Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ON AN ANTIQUE MEDAL, by JOSE-MARIA DE HEREDIA (1842-1905)


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ON AN ANTIQUE MEDAL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The wine which gave the antique ecstasy
Last Line: The immortal beauty of sicilian maids.
Subject(s): Arethusa; Beauty; Transience; Impermanence


The wine which gave the antique ecstasy
To great Theocritus, in purple gold
Still ripens on Mount AEtna; -- none can hold
The gracious girls he sang in Sicily!
Greek Arethusa, slave or mistress free,
Lost the pure profile of ancestral mold,
Mixed in her veins of Angevin, proud and bold,
And Saracenic, burning furiously.
Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays;
A shadow Agrigentum! Syracuse
Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades;
But the hard metal guards through all the days --
Silver grown docile unto love's own use --
The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.






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