| |
| QUEEN of the double sea, beloved of him | |
| Who shakes the world’s foundations, thou hast seen | |
| Glory in all her beauty, all her forms; | |
| Seen her walk back with Theseus when he left | |
| The bones of Sciron bleaching to the wind, | 5 |
| Above the ocean’s roar and cormorant’s flight, | |
| So high that vastest billows from above | |
| Show but like herbage waving in the mead; | |
| Seen generations throng thy Isthmian games, | |
| And pass away,—the beautiful, the brave, | 10 |
And them who sang their praises.
But, O queen, | |
| Audible still, and far beyond thy cliffs, | |
| As when they first were uttered, are those words | |
| Divine which praised the valiant and the just; | |
| And tears have often stopt, upon that ridge | 15 |
| So perilous, him who brought before his eye | |
The Colchian babes.
“Stay! spare him! save the last! | |
| Medea!—is that blood? again! it drops | |
| From my imploring hand upon my feet!— | |
| I will invoke the Eumenides no more. | 20 |
| I will forgive thee,—bless thee,—bend to thee | |
| In all thy wishes,—do but thou, Medea, | |
Tell me, one lives.”
“And shall I too deceive?” | |
| Cries from the fiery car an angry voice; | |
| And swifter than two falling stars descend | 25 |
| Two breathless bodies,—warm, soft, motionless, | |
| As flowers in stillest noon before the sun, | |
| They lie three paces from him,—such they lie | |
| As when he left them sleeping side by side, | |
| A mother’s arm round each, a mother’s cheeks | 30 |
| Between them, flushed with happiness and love. | |
| He was more changed than they were,—doomed to show | |
| Thee and the stranger, how defaced and scarred | |
| Grief hunts us down the precipice of years, | |
| And whom the faithless prey upon the last. | 35 |
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| To give the inertest masses of our earth | |
| Her loveliest forms was thine, to fix the gods | |
| Within thy walls, and hang their tripods round | |
| With fruits and foliage knowing not decay. | |
| A nobler work remains: thy citadel | 40 |
| Invites all Greece; o’er lands and floods remote | |
| Many are the hearts that still beat high for thee: | |
| Confide then in thy strength, and unappalled | |
| Look down upon the plain, while yokemate kings | |
| Run bellowing, where their herdsmen goad them on; | 45 |
| Instinct is sharp in them, and terror true,— | |
| They smell the floor whereon their necks must lie. | |
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