| |
| WE 1 are what suns and winds and waters make us; | |
| The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills | |
| Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles. | |
| But where the land is dim from tyranny, | |
| There tiny pleasures occupy the place | 5 |
| Of glories and of duties; as the feet | |
| Of fabled fairies when the sun goes down | |
| Trip o’er the grass where wrestlers strove by day. | |
| Then Justice, call’d the Eternal One above, | |
| Is more inconstant than the buoyant form | 10 |
| That burst into existence from the froth | |
| Of ever-varying ocean: what is best | |
| Then becomes worst; what loveliest, most deformed. | |
| The heart is hardest in the softest climes, | |
| The passions flourish, the affections die. | 15 |
| O thou vast tablet of these awful truths, | |
| That fillest all the space between the seas, | |
| Spreading from Venice’s deserted courts | |
| To the Tarentine and Hydruntine mole, | |
| What lifts thee up? what shakes thee? ’tis the breath | 20 |
| Of God. Awake, ye nations! spring to life! | |
| Let the last work of his right hand appear | |
| Fresh with his image, Man. Thou recreant slave | |
| That sittest afar off and helpest not, | |
| O thou degenerate Albion! with what shame | 25 |
| Do I survey thee, pushing forth the sponge | |
| At thy spear’s length, in mockery at the thirst | |
| Of holy Freedom in his agony, | |
| And prompt and keen to pierce the wounded side! | |
| Must Italy then wholly rot away | 30 |
| Amid her slime, before she germinate | |
| Into fresh vigour, into form again? | |
| What thunder bursts upon mine ear! some isle | |
| Hath surely risen from the gulfs profound, | |
| Eager to suck the sunshine from the breast | 35 |
| Of beauteous Nature, and to catch the gale | |
| From golden Hermus and Melena’s brow. | |
| A greater thing than isle, than continent, | |
| Than earth itself, than ocean circling earth, | |
| Hath risen there; regenerate Man hath risen. | 40 |
| Generous old bard of Chios! not that Jove | |
| Deprived thee in thy latter days of sight | |
| Would I complain, but that no higher theme | |
| Than a disdainful youth, a lawless king, | |
| A pestilence, a pyre, awoke thy song, | 45 |
| When on the Chian coast, one javelin’s throw | |
| From where thy tombstone, where thy cradle, stood, | |
| Twice twenty self-devoted Greeks assail’d | |
| The naval host of Asia, at one blow 2 | |
| Scattered it into air … and Greece was free … | 50 |
| And ere these glories beam’d, thy day had closed. | |
| Let all that Elis ever saw, give way, | |
| All that Olympian Jove e’er smiled upon: | |
| The Marathonian columns never told | |
| A tale more glorious, never Salamis, | 55 |
| Nor, faithful in the centre of the false, | |
| Platea, nor Anthela, from whose mount | |
| Benignant Ceres wards the blessed Laws, | |
| And sees the Amphictyon dip his weary foot | |
| In the warm streamlet of the strait below. | 60 |
| Goddess! altho’ thy brow was never rear’d | |
| Among the powers that guarded or assail’d | |
| Perfidious Ilion, parricidal Thebes, | |
| Or other walls whose war-belt e’er inclosed | |
| Man’s congregated crimes and vengeful pain, | 65 |
| Yet hast thou touched the extremes of grief and joy; | |
| Grief upon Enna’s mead and Hell’s ascent, | |
| A solitary mother; joy beyond, | |
| Far beyond, that thy woe, in this thy fane; | |
| The tears were human, but the bliss divine. | 70 |
| I, in the land of strangers, and depressed | |
| With sad and certain presage for my own, | |
| Exult at hope’s fresh dayspring, tho’ afar, | |
| There where my youth was not unexercised | |
| By chiefs in willing war and faithful song: | 75 |
| Shades as they were, they were not empty shades, | |
| Whose bodies haunt our world and blear our sun, | |
| Obstruction worse than swamp and shapeless sands. | |
| Peace, praise, eternal gladness, to the souls | |
| That, rising from the seas into the heavens, | 80 |
| Have ransom’d first their country with their blood! | |
| O thou immortal Spartan! at whose name | |
| The marble table sounds beneath my palms, | |
| Leonidas! even thou wilt not disdain | |
| To mingle names august as these with thine; | 85 |
| Nor thou, twin-star of glory, thou whose rays | |
| Stream’d over Corinth on the double sea, | |
| Achaian and Saronic; whom the sons | |
| Of Syracuse, when Death removed thy light, | |
| Wept more than slavery ever made them weep, | 90 |
| But shed (if gratitude is sweet) sweet tears. | |
| The hand that then pour’d ashes o’er their heads | |
| Was loosen’d from its desperate chain by thee. | |
| What now can press mankind into one mass, | |
| For Tyranny to tread the more secure? | 95 |
| From gold alone is drawn the guilty wire | |
| That Adulation trills: she mocks the tone | |
| Of Duty, Courage, Virtue, Piety, | |
| And under her sits Hope. O how unlike | |
| That graceful form in azure vest array’d, | 100 |
| With brow serene, and eyes on heaven alone | |
| In patience fixed, in fondness unobscured! | |
| What monsters coil beneath the spreading tree | |
| Of Despotism! what wastes extend around! | |
| What poison floats upon the distant breeze! | 105 |
| But who are those that cull and deal its fruit? | |
| Creatures that shun the light and fear the shade, | |
| Bloated and fierce, Sleep’s mien and Famine’s cry. | |
| Rise up again, rise in thy dignity, | |
| Dejected Man! and scare this brood away. | 110 |
