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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  From ‘On a Slab of Rose Marble’

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

From ‘On a Slab of Rose Marble’

By Alfred de Musset (1810–1857)

YET, despite myself, I trow

Other destiny was thine:

Far away from cloudy France,

Where a warmer sun doth shine,

Near some temple, Greek or Latin;

The fair daughters of the clime,

With the scent of heath and thyme

Clinging to their sandaled feet

Beating thee in rhythmic dance,

Were a burden far more sweet

Than court ladies shod with satin.

Could it be for this alone

Nature formed thee in the earth,

In whose beauteous virgin stone

Genius might have wrought a birth

Every age had joyed to own?…

There should have come forth of thee

Some new-born divinity.

When the marble-cutters hewed

Through thy noble block their way,

They broke in with footsteps rude

Where a Venus sleeping lay,

And the goddess’s wounded veins

Colored thee with roseate stains.

Alas! and must we hold it truth

That every rare and precious thing

Flung forth at random without ruth

Trodden under foot may lie?

The crag where, in sublime repose,

The eagle stoops to rest his wing,

No less than any wayside rose,

Dropped in the common dust to die?

Can the mother of us all

Leave her work, to fullness brought,

Lost in the gulf of chance to fall,

As oblivion swallows thought?

Torn away from ocean’s rim

To be fashioned by a whim,

Does the briny tempest whirl

To the workman’s feet the pearl?

Shall the vulgar, idle crowd

For all ages be allowed

To degrade earth’s choicest treasure

At the arbitrary pleasure

Of a mason or a churl?