from Canto IV

101

And so great names are nothing more than nominal,
     And love of glory’s but an airy lust,
Too often in its fury overcoming all
     Who would as ‘twere identify their dust
From out the wide destruction, which, entombing all,
     Leaves nothing till the coming of the just—
Save change; I’ve stood upon Achilles’ tomb,
And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome.

102

The very generations of the dead
     Are swept away, and tomb inherits tomb,
Until the memory of an age is fled,
     And, buried, sinks beneath its offspring’s doom:
Where are the epitaphs our fathers read?
    Save a few glean’d from the sepulchral gloom
Which once-named myriads nameless lie beneath,
And lose their own in universal death.

103

I canter by the spot each afternoon
     Where perish’d in his fame the hero-boy,
Who lived too long for men, but died too soon
    For human vanity, the young De Foix!
A broken pillar, not uncouthly hewn,
     But which neglect is hastening to destroy,
Records Ravenna’s carnage on its face,
While weeds and ordure rankle round the base.

104

I pass each day where Dante’s bones are laid:
    A little cupola, more neat than solemn,
Protects his dust, but reverence here is paid
     To the bard’s tomb, and not the warrior’s column:
The time must come, when both alike decay’d,
     The chieftain’s trophy, and the poet’s volume,
Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth,
Before Pelides’ death, or Homer’s birth.

105

With human blood that column was cemented,
    With human filth that column is defiled,
As if the peasant’s coarse contempt were vented
     To show his loathing of the spot he soil’d;
Thus is the trophy used, and thus lamented
     Should ever be those blood-hounds, from whose wild
Instinct of gore and glory earth has known
Those sufferings Dante saw in hell alone.

106

Yet there will still be bards; though fame is smoke,
     Its fumes are frankincense to human thought;
And the unquiet feelings, which first woke
     Song in the world, will seek what then they sought;
As on the beach the waves at last are broke,
     Thus to their extreme verge the passions brought
Dash into poetry, which is but passion,
Or at least was so ere it grew a fashion.

107

If in the course of such a life as was
     At once adventurous and contemplative,
Men who partake all passions as they pass,
     Acquire the deep and bitter power to give
Their images again as in a glass,
     And in such colours that they seem to live;
You may do right forbidding them to show ‘em,
But spoil (I think) a very pretty poem.

108

Oh! ye, who make the fortunes of all books!
    Benign ceruleans of the second sex!
Who advertise new poems by your looks,
     Your “imprimatur” will ye not annex?
What, must I go to the oblivious cooks?
    Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?
Ah! must I then the only minstrel be,
Proscribed from tasting your Castalian tea!

109

What, can I prove “a lion” then no more?
     A ball-room bard, a foolscap, hot-press darling?
To bear the compliments of many a bore,
    And sigh, “I can’t get out,” like Yorick’s starling;
Why then I’ll swear, as poet Wordy swore,
     (Because the world won’t read him, always snarling)
That taste is gone, that fame is but a lottery,
Drawn by the blue-coat misses of a coterie.

110

Oh! “darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,”
     As some one somewhere sings about the sky,
And I, ye learned ladies, say of you;
     They say your stockings are so (Heaven knows why,
I have examined few pair of that hue);
     Blue as the garters which serenely lie
Round the Patrician left-legs, which adorn
The festal midnight, and the levee morn.