curved plough, and mows the yellow mead.
Hence herds deserving well their ample cheer,
With all the genial labours of the year.
Hence too the tribute that he gladly brings
To his Penates, modest offerings—
Kind “Little People,” blest where’er ye come
Compacted of an atmosphere of Home!
Hence, above all, what may his native land
Of labour, store, nay, of his life demand!
True Roman, few as he of Rome so proud;
None readier to give her goods and blood!
Meantime no season comes without its call;
Not one would he away; he loves them all—
Cries between laugh and wail from lambs new-born,
Sheaves in the close-packed barn of golden corn,
Groans of content from home-returning sows,
The woodlands’ crackling thuds of severed boughs,
Pyramids of red apples, row on row,
And vineyards purpling in late Autumn’s glow,
Till with the olives’ rendering of oil
Winter winds up the victories of toil.
Content the master, with glad welcoming eyes,
As crop to crop succeeds, each a surprise,
Yet taking each its place in order clear,
The grand procession of the fruitful year!
Harmonious whole, made up, hopes and cares,
Mind’s, Body’s work, in not unequal shares;
With grateful pauses, as when whirlwinds cease
To riot in a wood, and there is peace.
Thus Eve; Man’s truce, nor his alone, for play;
But Nature’s universal holiday.
Stall-wards, devious steps, the cattle pass,
Their udders richly furnished; on the grass
With harmless horns kids wrestle; while a band,
Children and Wife, contend to clasp his hand,
And kiss his lips; he happy in the pride
Of love which chastity has sanctified.
And days as well there are, when the farm feasts,
The host reclining amid friends, his guests;
High flame the hissing logs, wine-cups are crowned,
And vows and healths to Gods and men go round;
On equal terms master with shepherds vies,
As archer, or as wrestler, for a prize.
Thus sprang a race, the wonder of the earth,
Suckled by Sabine mothers—as, at birth,
Their king by wild werewolf—twin strains with those,
Blending of Tuscan lords, high Lucumos;
Till from Seven Hills, in one wall, see come,
Mistress of a world, Imperial Rome!
Noblest of Monsters! beautiful as brave,
And strong at once to conquer, and to save.
Yet sometimes dream I legends strange and sweet,
Ere Nymphs nursed Jove upon a hill of Crete,
Of days when Earth, a garden bright and fair,
Gave Man fruits as easily as the air
He breathed; when all that trod or flew had part
In a large brotherhood of sense and heart,
And it could scarce have seemed to human mind
More hideous to batten on its kind,
Than with as unnatural zest to heap
Impious boards with flesh of steer and sheep;
When no war-bugle blew its summons shrill,
Or forge had fitted hands with swords to kill;
When Saturn planted here below his throne—
The Age of Gold, when Heaven and Earth were one!
A Tarentine Garden
Georgicon, Bk. IV. vv. 116-148
My helm points landwards; and yet would I fain
Re-commission my Muse, and sail again.
The breezes, as I coast by Pæstum, bring
Its twice-blowing rosebeds’ scent; I would sing,
But for emulous themes, how to inlay
A garden’s borders with a rich array
Of rainbow-hued gems that a loving care
Joys to persuade them in due course to wear.
Use and delight will play an equal part,
Where’er the garden’s master has a heart.
How fresh the curly endive there! how green
The parsley on the bank! Almost is seen
A melon swell, as with good cheer it fills
Itself ’mid the grass from glistening rills!
Everywhere a hand and head that know,
To harvest in its season, we must sow,
And from a sense no less of order, will
Take heed that the late-blooming daffodil,
Pliant acanthus, myrtles from sea-wave
Drawing the pungent fragrance that they have,
And grey-green ivies, form each its own zone
In one plot—many gardens out of one.
For I have marked what wonders may be wrought
By gardeners mixing seeds and roots with thought.—
In shadows craggy Tarentum’s tow’rs throw,
An old Cilician, cast up, who knows how,
By war, or vagrant mood, had grant, or none—
Some waste acres—to live or starve upon.
Though black Galeso waters a wide space
Of yellow cornfields, and rich gardens grace
Villas hard by, the scrub of this poor Stray
Would, it might seem, have not sufficed to pay,
As rough ploughland, a yoke of oxen’s keep,
Or meanly pastured half a dozen sheep.
As for potherbs, its thorns as likely would
Have brought forth grapes as a man’s simplest food.
Yet somehow sprang, to share with them the ground,
Colewort, vervain, with, here and there, around,
Lilies, and poppies—scant crop; but not great
The Stranger’s hopes. At night returning late
To the cheerless hut his own hands had raised,
Laden with unbought dainties these, he praised
His happy fortune from a more grateful breast
Than a king seated at his unearned feast!
I marked how he began; when next I came,
Transformed the garden! Gardener the same.
His the first roses, though an unkind spring,
And ripe apples ere leaves were yellowing.
While frost splintered the rocks, and ice and snow—
Winter fighting March—bridled Galeso’s flow,
He plucked Iris tresses, in mock distress
At missing Zephyrs, Summer’s tardiness!
Not his hives to fail in queen bees; no swarm
Of his was ever known to come to harm;
Earliest the honey from his combs pressed;
For who judged like him which flow’rs bees love best?
Master the old man in tree-craft as well;
His, choicest stone-pines, limes; for he could tell
By instinct where to plant; and as for yield
Of fruit, spring’s promise autumn aye fulfilled!
He planted, and transplanted, as he chose
Full-grown elms, hardwood pears, plum-grafted sloes;
Even a leafy plane he dared to move—
Nor hurt—to a fresh home within the grove.
Two thousand years ago the old man died;
And Nature that, with some laws, he defied,
Will, patient, not forgetful, at his death
Have returned arcades, flow’r beds, to waste heath.
Tradition shadows not their place.—
His name?
The Bard has not handed it down to fame.
A sudden vision of his youth, no more
Than a parenthesis of lines, some score.
In words how little we are told;—and yet
How impossible for us to forget
That haunting figure, in his parterres made
Out of the wild with his own brain for spade!
For not in Virgil’s verse alone he lives;
In all Earth’s gardens the “Corycian” survives!
A Golden Age
Bucolica, Ecl. IV. Pollio vv. 1-63
Muses of Sicily, if I rehearse
Our peasants’ pleasures, toils, in Latin verse,
I owe your idylls that my heart beats true
To the kind honest lot that once I knew;
And frames visions I have seen,
Still, in woods and pastures green.
Nature, changed, lives. Ages-leaves in a blast—
Flutter away, in dreams, all dead and past;—
Fleeting, alike ease that pays righteous toll,
And triumphs won from agonies of soul.
For when Fancy plays at Thought
In Dreamland, Time, Space are nought.
Slumber I, or wake? Is it that the long
Iron Age dies, as in the Sibyl’s song?
Does Justice return? Saturn wear his crown?
From high Heaven does a God-child come down?
Does Pollio’s Consulate
The Golden Age reinstate?
Reconciler of old friends! Yours the care
To efface bloodstains of the past, prepare
For the advent of a Peace-maker, heal
Aches—foreboding fresh horrors—that we feel.
He comes! be a path paved, meet
To be trod by Holy feet!
A noble task to clear and keep a space
Where you shall model a heroic race
On yourself—fit, if few, companions made
For their future Chief, nor without the aid
Of Gods visible, as he
In his Paradise shall be.
In the womb now! and in their charge the Birth,
Sun’s, Moon’s, of the most precious Thing on Earth!
Not for ten full months must the Babe see light!
Keep watch and ward, Day’s Lord, Lady of Night!
Be Peace throughout! hold your breath,
Thunders above, fires beneath!
Born! you lie, Babe, lapped in the calm, warm air;
Earth laughs with blissfulness to see you there.
Goats fain would suckle you; while you are near,
They feel they have nought from wild beasts to fear.
Snakes die; nightshade bids its root
Nurture no fair traitor fruit.
Touch the ground; flowers of all hues will spring;
Of sweetest scent, and with no thorns to sting;
Such as the common wayside thickets know,
Or nowhere but in palace gardens blow.
Ivy, Assyrian nard
Sue alike for your regard;
And grateful you for each; the mean, the rare
To your frank childishness as welcome are.
Tossing your naked limbs on the glad sod
You know not you will be—perhaps are—a God!
Yea, Child, who, than you all love,
More Divine in Heav’n above!
Ev’n when babyhood becomes boyhood, still
Nature spreads her bounty in sheer good-will.
Honey from the sturdy oak, like dew, drips;
Briers press purple grapes on thirsting lips;
And from unploughed fields are borne
Yellow sheaves of beardless corn.
But stifle human wants with plenty, lust
Of unneighbourliness creeps from the dust.
Merchants here and there about ocean roam,
Snatching subsistence given free at home;
Robbers build forts whence to spoil;
Shares rend the protesting soil.
Germs, mixed—crude, human restlessness—its need
For peril and adventure—or rank greed,
That had hid underground, from shame to break
“God’s Truce,” and keep the wondrous Babe awake,
Had been struggling to survive;
The spell is lifted; they live.
A fresh Argo will seek another Fleece;
Sin of a second Paris murder peace;
A new Achilles set streams in wroth flood
Rushing to the sea red with Trojan blood.
No more, Boy, know ye of it
Than in brave tales poets writ.
Of Earth, not of it, you move to and fro,
A mystery; wherever you may go,
Carrying a blessing! Your one main care
To learn what Heroes, like your Father, are;
What, Virtue;—revealed to them
Who prize it ere priced a gem.
Then, your eyes, a boy’s, that had closed at night
On a garden-land bathed in crimson light,
Open to find yourself of man’s estate,
Named Dictator of a mad world by Fate;—
Grasping no steel sword in hand;
With no Armies to command.
My vision is blurred.
As from graves, a host,
Chaos, rose, went back at dawn a ghost.
But mortal may not, ev’n in sleep, behold
Heaven at work Man’s being to remould.
Enough to witness when Earth
Has undergone its new birth;
How without pruning hook, or drudging bull,
The press ran wine, the granaries were full;
And traders finding wares from foreign lands
They had risked life to store, left on their hands,
Gave up voyaging abroad;
Let alone the Ocean road.
Ah! Joy, the world ’twas given me to view!
All that’s fair in the Old, kind in the New!
How Nature, impelled by but one desire
To grant her loved children all they require,
Never tires to please them; still
Paints the lily at their will,
Varies the rainbow’s order, gilds the gold
On Ebro’s banks, dyes the wool in the fold,
Wooes by soft stratagems her nursling, Man,
To feel motherliness in all her plan
Of change for him, while she shows
Her own bliss in a dog-rose!
Fate has decreed; the Destinies obey
Eternal laws, and bid their spindles play:
“March, Ages, without break!”
Time presses on!
You, of race Divine, Jove’s adopted Son,
High honours, great tasks await;
Swerve not at the call of Fate!
The arched world bows; the sea’s long currents raise
Glad crests; Heaven’s blue depths chant hymns of praise
For the good days coming. With one consent
The Universe prepares for merriment.
Winter was it? Now, ’tis Spring;
Hark! the woods are carolling!
“May it be given me to outstay death—
If I but keep so much of life as breath
To tell, my Prince, your deeds! My theme, not I,
Will Orpheus and Linus in song defy,
Though Muse-Mother, and God-Sire
Stand by, and their sons inspire.
Nay, I range in Arcady; and should Pan
Grace by a challenge on the pipe a man,
I must take up the glove—the meanest clod,
On equal terms competing with a God—
And win! for I you acclaim;
Then, what can he but the same?”
A smile! and, Babe, I would that I could deem
You meant it for pleasure at my Day-dream.
I know ’tis a return for those on you;
And that you can ne’er repay debts thus due.
Blest you so to have learned, while
In your cradle, how to smile!
Alas for the child who, by guilt, or guile,
Lives disinherited of parents’ smile.
For whom no fellowship of Gods or grace,
From birth condemned, an outcast of his race!
In your Palace, at your call
Shall not welcome be for all?
Æneas in Hades
P. VIRGILII MARONIS, Æneidos, Bk. V. vv. 721-754 and 835-871; Bk. VI. vv.
1-19 and 41-636
LIMBO AND TARTARUS
Sad with thoughts of Carthage, its Lady fair,
Weary and worn with wanderings and care,
Mourning his father still, Æneas lay
Sleepless, when lo! visible as in day,
Though up the heavens drove her car black Night,
Anchises, lit with an unearthly light:
“My Son,” he said, “here am I by Jove’s grace;
He pities, late, the sorrows of our race,
And has sent me to comfort and advise.
Let a new Troy in Sicily arise,
Peopled by many who would stay behind.
With the young and bravest, sail thou, and find
A realm in Latium; make its rude tribes feel
The temper of their Trojan Master’s steel.
But, first, thou to the Nether World descend,
And traverse from the threshold to the end
In search of me; not that I dwell in Dis,
With the curst, but the pleasant fields of bliss.
Thither, with, for thy guide, the Sibyl, come
To learn thy sons’ deeds in their destined home.
But past midnight; the horses of the Sun
Pant to speed on their course;—I must be gone!”
Full well were Jove’s commands he brought obeyed,
And the foundations of the city laid—
“Acesta”—as its lord, Acestes hailed;
And, wept now by those it left, the fleet sailed.—
For Italy sailed; there arrived; and moored
Off Cumæ;—
but with Pilot none on board.
Whether marine God, jealous of a skill
In seamanship like his, or, spite of will,
Worn out with toil, he failed at last to keep
His eyelids from the poppy dew of sleep;
Who knows? but he woke, rudder in his hand,
Drifting, shouts unheard, to an unknown strand.
Vain to trace Palinurus and his fate!
But all knew where the Sibyl kept her state.
In a shrine that Latona’s Children hold,
Their joint domain, and Dædalus of old
Adorned with various art, a huge cliff-wall
Recedes into a cavern; and thence call,
Rushing tumultuous through a hundred doors,
As many voices. One roar, the whole, pours.
Æneas touched the threshold, when a cry
Came from within:
“Ask, and I will reply!
Hear! the God!”—
And the Sibyl herself there;
She, yet not herself; breathing not our air;
No mortal accents from a mortal tongue;
Visage, complexion changed, fillet unstrung;
Breast stormily heaving; heart all but broke
In yet untamed resistance to the yoke
The God would fix, to break mind—human birth—
To bind his messenger from Heav’n to Earth;
While She, though pure, adoring, how not repine,
Identity lost, e’en to be Divine!
’Twas instinct in her that rebelled; not she,
The Prophetess, the Sibyl; for now see
Her wrathful for her master’s honour:—
“Thou,
Trojan at His altar, and not a vow!
Deemest mighty mouth of His awful shrine
Will open but to answer prayer from thine?”
Æneas had kept silence, not from fear,
Or shame, but reverence; now he drew near,
Entreating from the bottom of his heart:
“Phœbus, Troy’s champion, when few took our part;
Through whom Achilles died—whose kindly hands
Led us o’er false seas, past perilous lands—
O turn the shores where we have anchor cast,
From the mirage they were to homes at last.
And adverse Gods and Goddesses, to all,
I pray, if e’er Troy’s glory stirred your gall,
Does not down-fallen Pergamus atone—
Is Envy not content with heaps of stone—
With Priam’s House uprooted? What are we,
Mere remnant tossed till now on every sea?
Thee also, holy Prophetess, I ask;
Free thy God’s cloudy riddles from their mask;
In pity for me, who already know
I am to rule Ausonia, unveil how,
Where, and when, to found my City, replace
Troy’s exiled Gods, Genii of our race;
Nor trust thy renderings of what Fate weaves
To the chance flutterings of autumn leaves;
Chant; and be all transcribed; then, when, in pure
Marble fanes, thy God is worshipped, be sure
Kings after me shall treasure what is writ,
And train up scholars to interpret it.”
God and Prophetess listened no more;—
will
Was wrestling to be its own mistress still.
A woman with a God! In vain she raves;
Subduing lips that foam, breast swollen, waves
Of inspiration stamp, rolling along,
Apollo’s dictates on the Sibyl’s tongue,
Till—again the hundred doors open wide—
Phœbus to Æneas by her replied:
“Think not thy work is done because at length
Ocean’s dangers are escaped. All thy strength
Will be tasked on land; though Latium’s lord
Prepares to hail the offer of thy sword,
Thou’llt wish thyself soon afar! Look! a flood—
Tiber foaming to the sea—of men’s blood.
Horrors Simois, Xanthus showed might seem
Repeated by thy loath fancy in a dream.
Nor even wanting to this war—fell war—
An Achilles, Goddess born; Troy’s ill star,
Queen Juno; and, of worse augury yet
For Trojans, or, of snares that Fate has set
For thy feet a surer than all beside—
A foreign hostess, and a foreign bride.
Face trials; turn thy back upon no foe;
By paths, however strait, Chance-opened, go.
Where wilt thou not in Italy beg aid?
If to no purpose, be not thou dismayed.
Fortune loves strange means; how but for me have known
Thy dawn would break first from forth a Greek town?”
Æneas spoke not; for again the jar,
Bellowing, shrieking, roaring—civil war
Between Spirit, Divine, and human—This,
In last contest to stand by what it is;
Planning passages that lead nowhere, in or out,
Darkening truths, perversities of doubt;
Phœbus, if thundering, resolved and cold,
Certain of victory, ne’er quitting hold;
The other, a wild mare on a wild plain.
You heard the cold calm trainer shake the rein,
Tear mutinous mouth with the cruel bit,
Mock at the passion that resented it.
Then quiet; Æneas once more began:
“Speak not of risks endurable by man;
None daunt me; long since I foresaw the whole,
Rehearsed what worst could happen in my soul.
I fear no ordeal; if Hell’s gate be here,
As they say, and it front the darksome mere—
Acheron’s wash—I crave it of thy grace,
Holy One, to meet my sire face to face.
Never had I been parted from his side
Till in an evil hour for me he died.
Not in the agony of that dread night,
Troy’s ruin, did I lose him from my sight;
On these shoulders bore I him ’mid the wreck,
Though all Hell’s hounds were barking at my back.
On my voyagings best of comrades he,
In mortal terrors, on every sea;
Minding nothing how elements might rage—
A heart that defied weaknesses of age!
Tell me the foemen that I would not dare
To see him once more, pain I would not bear.
In the dead watches of the night he came,
And bade me supplicate Thee in his name
To unbar Hell’s gates, and to be my Guide.
Oh think that he is kneeling by my side!
Thy will is law; whate’er Thou wilt is done;
Mercy we pray; rejoin us, Father, Son.
Others have been to whom was given the right,
Living, to travel through the world of night.
Its doors, as Orpheus sounded lute and song,
Opened to let the minstrel pass along;
Fraternal tenderness has paved a way
To and from twilight to radiant day;
Alcides—did not friendship bring him down?
Theseus also—if but that!—
Me, love’s crown,
The noblest, filial piety, draws,
Though into Tartarus’s very jaws!
By no bare title holdest thou in fee
Avernus by gift from great Hecate;
Thine leave to grant, with me the right of love
To visit Hell—and I too count from Jove!”
“Easy,” replied the Sibyl, “the descent
To Avernus; welcome all thither bent;
Dis shuts none out; the task is, when the taste
For sunshine revives, measure back the waste
Wooded wilderness that Cocytus holds
In its innumerable black-slime folds.
What hope for mortals flesh-clogged to retrace
Their way! A few by Jupiter’s good grace,
Or saints on earth, with blood Divine to aid,
Of brief sojourn there stepping-stones have made
To the skies.—
But enough! Well that the sight
Of thy Sire is a passionate delight;
That thy fond heart’s self-satisfying sense
Of duty done is a full recompense
For risking the mad liberty to float
Twice across noisome Styx in Charon’s boat;
And twice view Tartarus,—
Yet first receive
The terms on which alone Thou hast thy leave;
In a nest of dells retired is a grove,
Darkened by shadows of the hills above;
And a tree, sun-proof, whose dense branches hold
Ever among them one of purest gold;
Gold leafage, gold saplings supple, yet tough;
Vain for any, though brave, and fond enough,
To plunge in the Underworld; unless he
Have tracked and plucked the Gold Bough off the Tree.
The Queen of Hades, Proserpine the Fair,
Chooses offerings thence for her to wear,
Never loses the tree glory; instead
Of branch plucked a second straightway is bred,
Thou, high and low, explore; and, if Thou find,
Lay hold on it; should Fate have Thee designed,
It will yield with ease, even joy; if not,
Nor strength, nor steel could tear it from the spot.
And ’tis not all; another duty still
Rests on thee, and a sadder, to fulfil.
While thou would’st learn the future in my cave,
A friend has been lying dead, with no grave—
To the entire Fleet a reproach, a shame.
First give his relics tomb, and rites, they claim.
So, may’st thou with clean hands thy way pursue;
And realms forbid shall open to thy view.”
A tangled maze! With a past bleak and bare,
A future of dim hopes, and certain care;—
A corse blurring the foreground! And of whom?
Then, as Æneas paced the shore in gloom,
Achates with him, see! a Body there!
Misenus, trumpeter, charioteer!
He drowned, and how? that horseman tried and good,
Hard and intrepid spearman, who had stood
The brunt of battle, as of rough sea-wave,
Of Hector and Æneas comrade brave—
There, like worthless seaweed, see! Misenus dead!
In eyes stark staring might almost be read
An appeal as if to Heaven, and Fate,
Against false friends who left him desolate!
And, true, ’twas pity touching on remorse,
Which swept through the armament, when the corse
Was drawn to the encampment on the shore.
The first thought, the Prince led, was to deplore
A comrade; the next, the pyre, to proceed
To raise, as to One who could intercede
In Heaven, what an altar might have been.
A primeval forest that had never seen
Woodman, or, profaning its silence, heard
The horn of huntsman chasing beast or bird,
Suddenly awoke to the frequent crash
Of pitch-pine, ilex, and the mountain-ash,
While heart of oak had to admit a wedge,
And giants rolled down many a hill ledge.
In all the toil none bore sturdier part
Than Æneas; for he, and with full heart,
Grieved for a loyal ally; but his brain,
With that central thought, took a wider train:
“Forests as this,” he mused, “the whole land through!
How to track to one tree a single bough!
Yet”—as of Misenus—“could the Maid tell
Ill news so truly, why not good as well?”
And ah! that instant, in his joyful sight,
Alighting from blue sky, in soft, smooth flight,
On the green turf a pair of milk-white doves
Such as flit where his Mother, Venus, moves.
“After them! Oh! to guess whither they make,
And match their speed whatever course they take!”
Fain would he think the rate was, as they flew,
Ruled for pursuit to keep them just in view,
To the dark arbour where a yellow glow
Should flicker on the verdant turf below.
Hope not in vain; the pair, after brief pause
For circling Avernus, and its death-jaws,
Tower swiftly aloft; next, in straight line
Glide to a tree, settle as by design.
The Hero arrives, and with heart aflame
Marks, checkering green shadows, a gold gleam.
Upon a foreign stem the mistletoe
Will in the woods a cluster of sprays grow,
With berries saffron-hued in winter’s cold.
Thus, on the holm-oak swayed the Branch of Gold,
Rustling its slight leafage in the soft wind;
Coy—rather than resisting, disinclined—
As Æneas plucked, in hot haste to bear
His prize, and trust it to the Sibyl’s care.
Meanwhile, the Trojans thronged, the Dead to mourn
With rites for which no thanks could it return.
First, they build, a marvel for bulk, the pyre—
Pitch-pine for flame, split oak to feed the fire,
Cypress, Death’s tribute, armour to remind
Of the warrior, twigs the logs to bind.
Vast the heap; but, with oil and incense, soon
Fire had done its work; and when it died down,
All being gone that of the mass could burn,
They closed the ashes, wine-washed, in the urn.
Then Chorinœus sprinkled thrice the ring
Of mourners with pure water from the spring,
And bade the Shade, leaving the world above,
Last farewell words of sorrowing and love.
Yet was the debt the Prince was proud to owe
But half-paid to a friend in weal and woe,
Till rose a sepulchre, stately and high,
For th’ honoured dust enshrined therein to lie.
Topped by oar and horn, sword, and spear, and shield,
To proclaim the champion of sea and field,
It crowns the airy Cape that boasts the name,
And through the ages seals a Trojan’s fame.
So, drowned Misenus need not wander more
Between two worlds on Styx’s groaning shore,
Dragging soulless flesh—choke in a foul fen,
Companionless for Shadows, and for Men.
No more an unburied suppliant this,
But Hero, Pilot trumpeting in bliss!
And, their consciences purged, with duties done,
All turned to fresh cares, leaving Misenus alone.
The Prince and men, the Sibyl guiding, went
By a rough track until a yawning rent
In a grim cliff disclosed a cavern; day
Was blocked by a dense grove; and in front lay
A dim dark pool; from its black lips a breath
Steamed into the arched sky, carrying death.
On its banks sounded never a bird’s song;
Whence “Avernus,” “birdless” in the Greek tongue.
Hard-by the Sibyl hallowed victims, four
Steers dusk-coloured; proceeding first to pour
Wine on their heads, and on the altar burn
Bristles from between the horns she had shorn;
Next, by blood calling Hecate, Divine
In Heaven as Hell, to further their design.
The Prince then to the Furies’ kith and kin—
Vain to try their Three vengeful selves to win—
Slaughtered a black-fleeced lamb; to Hades’ Queen
A cow untaught what mother’s joys had been;
And, lastly, after sunset, to the King
Of Tartarus, a vast, rich offering—
Whole bulls’ entrails upon the altars thrown,
With oil to sting the flames to hiss and groan.
But the sun rose, and earth began to growl
Underfoot, dogs in the grey dawn to howl,
And on wooded heights leaves waved in still air,
As Nature felt the Goddess coming there.
“Away, unsanctified; far from the grove,”
Threatens the Sibyl; “as your lives ye love!
Alone, Æneas, sword unsheathed, come Thou;
Need for stout heart, for all thy courage now!”
Prophetess possessed, she dared the dark cave;
Step by step followed he, with soul as brave.
Gods, whose the Spirit-empire, and, ye, hosts—
Chaos, Phlegethon, Powers too—of ghosts,
Dumb in a dumb world, grant I may unfold
Things, of which my spirit by yours is told.
Cloudy must my story needs be to him
Who reads. All to the pilgrims’ selves was dim!
Phantom-like, and alone with night, they passed
Through Dis’s kingdom, lifeless, joyless, waste,
As, pale and ghostly will a forest seem,
Between pale clouds and the moon’s grudging beam.
The first stage Orcus, where before the gate,
In forecourt, watchful, if with closed eyes, wait—
Padlocks on Hell’s jaws—Mourning, vengeful Care,
In many aspects; pale Disease and Fear,
Age looking back, Hunger counselling ill,
With Neediness that numbs the nerve of will:—
Forms of terror they all; and, no less dread,
Death, and Sleep, his cousin, sharing one bed;
Labour with a lash, and ill joys that taste
Like honey in the mouth, and lay Mind waste;
While in guard-houses opposite lodge War,
And Carnage driving a funeral car;
The Furies too—each in iron-barred cell—
Police-runners on Earth, hangmen in Hell;
And mad Discord, wreathing her locks of gore
With vipers borrowed from her neighbours’ store.
For centre an old elm, immense in girth,
Keeps sunless, barren, a wide space of earth.
Rumour gives it to idle Dreams, which browze
Upon the leaves, and hang from all the boughs.
Nor far away in the same region dwells
Many a strange freak of whom legend tells;
Centaurs in the doorway, Scylla, fish, maid,
Briareus hundred-headed, arrayed
In flames, Chimæra, and, bellowing beast,
The Hydra, Harpies that pollute a feast,
Gorgons looking cold death, and the Earth-King,
Who grew a fresh third body at each fling.
No stain on Æneas if monsters made
Him grip and wave at the dour crew his blade,
Until warned by the Sibyl that they were
Bodiless Shades, invulnerable as air.
Passing unharmed, they now approached the shore
Where Acheron, Styx, Cocytus meet, and pour,
In one vast whirlpool, mingled filth and sand,
And saw upon the bank old Charon stand.
Squalid ferryman, he keeps watch and ward
Over all these waters and streams; a beard
Shaggy, dirty-white, from his chin flows down;
Frowzy his cloak tied by a knot; a frown
Sits on his brow, o’er eyes twin pools of fire.
The barge, poled, sails to help, is, like the sire,
In iron-rusty age, but crude-green, good
To ship Shades numberless across the flood.
In truth masses rush pell-mell to the bank,
Dead of all sorts, without order, or rank;
Heroes that in their country’s cause had bled,
Aged wives and husbands, boys, girls unwed,
Youths leaving parents to inscribe the stone,
And linger through unwelcome years alone:—
As many as the leaves Autumn’s first frost
Brings down; as winged swarms that have ocean crossed
To escape in warm lands harsh winter’s blasts.
Pitiful the entreaties to be passed
Over. Some Charon takes, rejects the rest—
Perhaps with “sad” heart hid inside that rugged breast!
Well might Æneas wonder at the haste
To reach o’er those waters yon gloomy waste.
“Cocytus this,” the Maid, “that Styx, in whose
Name Gods dare not swear, and then break their vows;
They mark the boundaries of life and death,
Between the world above, the world beneath;
Spirit cannot claim to pass either flood
While it must drag behind it flesh and blood.
A way has been appointed and decreed,
By funeral rites, for it to be freed
From that now mere burden; who lack them pray
The Ferryman in vain; driven away,
They tread a hundred years the same dull track,
Till, less in hope than apathy straying back,
They are—disbodied—afloat! It may be,
If rarely, that friendship, or charity,
Late informed, or remorse for crime, has laid
White bones in earth, and thus a debt repaid.
Æneas heard, believed; for by him stood,
Witnesses to fortune of storm and flood,
And Hell’s hard rules, two whom he recognised
As of Troy’s remnant, but at sea surprised;
By a wild south wind robbed of life and tomb.
Leucaspis, Orontes, they; and in doom
Alike, though companionless, save for woe,
Palinurus!”
Exclaimed Æneas: “So
Diedst?” but Phœbus promised: “None lost at sea,
And all to disembark in Italy?”
“The Oracle spoke truth;” the Pilot said:
“Clinging to the helm, the fourth morn I made
Italy; the while, by the Seas I swear,
I feared not for myself; my only care
Was for thy ship, its steersman lost, and helm,
A prey for waves and gales to overwhelm.
But I landed, began to climb the cliff,
When brute shore-men taking me, soaked and stiff,
And unarmed, for sea-prize, attacked and slew.
Then, stripping my body naked, they threw
Into the sea, by turns there to abide,
And on the beach, at pleasure of the tide.
Oh, by the heaven’s cheerful light and airs,
By thy Sire’s memory, thy hopes and cares
For thy son! to Velia, returning, steer—
My body floats hard-by—give it a bier!
Or why, my Prince, not take a shorter mode
Of lifting my intolerable load?
Whate’er thou wilt, thou canst, with, by thy side,
A Divine Mother for thy shield and guide.
How else could living mortal hope to pass
Such rivers, and the Stygian morass?
Let me cross with thee; all my griefs will cease;
I shall have died at last, and be at peace;”—
“Unburied,” cried the Maid: “without command
From the Furies, presume to tread their strand!
Stop importuning for what Fate denies;
Heaven has not forgotten thy death-cries;
Thy murderers shall avow their foul crime,
And thou be honoured to the end of time;
For I can teach thee more, to ease the ache
Of waiting:—the Cape o’er thy tomb shall take
Thy name; seamen, as, doubling it, they sail,
Shall muse upon thy death, and tell the tale.”
They parted, he to tramp those marshes drear,
Where years are moments, a moment a year.
And living spirits to dead bodies bound
Pace in a tedious circle round and round;
Still, with his pain a joy—“My Cape, my name!”
For Death is ne’er so dead as to be dead to Fame!
Farewell to him. Æneas, with his Guide,
Approached, not unobserved, the black stream’s side
Charon was on the watch as they pursued
Their way along the sad and silent wood.
Scarcely had they emerged when he began
To scold, and Æneas first: “Halt, armed man,
Whoever thou art! No step further! Why
Wouldest thou cross? For ghosts alone I ply
Bound for the realms of slumb’rous Night and Sleep.
Not for live bodies do I ferry keep!
Do I not well remember how I crossed
With Hercules on board, much to my cost?—
Think! Zeus’s son, incomparably strong,
Fastened Cerberus with a leathern thong,
And drew trembling from under Pluto’s throne!
Who paid for the sacrilege? I alone.
When Theseus and Pirithous dared try
To carry off our Queen, who culprit? I!”
“Waste wrath!” quoth the Sibyl: “Thy hound may save
His bark to fright the pale Shades from his cave.
Pluto’s honour is safe; feel no alarms;
’Tis Æneas famed for piety and arms!
Hither has he descended from above
To pay his Sire the homage of his love.
Though not moved thou by tenderness like his,
See the Branch! Render fealty to This!”
At the sight rarely seen the anger sank,
Awe followed; straight backed Charon for the bank,
Clearing bench and deck of many a Shade
To make room for Æneas and the Maid.
Starting with its unwonted weight once more,
The coracle groaned, leaked at every pore;
But lasted out, and at the water’s edge,
Landed in clammy mud and grey-green sedge.
From where against the landing-place he lay,
Cerberus opened his three jaws to bay
Strangers, when the Sibyl, seeing the snakes
Round the neck arching, threw drugged honey-cakes.
The ravening throats licked the whole up; then—
While the monstrous limbs grovelled o’er the den—
Bidding the rivers none re-cross farewell,
The Pair are through the gate, and inside Hell.
The Underworld, an Empire manifold,
Is famed within it two main States to hold;—
For the Damned, and Fiends to torment them, Dis,
The Elysian fields for Saints in bliss.—
But Spirits of the Dead, ere they can come
Before their Judge to be assigned a home
Among the Blest or Sinners, undergo
Two stages of probation; first, we know,
For it to be on due inspection clear
They are qualified as Ghosts; and, next, where
To prepare for trial.—
From graves men rise
Shadows, bodiless, but as Death’s surprise
Caught them; and therefore shadows of the whole,
Of Body with its accidents, and Soul.
Such—Ghosts—they wake on Acheron’s dark shore:
Such by grim Charon are they ferried o’er;
As such they show when rapping at Hell’s gate;
And are sorted in vestibules to wait.
A few mortals, and living, there have been
Who, by the Gods’ leave, in a day have seen
The whole Nether World; but e’en its wide marge,
Reserved for Untried, would take men at large
Their lives to traverse. Reckon! the huge space
Needed to lodge the dead of human race!
Expectants of a summons to be tried
For the lives they led, and the deaths they died!
On probation for abjuring Earth and Sun
When their work above was not fully done!
For being here before it had begun!
Causes peopling this land of Little Ease
Myriad!
body’s accidents, disease,
A wild beast’s claws, a sudden east-wind’s blight;
Riches, poverty; daring and affright;
Jealousies of nations, brothers; the smart
Of love rejected, and a broken heart:
Hope become despair, as past, present schemes
Melt all into the fairy-land of dreams.
The victims—“Legion”—seeming still alive—
Wait here, distributed in Circles five;
Creatures of strange aspect, Earth’s rust inlaid
On spirit bearing it without flesh to aid.
Wanted a world to lodge the whole; and still
Continual accretions, plain, vale, hill,
Forest, are reclaimed from Immensity,
To hold this wreckage of humanity.
The first Circle to which were drawing near
Æneas and his Guide, might force a tear
From hearts of iron; for the entire air
Was but a storm of infantile despair;
One scream—plaints of robbery of the share
In sweet life to which each is born an heir.
Only, clasped to their mother’s breasts, of all
Promised at birth, they have—a funeral!
In the next Circle, less by one degree
Adverse their lot who died through perjury;
For they can claim revision of their cause
By eternal justice, if not man’s laws.
Minos holds his high Court; sifts hearts and lives;
A mute jury through Urns its verdict gives.
Acquittal will not breath of life restore;
But the appellant shuns his fellow Shades no more.
In the third Circle a sad folk abide,
Who go always wondering why they died.
Their hands are wet and red with blood they spilt;
And yet no neighbour charges them with guilt.
Accusers, sternest, themselves keep, within;
“Guilty,” they plead; unpardonable sin.
If a joy, ’tis but to avow their shame;
The story’s essence always is the same:
“Fool I! So wholly hateful did it seem—
Torture to my eyes—slant of a sun beam;
Needs shut it out forthwith—so simply how,
As by sending soul, body straight below?”—
Next moment!
if penury, mean toil were
The price for breathing once more Earth’s free air,
Gladly would all accept Man’s vilest lot,
But Hell’s and Heaven’s laws permit it not.
Slow Acheron is their eternal bound,
With unamiable Styx coiled ninefold around!
A fourth Circle holds within confines wide
“I Campi Dolorosi”; therein hide
In secluded alleys, and myrtle grove,
Those eaten through with leprosy of love.
Death kills it not; for a multitude haunt
The bowers, melancholy music chant.
With Procris, Laodamia, the rest,
The wound, unhealed, still bleeding in her breast,
Tyrian Dido roamed in a great wood.
Æneas in the leafy twilight stood,
Uncertain; as, at the month’s dawn, we doubt
If it be moon, or cloud flitting about.
Soon recognition, love; and, with them both,
Tears, shame, remembrance of his plighted troth:
“Then, ’twas truth,” he cried, “floated o’er the sea—
Dead—and by thy own hand—and, Queen, for Me!
But by the Stars, by all the Gods I know,
By what Pow’rs punish perjuries below—
Against, I swear, my heart’s will, by commands
Divine, I left thy shore for other lands.
To please, not myself, but because I must,
I pace Shadow-land, mouldy with the rust,
Miseries, aches of folly and of crime,—
Accumulated hoardings of old Time.
An instrument I of the Gods’ fixed plan;
Yet even thus would have rebelled as man,
Faced the penalties, had I been so vain
As to imagine the excess of pain
My parting would cause thee!
In pity, stay!
Whom flyest thou? I have so much to say!
And only one poor moment Fate allows!
Rob not of this, the last it grants our vows!”
As fruitless task to seek by words to slake
Fury of a furnace, as to re-make
A broken heart, or back to life surprise
Killed fondness.—On earth she fixed sullen eyes;
Moved by his prayers no more than by a smile
Of Venus would be cliff on Paros’ isle.
At last, though long his sad remorse pursued,
Gathering her strength, she regained the wood.
Their route resumed, they reached a land where air
Had a stir as of life; hither repair
War lords; here the heroes of old fights meet—
Adrastus, Parthenopæus; here greet
Æneas friends from Ilium, whose doom
Himself had witnessed, wept for, at the tomb;
And now re-wept, beholding each a Shade,
Though, like Idæus, in bright armour clad,
And charioteering.
On left and right,
Not with one look content, they throng; delight
To find pretexts to keep him, walk beside;
Question why he came, and how long might bide.
Not so with the Greeks Agamemnon led;
Seeing Æneas’s drawn sword, some fled
As once to their Fleet; all quaked; some would shout,
Mouths gaped, and the cry, a ghost, quavered out.
Shamed at the sight, Æneas, gazing there
As they shrank before him, became aware
Of a Ghost intent upon their dismay—
A Shade continuing the disarray
In which life had fled; hands, nostrils and ears
Lopped off by vengeful, jealous swords and spears;
Lace-work of gashes; the Shade shivered o’er
Dishonouring wounds, and bent, striving sore
To hide them, and himself.—
Hardly, at last
Æneas knew; and, with tears flowing fast,
Forced him to turn:
“Knight, Prince, Deiphobus,
Whose the force, will, to have outraged thee thus?
I had heard, on the death-night of our Town,
On a pile slain thou laid’st thee dying down.
Thy body I found not, but I addressed
Thrice farewell, consigning thy soul to rest.”
“No pious kindness,” answered Priam’s son,
“Friendship could require, hast thou left undone.
To Fate, and the Greek Murderess I owe
Horrors I bore on earth, my shame below;
She made my flesh my tomb, epitaph writ
Thereon, and on my ghost has graven it!
Thou knowest—how forget?—the lying joy
Of the last, the funeral night of Troy.
The Traitress through the festal city led
A chorus of Bacchantes, at its head
Waving a flaming torch; and, with the cry
Of ‘Evan,’ from the Citadel on high,
Summoned her ambushed Argives.—
I meanwhile,
Worn with the day’s cares, unsuspecting guile—
Least of all in my new-made Wife—in sleep,
Unbroken as quiet death’s self, sweet, deep,
Lay in my baleful chamber, whence my Bride
Had stolen all arms, even from my side
My trusty sword.—
Then she invites within
Menelaus—purgation for old sin!
Lo! he, and Ulysses, arch fiend, and She,
With Me unarmed—Why more?—Dost thou not see?
Gods, whom I worshipped, have not I a right
To claim like for like? Will Ye not requite?
But Thou; say, what mischance on sea or land,
Caprice of Fortune, or the Gods’ command,
Has sentenced thee in life to wander here,
Away from sunlight, and glad household cheer?”
A story long to tell; and longer still
Had been, were time Below, for good or ill,
Not measured for guests from the Upper Air
By speed of rosy Dawn’s four horses there.
But for Æneas, with half Day’s course run,
Not yet had the decisive stage begun.
Perforce the Sibyl warned against delay;
Nor thought Deiphobus his friend to stay.
Though bowed by unimaginable ill,
He faded into the Dark, to fulfil
His fate, with Adieu; “a high lot enjoy!
Be glory thine, and found a greater Troy!”
The fifth Circle left, they desired by haste
To pay time lost in grieving for the past.
Where the road forked, they took the right, that led
To Elysium; but, turning his head,
Æneas stood—bewildered, and in awe;
For, backed by a huge range of cliffs, he saw,
Extending far, behind a triple wall,
A city that one might a kingdom call,
Girt by waters—Phlegethon their dread name—
That whirl echoing rocks, and floods of flame.
Then, if that torrent of fire could be crossed,
What of the adamantine gates? Where host
Of men, nay, Gods of high Heaven, with pow’r
To tear those from their storm-defying tow’r?
And, as if this were not enough to keep
Dis safe, Tisiphone, who needs no sleep,
Sits guard in blood-red robe beside the door,
Reckoning each pulsation of the roar,
Every whizz of the lash, moan of pain,
Grating of iron, rattling of the chain.
Æneas heard too; his feet in fear clove
To the ground as frozen; he could not move
From the spot he trod. “What sins punished there,
And how? Whose those hoarse wailings of despair?”
Repelled—attracted: his unuttered thought
She answered:
“Ask not of me to be brought
Within; none guiltless enter but, like me,
They set in charge under Queen Hecate.
Herself, installing me, vouchsafed to tell
The system on which Heaven peoples Hell.
Committals hither are on sentence giv’n
By Rhadamanthus, righteous as Heav’n.
A sinner joys in craft that has concealed
His crime in life; but here it stands revealed
Blazing as the Sun; how vain cunning when
Tisiphone hauls the convict, grieved then
For old triumphs; in her right hand the scourge,
In her left snakes. She screams the while to urge
Her savage pair of sisters to make haste
From banks of dim Cocytus for a feast!
The Trials living men may not attend,
Or the dire chastisements in which they end,
But—for so much is lawful—thou shalt see
The Prison’s threshold.
At a sign from me,
Look! Gates of Adamant have opened wide,
Shrieking in loud protest; on either side,
The Fury, and a Hydra, grisly sight,
That hisses from fifty black jaws its spite;
While Tartarus beyond them plunges down
Full twice the space from red-hot Phlegethon
To the blue vault of Ether.—
Mark the twain,
And thank thy fate for being spared my pain
Of visiting the dungeons they control.
Noting unending torturings of soul!”
“Far from me, were I able, to express
Agonies of the Lost, their hopelessness!
Enough their names who sinned;—
here, hurled to Dis
By lightning at bottom of the abyss
Roll Earth’s sons the Titans; and I saw there
The Aloeid Twins, who scaled upper air,
Piling mount on mount; by brute strength alone
Tried to storm Olympus, and Jove dethrone
Salmoneus too, and the price his pride
Cost him, for choosing impious to ride
Mimicking lightnings’ flash, the thunder’s roar
Fool! to ape Jove with his steeds as they bore
His car through Elis, torches as they cast
Their smoky gleams, trumpets’ quavering blast.
Brief the trickeries of that crazed career,
Joy for man on Earth’s stage to act God’s peer;
And swift climax when, amid storms, there fell
Bolts that drove the pretender down to Hell!
Near him Earth’s nursling, Tityus, I saw,
Stretched o’er nine acres, with, to fill its maw,
A hook-beaked vulture clawing at his breast
For the liver e’er eaten, ne’er at rest;
Since growing ever, putting on new flesh;
So, the Thing gropes for dainties ever fresh.
Myriad Crime’s forms—Dis for all has room.
Kinship that should nurse kindness, rings its doom;
Virtues that have turned strangers into friends,
Oft change brothers and sisters into fiends.
Children, instead of vying to maintain
Parents, have beaten them, and even slain.
A traitor to human nature and hearth
Seduces her who owes to him her birth.
Lawyers, snapping ties sacred as of blood,
Have spun about their clients webs of fraud.
Misers have gone on hatching gold from gold—
A host of them—refusing to withhold
Grains from the hoard, although it were to save
Nearest that should be dearest from the grave.
Guests—till schooled here—have thought theft of a wife
Well worth the risk of forfeiture of life.
Liegemen, loved, aggrandized, have drawn the sword,
Himself had girded on, to stab their Lord.
Statesmen have abused a fond people’s trust,
To sell and tread its freedom in the dust.
Others, having dammed law-making at the source,
Opened, closed locks as gapes or shuts a purse.
The course of life cannot be ruled so straight,
Homes so pure, opportunities so great,
Reasons so full and plain for doing well,
But that they may be used as roads to Hell.
”Penalties”?—
As manifold, various.
The Lapithæ know it, Pirithous,
Tantalus, Ixion. I have held my breath
At black rock threatening, not, welcome Death,
But—for Shadows may feel—mangled, crushed bones,
Dragging eternally over jagged stones.—
That, in act to fall, ever seemed in air.—
And I have seen Hell’s cooks a feast prepare;
Spread couches with purple, and on gold-rests.
Then—dainties in view—as the famished guests
Seated themselves in hungry haste to sup,
The eldest Fury, screaming, started up
From where she lay, and, waving torch alight
Swept banquet, banqueters, into cold night.
On some the doom to push a mass up hill,
And, when it slips, as slip it ever will,
Still push; for some, e’en worse, the Wheel; and then—
Limbs healed—to be broken again, again.
There hapless Theseus sits, and will aye sit;
Phlegyas there, whose cry—might I deaden it!—
Is in mine ears: ‘Men, be warned! Scorn not Heav’n;
Never is sin against the Gods forgiv’n!’”
“More”? Yea; had I a hundred mouths; in each
A tongue of iron to give forth my speech;
And thou weeks to listen, I could not tell
Of all the guilt, its chastisements in Hell.
Enough for thee to know all there have dared
To break God’s laws, and in like kind have fared.
The deeds have been done; and now, fast shut in,
The doers take the wages of their sin.
But time presses; hasten, wouldst thou fulfil
Duties charged by Heaven’s grace, thy own good-will.
Courage; for we have left behind the Pit
Of sin and torture, and are soon to quit
Even the melancholy Precincts, where
The dead still mourn the Past, the Future fear.
Already I see the walls Cyclopian, built
To shut off lands of misery and guilt
From the happier one to which we wend.
Lo the Arch! there must thou thy Branch suspend!”
Crossing the intervening twilight space,
They stood ’neath the vault of the gate in face.
Then, sprinkled with fresh water from a spring,
Æneas hung up his gold offering.
Elysium’s doors opened; he was free,
Having paid her due to its Deity.
ELYSIUM
A land for joyance made; blest for the blest;
Happy in being chosen for their rest;
For nowhere greener lawns, more bow’ry glades
Inviting into more reposeful shades
Of arched romantic groves, with, ev’rywhere,
Steeped in a purple glow, a larger air
Than Earth’s; for the lower world owes no debt
To sun or stars with which our skies are set;
It has them of its own, as real as ours.
Real too its grass, the fragrance of its flow’rs;
Real they to Spirit as to them It seems,
Though for mortals unsubstantial as are dreams.
On turf or yellow sand some test the skill,
That earned them fame in life; and is theirs still.
The woods are full of revellers, who beat
Time to gay dancers and their flying feet;
Or banqueting sit, garlanded with bays,
Singing in chorus legends of old days;
While others proud of battle-fields afar
Conduct a mimic spectacle of war;
Spears waiting to be snatched, and the broad shield
To be slung, chargers harnessed for the field;—
Shadows to terrestrial men, who call
Earthly things real, when shadows most of all;—
Shadows these of the busy lives they led
On earth, which pursue them now they are dead;
Nought palpable, unless that through a grove
Eridanus rolls to the world above.
Here ignorantly happy dwell in joy
Princes like Dardanus who founded Troy;
With Teucer father of a royal race,
Gallant as noble, and most fair of face;
Ilus, Assaracus, of blood divine,
Through whom Æneas proudly traced his line.
Here stood showing glorious wounds a band
Of heroes fall’n to save its native land;
Though other arts could equal entrance gain,—
To give life charm, or steal a pang from pain.
Priests too, who as they at the altar stood
Offered pure lives as well as victims’ blood:
And seers, who ne’er falsified Heav’n’s truth,
But spoke as they heard from Apollo’s mouth:—
A various tribe, yet all alike in this,
That, having served, they have deserved their bliss.
The Maid led where the white-filleted throng
Was thickest; for Musæus’s the song,
Responsive to the lyre’s seven sweet chords,
That vied with all the magic of the words.
High he by head and shoulders o’er the ring
Around. The Sibyl, when he ceased to sing,
Besought him of his courtesy to tell
Where might Anchises in that blest land dwell;
Their search for him had many labours cost;
Dread sights been seen, perilous rivers crossed;
Their grace was brief, they must not longer bide;
How, clogged with flesh, find him without a guide?
Quick answer made the sage: “We count no home
As you on earth; wheresoever we roam
At home are we; for our repose at noon,
Or eve, no couch can equal with its down
A meadow bank, that rills unfailing heap
With flow’rs wooing irresistible sleep.
But flesh and blood aye move the heart and will,
And ye are here their purpose to fulfil;
So, follow me beyond this hanging peak,
And I will point your path to him you seek.”
Under his lead they climbed the height, and thence
Down into a wide, smiling champaign, whence
Opened a wooded valley: in a glade
Anchises stood, and deep in thought surveyed
A host of hurrying Shades. As he gazed,
He heard steps, his Son’s!
Eagerly he raised,
Both hands, while eyes and heart joined in the burst
Of love and joy; each struggling to be first
Its welcome to express: “Dearest! at last
I see Thee; at what cost of perils passed!
Yet never feared I that the utmost pow’rs
Of Earth and Hell could bar a love like ours
From meeting, as in old times, face to face,
In full converse, however brief the space.
With trust undoubting traced I to its goal
Thy devious course; for well I knew thy soul;
Each stage I numbered; tempests on what seas;
Unfriendly lands; kindnesses worse than these!”
“And could’st Thou,” cried Æneas “more repine,
Missing my presence than I longed for thine?
Thy image warned me on the island shore,
To ask thy counsels, as, on earth, of yore,
So, I am here! Once more to feel thy heart
Beating to my own!—
Nay; my Father, why,
When I would clasp hands, kiss thy face, deny
The embrace I dared Hell’s alarms to gain?”
Of no avail his prayers, tears; all vain;
Thrice in his arms the image melted away—
As flutter of breeze; dream at break of day.
Near where Anchises and Æneas stood
Shades swarmed, dense, ever denser, in a wood
Which rustled all its bushes with the press—
As of a migrant nation numberless—
Of Spirits emulous to be the first
To reach grey Lethe’s edge, and quench their thirst—
—Thus, in languorous stillness of noontide,
Sudden the slumb’rous calm is swept aside
By an inrush of bees; in wild descent,
Like pirates from the main, on nothing bent
But spoil they seem; yet each has its own flow’r,
To which sure instinct guides it hour by hour,—
Æneas saw the haste, knew not th’ excuse;
For him it seemed to be Hell broken loose.
Even when he heard the marvellous tale
That the myriads gathered in that vale
Were no unwilling, mourning outcasts there,
Condemned to breathe once more the upper air,
But after their secular repose full fain
Flesh to resume, links in an endless chain,
The world-worn hero shuddered none the less
It might be his to count it happiness
To exchange the peace of the myrtle grove
For stark sunshine and gross body above;
To be of those whom Lethe should wash clear
Of all they once had been, and all they were:—
That Elysium’s a waiting-room for life;
Life a dust-heap for trials, failures, strife
That men are Shadows all, expecting doom,
Whether flesh, or to shift it in a tomb.
“Forbear,” replied Anchises, old and wise,
“To measure laws of Fate by earthly eyes.
From the beginning of the sky and land,
The stars where once the Titans held command,
The sun and moon that share the day and night,
Air’s liquid fields;—all owe their charm and light
To eternal Spirit. That feeds the whole,
Breathes into bodies, lifeless else, a soul.
Mankind and beasts, winged Things, and monster strange,
That ’neath the level plains of Ocean range,
Draw hence their fire, the instinct of a birth
Elsewhere;—alas! for the burdensome bulk
Of limbs diseased, and joints that creak and sulk
For the foul lusts they stir, the scares, affrights,
The cowardly griefs, and as vain delights,
The Dark through which flesh stumbles, halt and blind
The dungeon where it keeps shut close the Mind,
Lest at one breath of air it should in scorn
Of earth fly back to Heaven where ’twas born.
Meanwhile an evil partnership for both!—
Spirit incorporate, however loth
To be associate with sores and blains,
Vice’s parasites, must bear fleshly pains
To be cleansed; for death is itself no cure;
Body, Soul with it, share in the Impure.
Some, carcasses, swing, split open, for breeze
To scour and wring, to bleach, and scorch, or freeze
For some a mill-stream whirls a crime about,
Or a furnace roars a rich baseness out.
Just the Judgment, every judgment true;
Each of us bears no more than is his due;
High as the merits of our kith and kin,
None but himself can carry his own sin.
Blest the sharp ordeal for the few who thence
Pass, not in sheer spiritual innocence,
But in no worse than such affections dressed
As leave the pure celestial spark at rest,
And free in these fair fields to dream away
Any chance taint surviving from earth’s clay
To dull the sereneness of the fire giv’n
To infants, that they may remember Heav’n.”
“And now behold the final stage:—
this rout,
Its cycle—a thousand years—being out—
Called by God’s Messenger of Life and Death,
Descends where Lethe, in the cleft beneath,
Will make it, drinking of the troubled flood,
Conscious it once was clothed with flesh and blood.
And yearn to take them back, and to return
Rude air to breathe, and feel a rude sun burn.
Nearer now draw with me, that from this bank
Thou mayest watch the comers rank by rank;
Read, as I point, the future in each face;
See, as I see, the glory of our race—
Great as it was, and greater still to be,
Graft on Troy’s stock, the bud of Italy.
Mark him who leans upon a bloodless spear;
’Tis thy own son; but look upon him here;
On earth Thou wilt not; for, when thy long life
Is all but spent, Lavinia thy Wife
Shall conceive a child, and in full time bear
Silvius in the woods to be thy heir;
King of Alba, like many of his line,
As Procas and Æneas, namesake thine.
And still kings come—I cannot number them,
Each adding to old a fresh diadem!
But stay! who advances crested like to Mars—
For whom Jove keeps a place among the stars?
Romulus—City maker? Tenfold more!
From him Earth’s arbiter, matchless in war,
With no limits to empire but the Pole,
And none below Olympus to the soul!—
—As Joys Cybele to have peopled Heav’n,
Rome boasts a breed to which Earth is giv’n!
Turn thy eyes; regard this Company; know
What a full tide of grandeur is to flow
Hence of thy name; how from Thyself, and from
Iulus, in time shall Julius come,
And one as great, long destined to be born
By Fate’s decree—else were Fate’s self forsworn—
That, where King Saturn reigned in days of yore,
Augustus shall the Golden Age restore.
Marches still; already his edicts sway
Where our day is night, and our night is day;
Among the Gætuli; beyond them; far
Outside the orbit, light, of any star;
Outside track of Sun and dancing Hours, where
Atlas swings the world’s axis, with its gear.
Rumours of his approaching overwhelm
Quaking Mæotis and the Caspian realm;
While sevenfold Nile offers fealty,
Trembling for what the Master shall decree.
Have we not heard in legends or romance
How God or Hero has made his advance,
Victor throughout Earth?—
Of him who laid low
Lerna’s fire-breathing Dragon with his bow,
Shot the brazen-footed Hind, and stilled the roar
In Arcady of Erymanthian boar!—
Of Bacchus in tipsy triumph, a yoke
Of spotted tigers in his chariot, broke
To obey, for reins, tendrils of a vine—
His Mænads leaping down the long incline
Of Nysa, wildly singing, their locks curled
With vine leaves, following to win a world?
Yet what in tales of Gods and men can match
For scorn of space, and ardour of despatch,
Delight in braving peril, grasp of mind,
Our Cæsar’s progress to the verge of Ind!
Wilt, Son, in view of all thy future Rome,
With her chiefs destined from thyself to come,
And while ancestral fire of Troy burns high
In thy own veins, put off the hour to try
Valour in act, and hesitate to prove
Thy right to lordship given Thee by Jove?”
“Observe, as they pass by us, one by one,
Those who will glorify thy Rome, my Son.
Illegible to them, for us the whole
Of their careers is writ as on a scroll,
See, the grey-bearded King, the Priest, the Sage,
Of many years, though not bowed down with age,
Whose laws devised to rule a petty town
Will fit it when into an empire grown;
Next, Tullus, warrior-prince, and Ancus, near,
Boasting his wit to catch the popular ear:
Then the proud Tarquins; and, of soul as proud,
Brutus, grudging not Freedom his sons’ blood—
Careless if fainter hearts, a feebler time
Brand a patriot’s sacrifice as crime!
Ah! changes—leaps and bounds—so fast surprise
Brains, toned here to calm, that my aged eyes
Are dazzled as forms pass, and then repass,
And straight are lost—reflections in a glass.
No smoother course for this, thy Rome to be,
Than now, my Son, for Thee in Italy.
A whirl of arms ere the fair land will deign
To grant thy offspring’s right divine to reign;
An age-long wrestle; yet a rope of sand
Makes a poor rival of an iron band.—
Hide from my sight those lictors, and a Son!
But they tell how Latium shall be won.—
A will inflexible, a discipline
Making a religion of a straight line,
A consuming, passionate, red-hot force
Never prisoned in its volcanic source—
Pride in the City of the Seven Hills—
Will merge all other passions, heal all ills.
These the fire inspired, that in fateful war
Gave Cossus and Jove arms of Tuscan Lar.
Maligned and banned Camillus their first call
Brought as through air to save Rome from the Gaul
Fabricius taught the Epirot King
Thus, that Rome wounded rises on the wing.
From them Serranus learned the art to guide
The State, and victor o’er the billows ride
As straight as he his furrow erewhile ploughed.
Regard these visages serene and proud
To do whate’er is Rome’s behest, content
To go whithersoever they are sent.
See, war’s twin thunderbolts, the Scipios,
Their oracle Rome, their one mark her foes.
See them to whom Achaia bows the head,
With Macedon’s monarch in triumph led;—
Avenging on Mycenæ, and the race
Of Atreus, on Achilles, the disgrace
They heaped upon Troy, and the outraged shrine
Of Pallas, their own patroness Divine.
Nor fail note that old man, heeding no jeer,
No hint of blood slow and sluggish, e’en fear:
Resolved throughout of one thing—ne’er, from haste
In clutching popular applause, to waste
A chance on Fortune’s wheel for his Rome’s Shield
To foil War’s cross-eyed Master in the field;
And, near to him, in Britomart’s royal spoils,—
Like a brave boar, trapped in a huntsman’s toils,
Unconquerable else—the battle’s lord—
Confess it, Gaul, Carthage, and Syracuse—Rome’s Sword!
But who is this, Thou askest, in the pride
Of arms and youth, advancing by his side?
Thou mark’st the likeness; well might he be son:
From the same stock he springs, a noble one.
Strange, in the changeless calm of these blest groves
The shadow of a brooding sorrow moves....
Well might I weep, if Spirit could, the fate
Of good as fair, and not more good than great.
Earth will have but seen to lose him!
Heaven,
Wert thou jealous, lest, thinking him given
To this our mighty Rome, not just on loan,
But to live her life, be her very own,
She would wax overweening? Yet the woe
Must surely wake thy pity, when, below,
Thou hear’st the wails numberless for such charms
Borne to their pyre upon the Field of Arms;
And Thou, old Tiber, as thou flowest by
The tomb in which the loved One’s ashes lie,
Wilt not forget how thou hast seen him play
Oft on thy banks young, beautiful, and gay.
Never will hope be raised so high by boy
Blending the blood of Latium and Troy;
And, when shall our earth ever find again
Such loyalty and faith in living men—
A right hand so approved in every art,
On horse, or foot, to do a soldier’s part?
I pity, praise, love!
Arrest but the chain
Of Fate; and lo! Marcellus come again!
—Armfuls of lilies bring; for Soul as sweet!
Spread crimson flow’rs, fit carpet for his feet!
—Grief for a Shadow, from a Shadow grief;
Yet Shadows find a Shadow of relief
For boundless loss in Shadows e’en of grief!”
“But now for the near future—I will show
How to surmount, and how to bear with, woe;
Faint not, endure, and earn renown! On Earth,
What, without store of fame, is living worth!
Weigh not the toils and snares, that, I foresee,
Impend, ere Thou shalt reign in Italy.
Remember thy reward, the noble end
Tow’rds which thy trials and thy hardships tend.
Teach a world-empire how its Founder bears
The load of war, and, worse, intestine cares;
For these must be, though I spare Thee the sight
Of brothers against brothers armed for fight—
Decii, Drusi, Gracchi—each House moved
By jealous passion for the Rome all loved.
And when the All-Conquering shall have hurled
Her legions to the confines of the world,
Lo! Chiefs—allied by blood, and leagued to share
Two continents between them—arm to tear
Their country’s entrails piecemeal! Baleful strife!
Will not one victim serve—Great Cato’s life?
Joy! God grants my prayer! There is brave steel
Of double virtue, both to wound and heal;
And of that heav’nly temper, Youth, is thine,
Second founder of the Julian line!
Hail to Olympian Cæsar! Who would
Not guard dear life at cost of Roman blood;
And ere—too soon—he parts, will choose an heir
Of skill divine the ship of State to steer
Clear of the breakers; Kind and keen to know
His fellow Romans, with the rush and flow,
The genius for sovereignty; their fate
To be Earth’s lords, and Earth’s to stand and wait!
Let others wile the furnace with its heat
To warm the heart within the bronze to beat,
Cunningly lift th’ imprisoning stone away,
And lead nymphs forth to blush in rosy day;
Dissemble truth with nimble tongues; and call
Stars by their names; tell when they rise and fall.
Others Rome’s Arts;—
To speak her mistress will:
Fight if it please her; bid the world keep still!
See that her vassals nowhere suffer wrong;
—Make Pride her Right; be Valiant, and be Strong!”
Death, and her brother, Sleep, rule side by side
Realms that shadowy boundaries divide,
Yet none can cross but through gates twain; and these
Are in the charge of Death, who keeps the keys.
Now and again a Spirit will repair
For love or hate back to the upper air,
To commune with Spirit, so far as whole
Can become two parts, Soul be just a Soul.
Of dull, dun horn the gate such use; hard by
Gleams the other, perfect of ivory.
Thence from the Under-world Imps float above
Freaks that in spite or idlesse they have wove,
To raid and wilder slumber, let it close
Men’s eyes, and cheat their senses of repose.
Anchises, for whom Space and Time were nought,
Had through the gate of horn Æneas sought
By night on the Etruscan sea; he now
With last words, and many a longing vow
Of love, confessed his child was due to part—
Though truer no Son, kinder no Sire’s heart—
By the ivory door; the horn gate stood
Fast locked and sealed against all flesh and blood.
Though soul there—a thistle-down Man, wind-tost
With life; a night-mare; less real than a ghost!
Virgil to the Unknown God
Æneidos, Bk. IV. vv. 576-577
_Sequimur te, Sarnie Deorum, Quisquis es_
Thou camest in the Darkness, and the Darkness Light became—
Not a word was ever spoken, and yet I heard Thy name,
I care not whither I must go; to worship at what shrine;
I know but that Thy servant I; that Thou art Master mine.
No Priest I need to lead me; for when Thou goest before,
How can I aught but follow, to love Thee, and to adore!
Who can ever fail to find Thee, or miss of Thy abode?
For where Thou art is Holiness,—and Holiness is God!
The Gates
Æneidos, Bk. VI. vv. 893-898
Sleep, and his Sister, Death;
Twins ever with Us; and theirs the keys
Of Past and Present, the Above, and the Beneath;
And, as Brother and Sister please,
Forth flutter Falsehood. Truth,
Changed, according as they pass the Gate
Of Horn or of Ivory into Joy or Ruth,
Even dreamed kindness into Hate!
Ghosts
_Ibid._
Ah! We at the behest,
Poor human mortals! of numberless shadowy hosts
Weaving Men’s dooms to amuse the tedium of Rest!
And nought abides but Ghosts!
Euryalus and Pallas
Æneidos, Bk. IX. vv. 455-457; Bk. XI. vv. 68-71
As a queenly daffodil in the springtide of its bloom,
Falls, whelmed beneath the plough-share, and wondering at its doom;
Or as a scarlet poppy, laying weary neck on earth,
Yields its breath to the full shower it welcomed at its birth;
So, all too fair to die, star of a life, Euryalus
Left for Nisus nought but despair, with dire revenge; and thus
Sank Pallas, young and brave;—as, under a girl’s heedless feet,
Drop violets, soft and shy, or hyacinths, faint and sweet,
Appealing from Fate to Heav’n, with all of their grace and sheen,
Telling—the more that life has fled—of what its charms have been;
Or as Babe on its Mother’s breast, who cannot, will not, think
Rosy lips half open are cold, and presses them to drink.
Things
Æneidos, Bk. I. v. 462
_Sunt lacryma rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_
There is spirit immortal that mounts up on high,
Yet reaches longing hands back to hopes left to die;
There are things that are tears; there are tears that are things;
There are tears that are water, and tears that are wings!
LUCRETIUS
Hymn to Venus
TITI LUCRETII CARI De Rerum Natura, Bk. I. vv. 1-48
Goddess! in whom our Rome is proud to trace
Nursing Mother of an Imperial race;
Who ’neath the constellations, as they range,
Heav’n’s standard-bearers, in soft interchange
Of night’s watches, rulest how, when, and where.
In Ocean’s finny depths, in upper air,
And teeming soil, Life, urgent to be born,
Shall at thy smile burst forth to greet the morn,
All without thee was gusty darkness;
then
A sudden rapture stirs in Gods and Men!
Thou comest! Winds fall; the sky no more low’rs:
Earth embroiders herself with fragrant flow’rs;
Billows that had been rolling mountains high,
Ripple laughter to greet a sapphire sky.
Wherever thou art is spring; thine the key
That sets the prisoned wanton west-wind free
To beat time to thy approach; and note how
Birds, thy heralds, by fits skim to and fro;
While, more fiercely-smitten, herds that had been
Content to graze their pastures rich and green,
Toss hoofs and horns, breast headlong streams; and where
It pleases Thee follow, whitherso’er!
Venus, all provident, and kind, and wise,
Nought in sea, torrent, hill escapes thy eyes;
No green plain, no tree that invites a nest.
With soothing touch in every breathing breast
Thou layest seed of love, yet with such skill,
A forethought so unerring, and a will
So tenderly sure, that never a spark
Strays from its order, but knows each its mark;
Kind choosing kind, species species, race race,
Till Being grows, age to age, in emulous grace!
Alone thou steerest Nature on her course!
Failing Thee, lost the aye marshalling force
To wash blind atoms on the shores of Light,
Where each shall take up Life in its due right,
To use it at its best, and for the best,
Joy for itself, harmony for the rest?
A theme, which it might well have seemed in vain
To attempt with powers of mortal brain;
Then least, when Rome—how lately!—claimed of all
Her children service at the trumpet’s call.
Ev’n still she aches with pangs that she has borne,
Glooming dumbly with fear they may return.
But, Goddess, I trust! greatly dare to ask:
“Shed thy eternal charm upon my task:
Bid warfare cease; uplift thy sovereign hand;
And blissful Peace will brood o’er sea and land.
What can resist Thee?
Mars with his alarms?
Where lies the God but in thy lovely arms?
Slender throat thrown back, see, his hungry eyes
Feed upon thine with ever fresh surprise!
Queen, he is thine; wound deeply as thou wilt;
Sweeter smart than all the blood he has spilt!
Cling round him; fold in thy divine embrace;
Lift tow’rds his the appeal of thy bright face;
Whisper love’s little nothings, till deep calm
Steep his whole being in a honeyed balm;
And he forget ’twas his murderous car
Spread frenzy through our streets of civil War!”
But the fever has abated; so long
As it is stayed, I will resume my song;—
The more gladly if it be heard by One
Whom Venus willed long back a Paragon,
Adorned with all the gifts that mortal man
Has owed her since Humanity began.
A Memmius is by that illustrious name
Pledged not to stand aloof from Rome aflame;
And thou didst thy part; but, the crisis past,
Thou now, my Lord and Friend, art free at last.
Yet weigh all well;
I have toiled hard to learn,
And with pains equal held it my concern,
When I myself was satisfied, to find
Means to pass truths into another mind.
No less a duty, if thou undertake,
Wilt thou betray, if thou should then forsake!
Away with mean cares; give, if aught, thy whole—
The sum of Reason—that which makes the Soul!
Philosophy
Bk. II. vv. 1-60
“Listen! the waves hiss, and loud the winds roar!
See! a ship drifts on a lee shore!
“Help!” No help; a whole crew on the beach dead.
Alas poor souls! I sleep on a good bed.
And lo! two hosts in line of battle drawn.
Thousands will not wake at next dawn!
To be killed, or kill—life or death for those—
I wonder which; happy I cannot lose!”
Count not men Molochs that with passive eyes,
They witness neighbours’ agonies.
Bodily ills all; how should bodies care
For others’ ills? Each has its own to bear.
Easily flow our tears when others weep;
As easily we fall asleep;
When Havoc stalks abroad, content we see
Other flesh in pain from which ours is free!
Let flesh be flesh; we by rough ways and bleak
Will climb up to the mountain peak;
And entering through guarded ramparts there
Find peace from flesh in temples stately, fair;
Work of wise builders, where a welcome waits,
With keys to life, within the gates.
That riddle many have tried, and not guessed;
They wander, spirit in flesh; nowhere rest.
Spirit trumpets down from tower, spire and hall;
They cannot hearken to the call.
Smothered in that they worship—wealth, power, birth—
Dream they are growing wings, and rot on earth!
Self-courted woes, suicide of the brain,
Dark chos’n for light, tortures in vain
Endured; this particle of life we have—
A spark at best—o’erdriven to the grave!
All but to pamper bodies, that, so long
As they are painless, hale, and strong,
Are warranted by Nature, watch-dog kind,
To press no further wants upon the Mind.
This commonwealth of limbs, together brought
To be a tenement for Thought,
Asks but to be exempt from fell disease,
Joy in mere breath, and feel itself at ease.
When the lamps’ flame from golden statues gleams,
Do the lights vie with the sun’s beams?
Must music to stir hearts to leap and bound,
From frescoed walls and fretted roofs resound?
Or if some time hot fever racks the head,
Are you, tossing on a sick bed,
Easier at all that you chance to lie
On cedarn couch purple with Tyrian dye?
Know you not, wastrels, that what Mind you give
To flesh you steal from power to live?
The spirit is the root of life; thereby
We live; and if we starve it, then we die.
When spirit-comrades by cool brook recline,
Beneath the shade of beech or pine,
They reck not which the rich, and which the poor.
Nor envious, nor jealous of neighbours’ store.
Enough to feel the warm blood answering
The joyousness of the sweet Spring:
While the soft turf, to offer greetings due,
Dresses itself in flow’rs of ev’ry hue.
Sense feels the charm, and Nature all approves;
While spirit talks with spirit, as it loves.
Ah! know how nought to flesh itself the whole
You sell life for; how hateful to the soul!
‘Musical as is Apollo’s Lute’
Bk. IV. vv. 1-25
I know a dell the Muses haunt; lone scene,
Where ne’er ere now had mortal footstep been.
Curious they what wand’rer should invade
The tuneful solitude, and pray their aid.
Ungrateful office his who tries to set
Men free from the close meshes of the net
In which religions of whatever kind
Presume to hold humanity confined.
Repulsed by those for whose sakes I pursued
A thankless work, I trod ways rough and rude,
Until, the track by good chance missed, I came
Solitary, out of heart, footsore, lame,
To this strange spot where the Nine Sisters camp
Out in the wilderness, and light their lamp
To guide lost wayfarers thither.
I asked,
And received; the Goddesses even tasked
Themselves for my scorned mission, which they dressed
In new melodies as an honoured guest;
For it unsealing in the sands fresh springs,
Inspiring it to lift itself on wings,
While they bade flow’rs strange to poesy blow,
That they might wreathe a garland for my brow.
If I, to emancipate Mind, make use
Of verse, does the enlistment need excuse?
Ignorance is the babe who drinks all up
When doctors sweeten at its brim the cup.
No sickness equals spectres of the brain,
They enslave till the bondsman hugs his chain.
Whose soul should not burn, as like mine, it sees
Hale men being treated, as for disease,
With drugs that force a nightmare-ridden sleep,
When they might bask in sun, and shout, and leap!
But the remedy? Reason wears a face
Austere, abstracted, void of outward grace.
The problems it would solve are deep and high;
And the informing light they shed is dry.
The crowd, long since besotted, in affright
Shrinks to its lazy phantoms from the sight
Of Wisdom, grim and grimy, in the mire
Calling it to drudge and moil without hire.
Whatever means Souls’ doctors can command
Should not they use to make men understand
That they are free—the more for the consent
Of Heav’n’s music to be their instrument?
Music interprets Mind; by it I strive—
Like physicians by honey from the hive—
To clothe bare truths Philosophy has taught
In garb that points—not hides—the charms of Thought.
All praise be to the Muses that I find
Power in their sweet mystery to bind
A friend in toils so happy that his soul
Will refuse deliverance ere the whole
Reveals itself to him of Nature’s plan,
Even in our verse, and how good for Man!
The Fear of Death
Bk. III. vv. 883-1107, and Bk. III. vv. 9-30
Men’s Words and Thoughts on Death!
One will deny
His and his dead body’s identity;
Yet resent, as if slight to his own worth,
Its rotting when deposited in earth;
Flame’s outrage, devouring it with his goods;
Beasts’, tearing it to pieces in the woods.
His proud profession that he does not care
For his body’s plight—He will not be there—
Rings false; he keeps, secreted in his heart,
A nerve which aches, though flesh and feeling part.
Not will self be root and branch so wrenched out
As that some still shall not be left about;
For why contemplate else at all the lot
Of the dead flesh he says concerns him not,
Unless Self pities Self, and it hurts the Soul
That it and flesh make an ill-smelling whole?
But, if strange that the sufferer thus made
To stand by, share the cruel insult paid
The carcase, being flesh and spirit, one,
Though feigned to feel, by now is past and gone,
And as Nothingness cannot feel it ill
For brutes to maul it, is not stranger still
The impulse rather to exult than mourn
When men foresee they shall hereafter burn
Upon a grand funeral pyre, or lie
Mummies, stifled, frozen, alternately,
On polished slabs of marble, or be hid,
Crushed beneath a mountainous pyramid!
You grieve: “No more will echoes of your feet
Reach home; no wife and children run to greet
Your glad return, and vie for the first kiss,
Flooding a heart, too full for speech, with bliss;
No more for dear ones will you watch and store;
Be their armour, and citadel no more;—
Oh! that one day, cruel, accursed, should spoil,
The harvesting of a whole lifetime’s toil!”
But in these sighs, what cause will you have shown
For real tribulation of your own?
Rather will not the death that you bewail
Be happy ending of a fairy tale?
Reduce your cries to words; and they will clear
Away a grievance, and assuage a fear.
To fall asleep at a fair life’s fair close,
And thence till Time shall cease enjoy repose—
Where hardship?
If it be to leave behind
Boundless sorrow to kindred, ease your mind;
The ash-pale face on the funeral pile,
Far from forbidding kindly souls to smile,
Stands for rest rewarding labour, release
From accidents of fortune’s blind caprice!
Folly again, when banqueters recline,
Brows roses-wreathed, cups in their hands, the wine
At their hearts, and—“brief harvest this of joy
For us poor things”, they cry; “the hour employ!
What is is ours; for use; not to recall!”
As if of death’s ills, if any, of all
Chief were to think of feasting in the past,
Feel in the hand the wine cup, and not taste!
Mere slumber will the night from day divide,
And brush life’s merriment and cares aside.
Death has infinite force to put asleep
Body and Mind, and how can men then keep
From craving the fuller, they being one?
Is not Death Sleep, but a sleep going on,
On eternally—more complete again,
While it lasts, than the sleep of living men?
Sleep in its own true nature does not quit
Its hold so far of sense as to unfit
A wakened subject to collect his powers
For the due service of his working hours.
Much less—if nought with something may compare—
Than busy life’s in slumber, is Death’s care
For Self! Death owes no duty unto life,
Its joys and griefs, its harmony and strife;
Dissolves as if intent to negative
The utmost art of builder to revive.
Did ever man re-tread his native land
On whom Death once has laid his icy hand?
Yet living men will counterfeit a woe
For loss that in their graves they cannot know!
Well Nature losing patience might express
Herself in plain reproof of fussiness:
“What ails the man? Why all this waste of breath
In fond anger at the approach of Death?
Did all thy days in unmixed misery pass?
No drop of pleasure moisten the cracked glass?
If satiety the fault, better, Guest,
Fly a feast too hospitable, and rest.
Since the offence a glut of life, the waste
Is the worse the longer the life shall last.
Why live, when, as each hour is born, and dies,
You read its curses in lack-lustre eyes?
Off with yourself; nought fresh can I invent;
You’ve sampled my whole stock; my wits are spent!”
You object: “Your years few; body not chill
Or withered with age; your joints supple still?”
True, I dare say: yet though you should defy
Whole centuries to kill—nay, never die—
Nature endures; all would be stale to you!—
Plead guilty; for you know the charge is true.
Call next appellant—one advanced in years,
Who meets Death’s advent with protesting tears.
Would not Nature have reason on her side,
If high She raised her voice to scold and chide:
“Begone! bad jester, peak and pule elsewhere!
I will not stand your sickly groanings here.
What if, when, as your head you laid just now
On the pillow, thinking nought else than how
Empty you were, hungering for rich fare,
Death entered, bidding you forthwith prepare
To follow! You may call it hard, unkind
Of the many years which left you behind,
Drift-weed, ashore cast by the downward flow,
Unsatisfied, forlorn,
—But wherefore so?
Did I not range careers for you to choose—
This, that—a crowd—while you, from fear to lose
A better, let all go?
At last be sage;
And cut ambition short to suit your age;
Accept complacently the golden rule—
What must be must be—
kick; and die a fool!”
Nature is right to rate a worthless son,
Though She may find use for him later on.
A battered thing like that, long past its prime,
Rusted and cankered with unlovely grime,
Out of shape and fashion, is good enough
To feed Creation’s furnace with the stuff
It is ever craving, supply of fresh
Material of mortal mind and flesh.
You need not be afraid that you, poor Clown,
Will—deserve as you may—be shovelled down
Into a bottomless pit, or consigned
To Hell, as sport for devils there confined.
How unless from old clay could new be born?
Dust we were, and must, dust to dust, return;
Millions before have fallen to it; thus
Will numberless worse, better, fall like us!
New pots from old—
just that is Nature’s view;
Still the old stuff, although the style be new.
—And Man the stuff; no scrap of Self his own;
Nothing fee simple; all on lease, or loan!
So complain not, as if to strike away
From life ere extreme age, if then, a day
Were robbery. We have, all grant, no right
O’er the past; Nature, keeping this in sight,
Inquires what better title then have we
To stake out a claim in futurity.
Past—no beginning—future—no end—are one;
Neither heeds when Man comes; when he is gone;
And you—when time casts you out, why lament,
More than its neglect in the old descent?
For grievances a fairer you might choose
In the undue postponement of repose.
Sleep is prized as a respite from Earth’s strife,
Yet is checkered by dreams that mimic life;
And death loathed as carrion bird of air,
Though sleep’s original, with no nightmare!
But, perhaps, not delights of life so much
You grieve to lose as that to quit your touch
Upon life, is to leave you face to face
With Hell’s Powers, and at their cruel grace.
Dread not; whatever penalties you owe
You will pay to the full, but not Below.
Hell’s horrors are mere bugbears; and, as they,
Shadows from the realities of day;
Warnings as well.
In no drear realm beneath
Wanders Tantalus, with fear-frozen breath
Lest the huge rock shall snap the slender thread,
And thunder down upon his helpless head.
It is a parable. The weight of cares,
The uncertainties in human affairs—
These men attribute to the wrath of God;
Charging Heaven with strokes from Fortune’s rod.
Never huge Tityos lay chained upon
Torturing bank of pitchy Acheron.
Had such monster lived, and his writhing bulk
Paved, no mere nine acres, a guilt-logged hulk,
But the whole Earth’s circle, neither he could
Supply vultures groping his breast for food,
Nor his nerves endure ages of the strain
Of waiting, with the everlasting pain.
The crazed lover in whose heart desire delves,
And lust gnaws, is Tityos for ourselves.
Look; spy you not passions everywhere
Mounting red-billed from entrails to the air?
Not in Hell is the stone pushed up, that will
Foil Sisyphus by rolling down the hill.
’Tis our Office-badges we see each year
Candidates praying, buying leave to wear—
Ungrateful burden—and worse, after all,
Not be licensed to be the people’s thrall!
The Danaids again; who could in truth
Believe that in despite of bridal ruth
Fifty girls, save one, would shed forth a flood,
At their father’s dictate, of kindred blood,
Or, if so, have paid for the deed in Hell
By drawing, in cracked pitchers, from a well?
Myth ill planned; but ponder it he who feeds
Cross-grained diseases of the soul, ill weeds,
That usurp life’s field, and divert the gaze
From joys that might be his for many days,
To outbursts as self-mocking as the freak
Of pouring water into jars that leak.
Cerberus too, the Furies, and the gloom
Steaming from black Cocytus, and the boom
Of Tartarus, flames and shrieks, horrors seen
By none but bards. They never could have been;
Yet such were, are, will be, at our own hearth,
So long as wrong is rampant on the Earth.
Thriving guilt is haunted. As if to mock
Its rise, is hurled from the Tarpeian rock,
Shivers in dungeons, is scourged, branded, all
To stamp sin’s end, and emphasize pride’s fall.
If Justice often lags, alas, to find
Fit chastisement for crime, and may seem blind,
Conscience is keener-sighted; and its goad
And whip spare not; no mercy for the load.
How cheered would be the sinner could he think
Dying cleared accounts; he had but to sink
In death, and the weight dropped? Part of his curse
Is that fancy paints future torments worse.
The Wise assure him Hell is not; in vain;
Life, his, is Hell; Eternity of pain.
To wrongdoers and wronged too brief a space
Human life has seemed to avenge a race
On heinous crimes against it; hence rose Dis,
Balanced by Elysian fields of bliss.
But you, the Multitude, why are you sad
That life is short, you, neither good, nor bad?
Is it not for an ordinary man
Audacious to complain how short his span,
When, Ancus, with his royal work to do,
Closed his eyes on light, younger than are you?
Other kings, and lords many, in the pride
Of life, who ruled great nations since have died.
By a sudden treason He breathed his last
Who paved a road by which his legions passed
O’er the sea’s salt pools, scornful of the roar
As foot and horsemen crossed from shore to shore.
Scipio, thunderbolt of war, at whom
Carthage shuddered, messenger of her doom,
Gave his bones without protest to the grave
As much of course as if a scullion slave.
Did they who trained the energies of mind
To serve, and exalt, or please, humankind,
Pioneered in the Sciences to arm
Against gross Dulness, and by Arts to charm,
Repine when the summons came to leave off,
And not echo it with a glad “Enough”!
Ministers of the Muses, with the rest,
Peerless Homer, by all their king confessed,
Raised not a single murmur, did not plead
For one song more before they joined the dead.
Democritus, not stooping to complain,
When he missed the old readiness of brain,
Stayed for no rougher monitors of age;
Spared death the toil of posting the last stage,
When the sun arises the stars that shone
In high Heaven, leave it to flame alone.
Epicurus was the sun; in his light
Wisdom of other men became as night,
His page tracks life to its source; there the whole
Is moulded by this father of the soul.
Mortal being is a medley; but as bees,
Ranging up and down, among flow’rs and trees,
In a woodland glade, sip everywhere,
Scorning nothing suckled by sunny air,
And turn all to honey, so his wise pen
Transmutes words into golden sweets for men.
As his thought wells up from a mind divine,
Terrors bred of animal blood resign
Their hold, world’s walls crumble in dust away,
I see in light clearer than that of day
Earth—above it, through it; but nought to tell
Of an Under-world, torture-jail of Hell.
Heaven stands revealed; the Gods’ quiet home,
Where nor clouds, nor rain and snow-storms dare come,
And in large air they breathe immortally,
Unknowing sin or grief, content to Be.
Ah! the debt that I owe, joy mixed with awe,
For all I learned through him of Nature’s law!
If lives stretched for goodness, well might his vie
For an exemption from the rule to die;
Nothing more certain, as his light grew dim,
Than his waiver of it, if pressed on him.
And You make a fuss at death, fret and fume,
When how does your life differ from a tomb?
You rid yourself of half of it in sleep;
For the other half, when you think you keep
Awake, bemused you yawn and snore, a prey
To sick nightmares although it is broad day,
Chief of your evils being that you fail
To extort from them what it is you ail.
Cruel the weight, you cry, upon your breast;
It wears you out, and robs you of your rest.
Seek whence it came, and by what right it took
You for pack-horse, and why it is you brook
The burden; put it, put your brain and heart
To the question. When you and Reason part,
The nightmare will be gone, and you will find
You have regained possession of your mind.
Ignorance of Causes;—that is the main
Virus in the pest of which you complain.
You rush about with it, are discontent
To return no sounder than when you went.
Ho! to the villa from the house in Town—
As driving a fire engine—headlong down.
Doze; with the fury that you galloped down,
Gallop up, just to sup alone in Town!
Why! to escape yourself—from whom, be sure,
You cannot flee out of whatever door.
Yourself you loathe for sickness!
And its Cause?
None else than being blind to Nature’s laws.
Life-in-death—it fleets! Moments its concern;
Yet in them what may not a mortal learn!
Study those laws, I say; they keep the key
Of the Universe and Eternity;
The clue to what hereafter shall be made
Of this stuff in which, men, we masquerade.
Take to heart my counsel; do not from fear
For life, shun ills your duty is to bear.
The end’s stamped on each mortal lot by Fate;
No human force avails to change the date.
And why crave to live on? You’ll find nought new;
Nothing but the old objects to pursue;
No fresh joys from life to be hammered; just
Battered failures, and savouring of dust.
We covet years, in the hope that they will
Be generous beyond the past, and still,
Although they be, hope, covet, as at first;
So wide-mouthed faith; so unquenchable thirst!
Never does it occur to you to glance
At Fortune’s caprices, the whims of Chance,
To reflect that, if added, years will not,
Whatever the number, affect one jot
The accounts between life and death.
No strife
Can be, infinite Death with finite Life.
What that called “Death”? A sea beyond, before;
Boundless, everlasting; no port, no shore.
And “Life”? An accident. Whether at birth it fall,
Or in a thousand years, concerns not Death at all!
Earth’s Decay
Bk. II. vv. 1145-1175
Ah! the good times, when Earth was young and new,
And, day by day, in strength and beauty grew;
When out of her bountiful bosom sprang
Each instant, some fresh wonder into view.
Instead, the mournful change! now, day by day,
The rule for the old Mother is decay.
Ill is the continual drain supplied,
As used particles rarefy away.
It is not as in the primeval age.
Nought mattered it to her that at this stage,
In the gay effervescence of her youth,
Blind forces beat on her; she mocked their rage.
Her garrison lacks food for its support.
Pounded by batteries of ev’ry sort,
The walls already are a pile of dust.
No hope to hold longer the great World-fort.
Futurity has ceased to be for Earth
As in her prime of jollity and mirth.
She is worn out, and weak with motherhood;
No more, as once, has vigour to give birth
To all kinds of being, race after race,
Creatures monstrous in size, perfect in grace;
All her own make; by no gold cord let down
With glory on them from a higher place,
Or cast up by the lashing, wailing tide.—
She bears not, as when laughed on ev’ry side
Cattle, corn, pastures, vines, to make hearts glad,
Earth’s gifts to Man, her glory, and her pride.
A changed scene ours; no longer Nature heaps
The barns with sheaves; well, if the farmer keeps,
After cost of labour and grain he sowed,
A balance from the harvest that he reaps.
His land in ancient days required no toil,
Except to clear the corn from off the soil;
Much less, an armoury of tools, with beeves,
And a train of hirelings to drudge and moil.
Some aged ploughman will be heard complain,
That “labour as he may, how small the gain!
Harder times these than those his father knew;
A grateful task to be God-fearing then!
True, that, man for man, a husbandman’s plot
Might seem, in measurement, a smaller plot
Than is now allowed; but reckon by yield,
And how unequal is the present lot!”
Not without cause the impulse to repine
That we live in times of weakness—decline
Throughout—in wisdom, honest cheer, and worth—
Ev’n in fruitfulness of a shrivelled vine.
But look at home ere you begin to ring
Changes on offence from without; to bring
Indictments against Fortune and the Gods;
While none’s in fault but Earth herself—poor thing!
Primeval Man
Bk. V. vv. 781-1159
In the beginning Earth at her own will
Spread a verdant glitter on plain and hill.
Flowery meadows shone, gay, birthday sheen,
Many-coloured embroidery of green.
Meanwhile fresh germs were nursing strength beyond
The modest grass that carpeted the ground.
In them all a strange, a wild yearning woke
To taste upper air; from the soil trees broke.
Ah the sense of liberty, the keen zest
Of a roaming instinct that stirred Earth’s breast!
Thus she by herself in bush and tall grove
Probed the mystery of the realm above;
Foliage anticipating in space
The down and feathers of a wingéd race.
Next, in many, manifold modes, not come
From salt pools, or sky-dropped, but from the womb—
Bewildering variety of birth—
Of the one universal Mother, Earth,
Life, under impulses of rain, heat, light,
Found organs of movement, even of flight.
Nor yet is her inventiveness outworn;
Still, through the same forces, are fresh forms born.
But well it may have been that in old days,
When Earth was quicker, livelier, in ways,
Air larger, the diversity in kind
Was more, the size greater, than now we find,
Vitality faster in ev’rything.
Thus, eggs would be hatched by the sun in Spring,
As the cicala strips its body bare
Of its fine coat, and needs no mother’s care.
And now Earth’s motherliness that had first
Found its scope in herbage, in due course nursed
Human life itself.
Wombs from moist heat grew
Soil-fixed by roots that nutriment thence drew.
This children, when they broke forth, sucked, and then,
Issuing to air, walked erect as Men.
Owing thus to one source—Earth’s breast—their milk,
For clothes her breath, for couch turf soft as silk.
Fit season for creative pow’rs to wake,
When cold did not numb, gusts confusion make,
And unlike natures could in peace assume
Their just traits, and find, without jostling, room.
With fair intervals since the birth of Man,
Almost each beast and bird we know began
To range mountains and air, although at length
Earth, like to mortal mothers, waned in strength.
Change is Nature’s prime law; stage follows stage;
And the engine by which she works is age.
A plant from flower droops into decay;
Another from dust blossoms for its day.
Earth is in endless flux; she cannot bear
Qualities once loved; kinds are not which were.
Legend is thus encouraged to relate
Tales of wonders in Earth’s creative state.
We hear of bodies twofold, each a kind,
Bound in one frame, but with a single mind.
Inconceivable Centaurs!
At three years
A horse is full-grown and all burdens bears;
At that age a boy can but play, and rest;
Yearns aloud in sleep for his mother’s breast.
Hardly is life for the young man begun
When the wind-galled steed’s course long since was run.
And Scylla? She might have chos’n to be fish,
Or to bark as dogs, and have had her wish;
But as a pair!
And Chimæra again?
Well for the Three to work as each is fain;
But, however it is with dragons, goat
And lion boast not of a flame-proof coat.
So, of the new Earth and Heaven—dreams told
Of rivers running sudden floods of gold;
Trees with gems for flowers; giants of height
To wade deep-rushing waters, and a might
That could make Olympus a ruined heap;
As if, because young Earth was used to keep
Elements and seeds dormant, when they came
At length to life, they need not be the same!
Fancy “improved” them from real freaks, born,
Living, if lives scarce human, and forlorn.
From instinct creative, but cross-grained, Earth
Brought monsters—aspect and limbs strange—to birth;
Abnormal the whole—some with parts too few,
Some with more, though all human, than were due.
Horse-men, mermaids, dragons, gold-streams, gemmed trees.
For Nature are impossibilities.
Had they once existed, there is no cause
Why the race should have ceased through Nature’s laws.
The freaks of Earth were actual, and led
Earthly men’s lives; horror, if they had bred,
As they might have but for good Nature’s grace!
She, guardian of the purity of race,
Rejecting them from the kind, by her ban
Of Childlessness, saved the descent of Man!
Nature works marvels; many are combined,
When she plants, and bars trespass on, a kind.
First, long experiments will have been tried
Before candidates find their way inside.
Even with claim allowed, how many have
Left, to prove they lived, nothing but a grave!
Food may have failed, elbow-room, or good will
In new-come neighbours strong to do them ill.
Among survivors a part owe their life
To native power to outlast long strife.
A habit may have been acquired to keep
Vigils while the enemies were asleep;
Or consciously they set wit against wit,
And, with life for stakes, enjoy playing it.
That is reynard’s way; lions’, less, resource,
Than valiant rage has been the ruling force;
And a third quality has saved a race,
Agility—deers’ pow’r to devour space.
Again, Man is grand destroyer; so breeds,
Many, owe survival to his large needs.
Dogs might have been classed with wolves; but we prize
Them as loyal light sleepers, best allies.
Some kinds, beasts of burden, willing or not,
Exchange protection, meals, for freedom’s lot.
To flocks and herds attack by beasts of prey
Was a nightly scare; it has passed away.
They are secured from that, or lack of food,
Since their extinction would lose Man a good.
But kinds that neither can resist a raid,
Nor have the right to call Man to their aid,
What for them but death, if worth while as spoil,
Or sharp riddance, cumberers of the soil?
Such final dooms as these may well have struck
A multitude of kinds out of life’s book;
And Earth, as women, fills not gaps; her stage
Of maternity obeys laws of age.
Not Man, first-born of Earth, of those that fail;
Child of a lusty mother, hard and hale;
Built on a frame-work of big, solid bone,
With tough sinews to weld the flesh in one;
Not made with heat to faint, or cold to freeze,
To sicken with strange meat, or by disease.
Men led wandering wild beasts’ lives; the sun
Had revolutions numberless to run
Ere they harrowed fields, guided the curved ploughs,
Planted young orchards, or lopped rotting boughs.
Meanwhile they gathered Earth’s alms, well content
With the chance harvests sunshine, showers sent;
Though food on which our ancestors relied
Was that the boundless woods of oak supplied.
Acorns were their mainstay, with, in large store,
Berries that young Earth’s teeming fallows bore.
They felt not how miserable they were;
For Nature pitied, and gave ample fare.
To slake thirst they but had to track the sound
Of torrents tumbling from great hills around—
A call their fellows, the wild beasts, knew well.
And oft a man would linger in some cell
Of Wood-Nymph invited by the cool air,
Since thence broke springs unfailing. Here and there
They bubbled round rocks, loitering to play
With each; then would awhile sleep on their way
In soft green moss, before all joined, to flow,
One easy gliding stream, to the smooth plain below.
As yet men had not learned to tan a skin
Robbed from some beast, and dress themselves therein.
Forest, or mountain cave, was the sole home—
If that,—they knew. When, as they chanced to roam,
A storm burst, rain, or whirlwind, they would lie,
Grimy, in the thick scrub, till it passed by.
Each one was for himself; none of them could
Rise to an idea of common good;
“Custom”, “Morals”, things unknown; and what use
In laws, when no act required an excuse?
Aught a man saw, and liked, he took; so long
As none other saw, liked, and was as strong.
The only need, a standard how to test
Animal worth—live as fitted that best.
Savage love, although not without its storms,
Was simpler than ours, direct, free from forms.
If two agreed in those natural days,
They wedded, as were weddings; went their ways.
Were he willing, not she, he won consent
With a stick: and she had to be content.
When rich the wooer, quick the bargain made,
And the price in acorns, or berries paid.
In our times, though passion may burn, its flame
We call discreetly by some other name;
Is it force to warn daughters that to wed
Poverty means just a mother’s death bed?
And as for a sale of hearts, dare compare
A lawyer’s settlements with a swine’s fare!
Still, in essence a likeness we may find
In our modes to those of the new-world kind.
Hunters all, by virtue of speed of foot,
Patience no less, they ran down any brute;
Hands as dexterous hurled a storm of stones,
And wielded clubs that crashed through flesh and bones.
Rarely were they baulked, or had to lie low,
Hunted, the hunters, by a stronger foe!
Sometimes night surprised them, led by the chase
Far from their customary haunts. Small case
They made of that; strewed leaves, and on the heap
Threw themselves, like wild beasts, and were asleep.
Pity not that beneath no roof they lay,
As darkness followed on the close of day.
They wailed not, doubting its return, for light,
Till with rosy torch the Sun banished night.
The two had from their childhood come and gone;
Why fear the Dark, unwatched, might rule alone?
To them who never knew of locks and bars,
A roof seemed a worse guardian than the stars.
Rather it was when they had sought repose
In caves they met most danger from their foes.
It might occur to some wandering beast,
Making the night hideous, to infest
A recess it passed: and, however glad
The tenant to buy life with all he had,
His fate would be to glut a lion’s maw.
Plunged live in a live tomb by tooth and claw;
Though worse their doom, who, with huge gobbets jagged
From the bleeding flesh, about the woods dragged
Noisome centres of horror and pest—palms
Trembling o’er sores for which they knew no balms;
Calling with agonizing cries on death
To sink their remains to the world beneath.
Alas!
Though measure age with age; nor let
Us in compassion for a few forget
How hosts that, eagles gleaming, marched to war,
Return, less thousands weltering in gore;
A navy that rode yesterday the waves,
To-day is matchwood, corpses robbed of graves.
Ocean in Earth’s infancy swelled with pride,
And lightly laid its empty threats aside;
Laughing tides might mean treachery, or not;
Mortals could plead no wreck to prove a plot;
Famine slew a good few in the Age of Flint;
Surfeit’s as homicidal as is stint;
For themselves poisoned meats rude nomads dressed;
With polished art we serve them to a guest!
A stage on; huts, plaited boughs; men therein
Who stripped for clothes their prey of fur and skin.
Chief of all discoveries theirs to learn
How the thing we call “Fire” will flame and burn.
First, lightning brought it, darting from above;
Though men might watch its birth in any grove,
For when gales blow, the old trees sway about,
And from the boughs in friction sparks flash out.
The sun taught many uses; how the heat—
Repeated rays—will gradually beat
Hardness mellow, and, with fire’s aid, prepare
The soil’s crude fruits and grain for human fare.
Thus, from a hearth and rough shed, rose a home,
With revolutions many thence to come;
And when stop?
With comfort, unknown of old,
Men grew impatient of rude toil and cold.
Plenty and leisure stirred the torpid heart;
And love and tenderness required their part.
Marriage fought free-love; couples plighted troth;
And offspring were the property of both.
Pledges of love, they had power to warm
Beyond the circle where they were life’s charm.
How could a father keep a heart of stone,
When he felt a child’s throbbing on his own?
Tenderness breeds tenderness; men at length
Recognized binding duties owed by strength
To weakness—assuming what it has willed
Must be done—in the stammer of a child
Dictating to its father. From the hearth
Sympathy with helplessness spread through Earth.
Right of the weak was the keystone whereon
Neighbours that would not do or see wrong done,
Founded their leagues; AND THOUGH SOME BASE WAR-LORD
WOULD HERE AND THERE BE FALSE TO HIS SWORN WORD,
THE BEST, THE MAIN PART, STOOD BY THEIRS, PURE, CHASTE:—
Else, mankind had perished, Earth been a waste!
Throughout it all, Mankind was being taught
To voice the rising requirements of Thought.
Gradual process! Gesture was first stage;
The fingers point a want in infant age.
Each creature feels what force the best to spend
To indicate a need, and gain an end.
An angry calf soon after it is born,
Butts with forehead not armed as yet with horn;
Whelps of panthers, and cubs of lions treat
As weapons teeth to be, and clawless feet.
Chickens ruffle spread-wings, as at a foe,
Threatening trespassers things they might do.
What emotion will not all beasts succeed
In expressing, though without speech, at need?
Your Molossian draws back his large, soft lips,
And shews his hard teeth! Strangers, ware, he grips!
Then comes an old friend of the Master’s—hark!
With frolic round and round, the joyous bark!
So with the whole tribe; whether in a glow
Of love they lick their pups; or to and fro
Roll them—mimic rage—and bare, as to glut
Cannibal hunger, teeth in jaws half shut.
All who know but a little of the kind,
And listen to the scolding match, will find
Worlds of difference from the doleful bay
Of hound deserted, whipt, cow’ring away.
Horses, again; does not the rule apply?
You tell by a steed’s neigh that mares are nigh;
Straightway he feels the spur of wingéd love;
They interpret his challenge to the drove.
But—nostrils spread, the neigh become a snort;
War steeds, jangling armour, pass—he would join the sport!
Nor are birds, ospreys, gulls, without their choice
Of vents for feeling; all unlike the voice,
In wooing, to the hunger-scream of strife,
Or victor’s, grappling sea fish for its life.
Even, it is believed, some kinds that ride
The air have means by varied cries to guide
Men’s acts. Rough throated rooks and crows are said
By secular sign-reading to have bred
An instinct when winds, floods, rain they would have,
To warn of weather coming that they crave.
Thus, ears attest the ways that have been found
By lower races to converse by sound,
Strange if Man, Nature’s first-born, built not speech
On sounds for meanings diverse, one for each!
Fond fable that one knew all names, and then
Distributed them to dumb fellow men!
Before common use, by what means learned he
Articulate speech had utility?
How urge men as good as deaf—so, the rule,
Sulky—for no clear gain, to go to school,
When Nature had already, by design
For them, through combining powers, to reign,
Giv’n versatility of voice and tongue
To plan, to act, and drive the world along!
Strength in union; this the great, first law,
From which, and its self-sacrifice, men draw
Sovereignty in Nature; thence learned to bow
To chiefs in mind and heart, who taught them how
To change forms of living and life for new.
From acceptance of son after sire grew
Kingship and kings; with cities in due course,
And citadels as centres of armed force,
Or royal refuges in civil strife;
For complex soon became national life.
Wealth counted first by cattle, and by land;
And the State’s part was at the King’s command.
By his own standard he apportioned it,
For strength or beauty; sometimes mother-wit.
Laws of inheritance grew fixed; and great
Landowners vied with kings to rule a State.
Gold came; race, steel, charm, acres ceased to reign;
All gave gold way, and followed in its train.
An owner used it to earn rule and fame;
Less for themselves—not e’en so high his aim—
Than that he sought to hide some stain of earth.
None blushed to rank by accidents of birth;
But rank through money! Rich men would disguise
That flaw by vouching aught else for their rise,
They wished wealth for enjoyment, yet to shun
Odium for it behind honours won.
Vain! each peak climbed breeds on its own account
Envy with traps to trip you as you mount;
The more, and loftier, surer the flash
Of a bolt, and for you, amid the crash,
To find yourself contemptuously hurled
Into the foul pit of the Underworld.
Flee gold and power, both; neither is one
With happiness; or sheds bliss on a throne.
Few who have touched the goal aver the good
Equals the price they paid in sweat of blood.
Better it satisfies to be of those
That obey than to sway realms, and crush foes.
Hear Reason, and know wealth, absolute, whole,
Is so to live that means disturb not soul.
You wish to forbid Penury your door?
Then adjust your house-keeping to your store.
Ambition exalts to abase; your eyes,
If they see, will teach you its lures are lies.
Earth’s masters despised these truths; they who had
Supremacy and wealth went drunk and mad
With licence; worms could bear no more; and crown,
And lordship—heads with them—came tumbling down.
Majesty was a ball for mobs to spurn;
Awe’s excess was matched by excess of scorn.
It was the dregs’ orgy; rule of brute force;
And each man’s fury followed its full course.
Guilt will, whatever an offence, appear
Less heinous to third persons than seen near.
Trial now was before a Court of one;—
Judge, suitor, he to whom the hurt was done.
Vengeance extreme would rouse convict, or kin,
To redress disproportioned to the sin,
And, unindulged, leave on the other side
A balance owing, and unsatisfied;
Enmeshing in either case a wide swarm
Of households pledged to work each other harm.
A blood-feud chokes enterprise;—earn reward
For deeds, when hangs over the door a sword!
Then, in all ages, let him who shall dare
Set rolling stones of civil feud, beware!
Whatever lives earlier it may spoil,
It will not miss him out; it must recoil,
No peace at home for one who has, the first,
Poisoned man’s faith in man; he is accurst.
Skulk as he may, himself does not believe
He shall for aye be able to deceive;
In sleep, fever-raging, he will proclaim
His sin, and roam clad in the sheet of shame!
Drear this “mid passage”, when, as themselves thought,
Emancipated, men were sold and bought;
Bondsmen to cunning demagogues, who saw
Their gain in putting off the reign of Law.
But ev’n the Multitude will not endure
Chaos, save as interlude. Hence the cure.
Mankind wearies of frauds; of vengeful deeds,
Infinitely renewing, like ill weeds.
From lassitude it lets the wise and good
Enlist strong arms to stem the turbid flood.
In time some sage arises to extract
Ideas of right, that laws condense to act.
Youth long since was past; Nature stood aside,
Leaving Man to face problems, and replies provide.
Iphigenia
Bk. I. vv. 80-102
Think not I, and in Reason’s name, blaspheme
Holy truths. Nay, for this would ill beseem
My purpose. To bring home impious deeds
Done as for Religion—that is my theme.
Who knows not of Aulis—the Chiefs arrayed
About the Altar of the Trivian Maid—
Lords, chosen of Achæa, kings of men,
Reluctant murderers, ashamed, afraid.
And lo! though startled, with no fear at all—
For how suspect ill in her loved sire’s call!—
A girl, young; yet ripe for marriage; perhaps,
Summoned to adorn that high festival!
What if some tremor? In her flow’r of days,
Brought hither for the host of Greeks to gaze,
And admire the Fair, a young hero’s bride.
Hark! is not that the wedding chant they raise?
Courage! Faint not; here are brave friends will bear
Thee to the Altar; all await thee there!
“Who, and for what?” She knows not, but a steam,
A blood offering, scents she in the air.
In a trance she moves; round her a void space.
Awed as if at Death’s halo on Youth’s grace,
Warriors shrink as on the Princess comes,
Abashed to look their victim in the face.
A priest’s touch—the tresses in which maids bind
Their waving hair have found themselves confined
By a sacrificial fillet, the ends
Circling each cheek, and flowing down behind.
She wakes. Flash on her soul—the Fleet’s delay—
Her Mother’s despair as she went her way—
The wrath of Artemis, Her gory rites—
Basilisk glance as Calchas passed that day!
And her sire—not once to have turned and smiled
Upon his best beloved, his first-born child—
The gleam from a ray on a Thing ill veiled—
And a swell of sobs that could not be stilled!
Her knees fail her; and how not? how sustain
The horror! her father to will to stain
His dagger with her blood! to breathe beneath
A load of inextinguishable pain!
So, shed Iphianassa her pure life,
Borne in shuddering arms to a Sire’s knife:
Printing with chaste blood incestuous stains,
Re-dyed later by a foul, vengeful wife!
The whole to verify a priest’s surmise,
Prove privity with Heav’n in vulgar eyes!
No matter how Gods’ credit was abused,
Or sweet innocence sacrificed to lies.
Maternal Love
Bk. II. vv. 342-380
Admire how Nature, with her jealous care
For purity in kind, still schemes to pair
Mother and child by features that forbid
Confusion in the common home all share.
Members of a kind insomuch agree;
Yet each is itself; whence diversity.
Mutual recognition rests on that;
Family ties without it could not be.
No human convention; dumb cattle can
Be sure where love is due, no less than Man.
An universal instinct—and, for guide,
A sense of differences—Nature’s plan.
A calf may its innocent life resign
On the altar before some stately shrine,
Shedding a flood of warm blood ’mid the steam
Of incense, and libations of red wine.
And the Mother! in many a green glade
She tracks the lost by prints his feet have made.
Each spot she studies, in the fond belief
The faith of love can never be gainsaid.
Then, from the woods that her moans overflow,
An impulse drives her to renew her woe
At the stall, where a passionate regret,
Piercing her heart, tosses her to and fro.
Not willow saplings, dewy grass, nor sight
Of brimming rivers, with, in warm noon light,
Cool pools to stand in, banish pain and ache,
Much less, yield an interval of delight.
A calf at play impose on her belief!
Be accepted as hers, and bring relief!
Numberless signs attest it not her own;
Both like and unlike aggravate her grief.
’Tis given not to flocks alone and herds
To mark diversities, but wild beasts, birds,
Joying in lonely groves, and streams, and lakes,
Even fish that understand without words,
As they swim the deep, paint in shells the shore,—
Nay, grains of corn themselves, an endless store,
Remain distinguishable, one and all;
Are known apart by learnéd in such lore.
Art works after one pattern, and by rule;
Nature as the mood inspires, not a school.
She is certain in idea; diverse
In embodiment; never same and dull.
Echo
Bk. IV. vv. 525-536, 549-596
Sound, voice are bodies. Though not for the hand
To grasp, sense feels them, acts at their command.
They wind into the ear, and strike the drum;
Hark! response, as to a conductor’s wand.
The voice even can hurt, as fist, or saw.
In full volume, hoarse, grating on the jaw,
Jostling its way in haste to worry through,
It leaves the path it travels rough and raw.
And no less bodily a spoken word;
When moulded, and dressed, to be rightly heard,
And winged by that arch modeller, the tongue,
It slips through the lips, and careers, a bird.
If the length to be traversed is unfair,
Symmetry is marred; speakers must prepare
For dazed confusion in their audience,
And only a blurred rumbling in the air.
Then set a Herald in a market place.
For him thousands of eyes gaze from one face;
And he flings at the whole a single word,
That each will drink-in as his special grace.
It multiplies, and with the hearers; all
Receive stamped facsimiles, to recall
Both form and sound, distinct, as that went forth;
Each can claim his own for original.
Human ears are the goal; and when no ear
Is reached, after roaming everywhere
In vain for shelter, the poor thing expires,
To flit a ghostly leaf, dead, shrunk and sere.
Or chance may be that it collides with rock;
When—as with pebble that recoils—the shock
Returns the voice thither whence it had come,
And so unchanged that it appears to mock.
Natural the cause, effect; the surprise,
When in lone spots a company’s loud cries
After stragglers on dark hills, bring back nought
But old words in old order as replies.
Where a height faced height, I have known a shout
To gambol between in a joyous rout,
And six or seven times reverberate;
Like ball thrown to and fro in play about.
Nothing is out of Nature’s course, the mode
In which She acts; but Fancy loves to load
Being with mysteries; not learn the laws
Within our ken that rule Earth, our abode.
Thus, a charmed husbandman will vigils keep,
Imagining far echoes breaking sleep,
’Mid silences that seem to hold their breath,
To be Pan come, half God, half Beast, with leap,
And rustle of his bristly, pine-wreathed head—
Drawn lip running o’er shrilling pipe—to lead
His troop, goat-footed Satyrs, Nymphs, and Fauns,
Till cliffs and caves reply to chords and reed.
He deems that shy Powers, as falls the Dark,
In solitudes—no prying crowds to mark—
Fill woods and hills with music, wind and stringed,
That he hears till the day-star wakes the lark.
For ears hear as they list.
The world is wide,
With wildernesses wherein few abide.
Remote from busy marts these joy to dream
Some Gods do not disdain to dwell beside!
The Seasons
Bk. V. vv. 736-746
The pageant of the Seasons! Venus comes; She brings with her,
As leader of the revel, winged Zephyr, Spring’s harbinger.
And Flora has spread a carpet, finer was never wove,
All hues and fragrances, to be trod by the Queen of Love.
Next enters red-hot Summer; but its droughts are lightly borne
By good Goddess Ceres; for they ripen the standing corn
Nought ashamed is She of the dusty sweat upon her brow.
Foreseeing her sheaves, how more and heavier they shall grow;
Nor even scolds the North-wind; it steels the straw to sustain,
By its rough embraces, the weight of the hardening grain.
Autumn steps close after; and it too with a God for guide;
Hark! shout the vineyards, “Bacchus! Hail to Bacchus!” far and wide.
And now Earth’s “No-man’s land!” Spring, Autumn, Summer here and there;
While up and down dance the Winds in the Kingdom of the Air.
South-easters roar through woods where green leaves whispered yesterday;
And thunders the South on meadows that wear the bloom of May.
But the Year is waning; in the long chilly Dark it sits;
No more, though by mere spasms, it breaks out into merry fits.
Sulky and dull it mumbles its tempers in fog and sleet;
Its joints are stiff with age; it totters on frost-bitten feet.
’Tis Winter, with a train pinched like itself, and short of breath,
That shivers, and, as it moves, rattles its remains of teeth.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
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