epub:type="z3998:poem bodymatter z3998:fiction">
Horatian Echo3
(To an Ambitious Friend)
Omit, omit, my simple friend,
Still to enquire how parties tend,
Or what we fix with foreign powers.
If France and we are really friends,
And what the Russian Czar intends,
Is no concern of ours.
Us not the daily quickening race
Of the invading populace
Shall draw to swell that shouldering herd.
Mourn will we not your closing hour,
Ye imbeciles in present power,
Doom’d, pompous, and absurd!
And let us bear, that they debate
Of all the engine-work of state,
Of commerce, laws, and policy,
The secrets of the world’s machine,
And what the rights of man may mean,
With readier tongue than we.
Only, that with no finer art
They cloak the troubles of the heart
With pleasant smile, let us take care;
Nor with a lighter hand dispose
Fresh garlands of this dewy rose,
To crown Eugenia’s hair.
Of little threads our life is spun,
And he spins ill, who misses one.
But is thy fair Eugenia cold?
Yet Helen had an equal grace,
And Juliet’s was as fair a face,
And now their years are told.
The day approaches, when we must
Be crumbling bones and windy dust;
And scorn us as our mistress may,
Her beauty will no better be
Than the poor face she slights in thee,
When dawns that day, that day.
To George Cruikshank, Esq.
On Seeing for the First Time His Picture of The Bottle, in the Country
Artist, whose hand, with horror wing’d, hath torn
From the rank life of towns this leaf: and flung
The prodigy of full-blown crime among
Valleys and men to middle fortune born,
Not innocent, indeed, yet not forlorn:
Say, what shall calm us, when such guests intrude,
Like comets on the heavenly solitude?
Shall breathless glades, cheer’d by shy Dian’s horn,
Cold-bubbling springs, or caves? Not so! The Soul
Breasts her own griefs: and, urg’d too fiercely, says:
“Why tremble? True, the nobleness of man
May be by man effac’d: man can control
To pain, to death, the bent of his own days.
Know thou the worst! So much, not more, he can.”
Fragment of an Antigone4
| The Chorus |
Well hath he done who hath seiz’d happiness.
For little do the all-containing Hours,
Though opulent, freely give.
Who, weighing that life well
Fortune presents unpray’d,
Declines her ministry, and carves his own:
And, justice not infring’d,
Makes his own welfare his unswerv’d-from law.
He does well too, who keeps that clue the mild
Birth-Goddess and the austere Fates first gave.
For from the day when these
Bring him, a weeping child,
First to the light, and mark
A country for him, kinsfolk, and a home,
Unguided he remains,
Till the Fates come again, alone, with death.
In little companies,
And, our own place once left,
Ignorant where to stand, or whom to avoid,
By city and household group’d, we live: and many shocks
Our order heaven-ordain’d
Must every day endure.
Voyages, exiles, hates, dissensions, wars.
Besides what waste He makes,
The all-hated, order-breaking,
Without friend, city, or home,
Death, who dissevers all.
Him then I praise, who dares
To self-selected good
Prefer obedience to the primal law,
Which consecrates the ties of blood: for these, indeed,
Are to the Gods a care;
That touches but himself.
For every day man may be link’d and loos’d
With strangers: but the bond
Original, deep-inwound,
Of blood, can he not bind:
Nor, if Fate binds, not bear.
But hush! Haemon, whom Antigone,
Robbing herself of life in burying,
Against Creon’s law, Polynices,
Robs of a lov’d bride; pale, imploring,
Waiting her passage,
Forth from the palace hitherward comes.
|
| Haemon |
No, no, old men, Creon, I curse not.
I weep, Thebans,
One than Creon crueller far.
For he, he, at least, by slaying her,
August laws doth mightily vindicate:
But thou, too-bold, headstrong, pitiless,
Ah me!—honourest more than thy lover,
O Antigone,
A dead, ignorant, thankless corpse.
|
| The Chorus |
Nor was the love untrue
Which the Dawn-Goddess bore
To that fair youth she erst
Leaving the salt sea-beds
And coming flush’d over the stormy frith
Of loud Euripus, saw:
Saw and snatch’d, wild with love,
From the pine-dotted spurs
Of Parnes, where thy waves,
Asopus, gleam rock-hemm’d;
The Hunter of the Tanagraean Field.5
But him, in his sweet prime,
By severance immature,
By Artemis’ soft shafts,
She, though a Goddess born,
Saw in the rocky isle of Delos die.
Such end o’ertook that love.
For she desir’d to make
Immortal mortal man,
And blend his happy life,
Far from the Gods, with hers:
To him postponing an eternal law.
|
| Haemon |
But, like me, she, wroth, complaining,
Succumb’d to the envy of unkind Gods:
And, her beautiful arms unclasping,
Her fair Youth unwillingly gave.
|
| The Chorus |
Nor, though enthron’d too high
To fear assault of envious Gods,
His belov’d Argive seer would Zeus retain
From his appointed end
In this our Thebes; but when
His flying steeds came near
To cross the steep Ismenian glen,
The broad Earth open’d and whelm’d them and him;
And through the void air sang
At large his enemy’s spear.
And fain would Zeus have sav’d his tired son
Beholding him where the Two Pillars stand
O’er the sun-redden’d Western Straits:6
Or at his work in that dim lower world.
Fain would he have recall’d
The fraudulent oath which bound
To a much feebler wight the heroic man:
But he preferr’d Fate to his strong desire.
Nor did there need less than the burning pile
Under the towering Trachis crags,
And the Spercheius’ vale, shaken with groans,
And the rous’d Maliac gulf,
And scar’d Oetaean snows,
To achieve his son’s deliverance, O my child.
|
Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira
O frivolous mind of man,
Light ignorance, and hurrying, unsure thoughts,
Though man bewails you not,
How I bewail you!
Little in your prosperity
Do you seek counsel of the Gods.
Proud, ignorant, self-adored, you live alone.
In profound silence stern,
Among their savage gorges and cold springs
Unvisited remain
The great oracular shrines.
Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer’s holy robe,
And purged, considerate minds.
And him on whom,
