Classic Poem

PART IV.

I

Y ET again buried, mid the beautiful,
The myrtle-bowers round which vines clustering throng
O'er latticed roofs that cast down shadows cool,
As the air sighs their tendrilled leaves along,
Forget the desolate; the skull among
Arcadian flowers; the shade of death that sate
At the life-feast and chilled the festal song.
Oh! yet the form of beauty contemplate,
That woos glad Eros here his love to satiate.

II

Know'st thou the stream, its veiny current threading
Between the willow-banks it loves, that makes
Its low voice heard by thee as thou art treading
That green bank thoughtfully. The aspen shakes
Its boughs above; the deep sky gives and takes
Its azure from it, and that river keeps
Its name, while states have vanished as the flakes
Of snow sun-melted. S ARNO to the deeps
Rolls on; its wave no more the painted trireme sweeps.

III

A rising mound, wave-like, the path conceals;
The fig-trees blossom o'er its flower-crowned crest:
Enter! a world behind itself reveals;
The dead are disinterred from Nature's breast,
The buried waked from their sepulchral rest.
Living Pompeii raised again behold!
The vision in material life confessed;
Time hath the archives of the past unrolled,
Their household gods unveiled, and life domestic told.

IV

The City of the Dead to light restored,
And resurrection, day again began,
The law of fate suspended, to record
The greatness and the nothingness of man;
Decay arrested, and oblivion's ban
From wrecks that rise on life's cold shore alone:
Here, moralist! thou seest thy bounded span;
Truth stands embodied, and with audible tone
Points to the house, thy tomb, the dust that is thine own.

V

Lo, the Pompeian Forum! haunt of rest
And recreation when the twilight sky
Hued with its beauty the delighted west;
When the sea's rising breath refreshingly
Gladdened each heart, and soothed each wearied eye
Oppressed and fevered with the heats of day;
Moments when life was felt, when the light sigh
Was pleasure, impulses that all obey,
As nature o'er the heart asserts her healthful sway.

VI

Thou who dost press the benches disarrayed,
In yon void theatre, the stage the same,
Save where the painted scene illusion made;
Whom the same hopes, wants, joys, loves, wishes, claim
As thy own fellow-men, thou wilt not blame
Thy heart for weakness, if from thought austere
Thy brow, relaxing, gentler feelings tame;
If thou dost sigh, it may be, shed a tear
For those who lived like thee, who thronged rejoicing here.

VII

Here, where light satire mirrored to the view,
And lashed the modes and follies of the hour,
Or where sublimer throes of passion drew
Tears that confessed the Muse's tragic power:
And they who gazed, the lover, and his flower
Of beauty near him, in whose ear was sighed
That love-tale prized beyond fame's brightest dower;
Where are they fled in their patrician pride? —
Their very dust with nature doth no more abide!

VIII

Rent is the area that life held within,
The columns fallen, lowered the painted scene,
Where toiled the inventive brain of art to win
Shouts from applauding crowds. Yon fields are green
As ever in the distance, and serene
Looks in the beauty of the azure sphere,
Where once Velarium's foldings spread between;
There, yawning open like a desolate bier,
'Mid Nature's deathless works, man's reliques grey appear,

IX

Looking a moral and reproof sedate
On the light pastimes of the vanished dead,
The stage exposed, but not to contemplate
Or gauds, or toys, or tinsel draperies fled;
Bared, skull-like, there, it lies beneath; we thread
Those avenues which man no more shall build,
The portals and the winding paths that led
To chambers once with ardent impulse filled;
Where the retiring mind planned, reasoned, thought, and willed.

X

The Street of Tombs! — the dwelling-places rent
Of those who felt not fires that o'er them swept,
Engulfed within a living monument;
But in those hollow niches where they slept,
Even in their urns the fiery vapour crept,
The mountain's ashes and the human dust
Together heaped; the dead no longer kept
Their couches, forth by earth convulsive thrust
From that last home where love the loved ones still entrust.