from Canto VII

71

“May it please your Excellency,” thus replied
     Our British friend, “these are the wives of others,
And not our own. I am too qualified
     By service with my military brothers,
To break the rules by bringing one’s own bride
     Into a camp: I know that nought so bothers
The hearts of the heroic on a charge,
As leaving a small family at large.

72

“But these are but two Turkish ladies, who
     With their attendant aided our escape,
And afterwards accompanied us through
     A thousand perils in this dubious shape.
To me this kind of life is not so new;
     To them, poor things, it is an awkward step:
I therefore, if you wish me to fight freely,
Request that they may both be used genteelly.”

73

Meantime these two poor girls, with swimming eyes,
     Looked on as if in doubt if they could trust
Their own protectors;—nor was their surprise
     Less than their grief (and truly not less just)
To see an old man, rather wild than wise
    In aspect, plainly clad, besmeared with dust,
Stript to his waistcoat, and that not too clean,
More feared than all the Sultans ever seen.

74

For every thing seemed resting on his nod,
     As they could read in all eyes. Now to them
Who were accustomed, as a sort of God,
     To see the Sultan, rich in many a gem,
Like an Imperial Peacock stalk abroad,
     (That royal bird, whose tail’s a diadem)
With all the Pomp of Power, it was a doubt
How Power could condescend to do without.

75

John Johnson, seeing their extreme dismay,
     Though little versed in feelings Oriental,
Suggested some slight comfort in his way:
     Don Juan, who was much more sentimental,
Swore they should see him by the dawn of day,
     Or that the Russian army should repent all:
And, strange to say, they found some consolation
In this, for females like exaggeration.

76

And then with tears, and sighs, and some slight kisses,
     They parted for the present, these to await,
According to the artillery’s hits or misses,
     What Sages call Chance, Providence, or Fate—
Uncertainty is one of many blisses,
     A mortgage on Humanity’s estate—
While their beloved friends began to arm,
To burn a town which never did them harm.

77

Suwarrow,—who but saw things in the gross,
     Being much too gross to see them in detail,
Who calculated life as so much dross,
     And as the wind a widowed nation’s wail,
And cared as little for his army’s loss
     (So that their efforts should at length prevail)
As wife and friends did for the boils of Job,—
What was’t to him, to hear two women sob?

78

Nothing.—The work of Glory still went on
    In preparations for a cannonade
As terrible as that of Ilion,
     If Homer had found mortars ready made;
But now, instead of slaying Priam’s son,
    We only can but talk of escalade,
Bombs, drums, guns, bastions, batteries, bayonets, bullets;
Hard words, which stick in the soft Muses’ gullets.

79

Oh, thou eternal Homer! who couldst charm
     All ears, though long; all ages, though so short,
By merely wielding with poetic arm,
     Arms to which men will never more resort,
Unless gun-powder should be found to harm
     Much less than is the hope of every Court,
Which now is leagued young Freedom to annoy;
But they will not find Liberty a Troy:—

80

Oh, thou eternal Homer! I have now
     To paint a siege, wherein more men were slain,
With deadlier engines and a speedier blow,
     Than in thy Greek gazette of that campaign;
And yet, like all men else, I must allow,
     To vie with thee would be about as vain
As for a brook to cope with Ocean’s flood;
But still we Moderns equal you in blood;