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(From The Task)
ALAS for Sicily! rude fragments now | |
| Lie scattered, where the shapely column stood. | |
| Her palaces are dust. In all her streets | |
| The voice of singing and the sprightly chord | |
| Are silent. Revelry and dance and show | 5 |
| Suffer a syncope and a solemn pause, | |
| While God performs upon the trembling stage | |
| Of his own works his dreadful part alone. | |
| How does the earth receive him?—with what signs | |
| Of gratulation and delight her king? | 10 |
| Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad, | |
| Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums, | |
| Disclosing Paradise where’er he treads? | |
| She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb, | |
| Conceiving thunders through a thousand deeps | 15 |
| And fiery caverns, roars beneath his foot. | |
| The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke, | |
| For he has touched them. From the extremest point | |
| Of elevation down into the abyss | |
| His wrath is busy, and his frown is felt. | 20 |
| The rocks fall headlong, and the valleys rise, | |
| The rivers die into offensive pools, | |
| And charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross | |
| And mortal nuisance into all the air. | |
| What solid was, by transformation strange, | 25 |
| Grows fluid; and the fixed and rooted earth, | |
| Tormented into billows, heaves and swells, | |
| Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl | |
| Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense | |
| The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs | 30 |
| And agonies of human and of brute | |
| Multitudes, fugitive on every side, | |
| And fugitive in vain. The sylvan scene | |
| Migrates uplifted; and, with all its soil | |
| Alighting in far distant fields, finds out | 35 |
| A new possessor, and survives the change. | |
| Ocean has caught the frenzy, and, upwrought | |
| To an enormous and o’erbearing height, | |
| Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice | |
| Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore | 40 |
| Resistless. Never such a sudden flood, | |
| Upridged so high, and sent on such a charge, | |
| Possessed an inland scene. Where now the throng | |
| That pressed the beach, and, hasty to depart, | |
| Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone, | 45 |
| Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,— | |
| A prince with half his people! Ancient towers, | |
| And roofs embattled high, the gloomy scenes, | |
| Where beauty oft and lettered worth consume | |
| Life in the unproductive shades of death, | 50 |
| Fall prone: the pale inhabitants come forth, | |
| And, happy in their unforeseen release | |
| From all the rigors of restraint, enjoy | |
| The terrors of the day, that sets them free. | |
| Who, then, that has thee would not hold thee fast, | 55 |
| Freedom? whom they that lose thee so regret, | |
| That e’en a judgment, making way for thee, | |
| Seems in their eyes a mercy for thy sake. | |
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