Rhymes a la Mode

Let Death but ask, we give
All gifts that we may live;
But though Death dwells so near,
We know not what he saith.

NYSA

(Soph., Fr., 235; Æsch., Fr., 56.)

On these Nysæan shores divine
The clusters ripen in a day.
At dawn the blossom shreds away;
The berried grapes are green and fine
And full by noon; in day’s decline
They’re purple with a bloom of grey,
And e’er the twilight plucked are they,
And crushed, by nightfall, into wine.

But through the night with torch in hand
Down the dusk hills the Mænads fare;
The bull-voiced mummers roar and blare,
The muffled timbrels swell and sound,
And drown the clamour of the band
Like thunder moaning underground.

COLONUS

(Œd. Col., 667–705.)

I

Here be the fairest homes the land can show,
The silvery-cliffed Colonus; always here
The nightingale doth haunt and singeth clear,
For well the deep green gardens doth she know.
Groves of the God, where winds may never blow,
Nor men may tread, nor noontide sun may peer
Among the myriad-berried ivy dear,
Where Dionysus wanders to and fro.

For here he loves to dwell, and here resort
These Nymphs that are his nurses and his court,
And golden eyed beneath the dewy boughs
The crocus burns, and the narcissus fair
Clusters his blooms to crown thy clustered hair,
Demeter, and to wreathe the Maiden’s brows!

II

Yea, here the dew of Heaven upon the grain
Fails never, nor the ceaseless water-spring,
Near neighbour of Cephisus wandering,
That day by day revisiteth the plain.
Nor do the Goddesses the grove disdain,
But chiefly here the Muses quire and sing,
And here they love to weave their dancing ring,
With Aphrodite of the golden rein.

And here there springs a plant that knoweth not
The Asian mead, nor that great Dorian isle,
Unsown, untilled, within our garden plot
It dwells, the grey-leaved olive; ne’er shall guile
Nor force of foemen root it from the spot:
Zeus and Athene guarding it the while!

THE PASSING OF ŒDIPOUS

(Œd. Col., 1655–1666.)

How Œdipous departed, who may tell
Save Theseus only? for there neither came
The burning bolt of thunder, and the flame
To blast him into nothing, nor the swell
Of sea-tide spurred by tempest on him fell.
But some diviner herald none may name
Called him, or inmost Earth’s abyss became
The painless place where such a soul might dwell.

Howe’er it chanced, untouched of malady,
Unharmed by fear, unfollowed by lament,
With comfort on the twilight way he went,
Passing, if ever man did, wondrously;
From this world’s death to life divinely rent,
Unschooled in Time’s last lesson, how we die.

THE TAMING OF TYRO

(Soph., Fr., 587.)

(Sidero, the stepmother of Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, cruelly entreated her in all things, and chiefly in this, that she let sheer her beautiful hair.)

At fierce Sidero’s word the thralls drew near,
And shore the locks of Tyro, – like ripe corn
They fell in golden harvest, – but forlorn
The maiden shuddered in her pain and fear,
Like some wild mare that cruel grooms in scorn
Hunt in the meadows, and her mane they sheer,
And drive her where, within the waters clear,
She spies her shadow, and her shame doth mourn.