Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE DEPARTURE OF PROSERPINE, by FRANCIS LEDWIDGE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE DEPARTURE OF PROSERPINE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Old mother earth for me already grieves
Last Line: No secret turning leads from the gods' way.
Subject(s): Mythology; Mythology - Classical; Persephone; Proserpine; Proserpina


OLD mother Earth for me already grieves,
Her morns wake weeping and her noons are dim,
Silence has left her woods, and all the leaves
Dance in the windy shadows on the rim
Of the dull lake thro' which I soon shall pass
To my dark bridal bed
Down in the hollow chambers of the dead.
Will not the thunder hide me if I call,
Wrapt in the corner of some distant star
The gods have never known?
Alas! alas!
My voice has left with the last wing, my fall
Shall crush the flowery fields with gloom, as far
As swallows fly.
Would I might die
And in a solitude of roses lie
As the last bud's outblown.
Then nevermore Demeter would be heard
Wail in the blowing rain, but every shower
Would come bound up with rainbows to the birds
Wrapt in a dusty wing, and the dry flower
Hanging a shrivelled lip.
This weary change from light to darkness fills
My heart with twilight, and my brightest day
Dawns over thunder and in thunder spills
Its urn of gladness
With a sadness
Through which the slow dews drip
And the bat goes over on a thorny wing.
Is it a dream that once I used to sing
From AEgean shores across her rocky isles,
Making the bells of Babylon to ring
Over the wiles
That lifted me from darkness to the Spring?
And the King
Seeing his wine in blossom on the tree
Danced with the queen a merry roundelay,
And all the blue circumference of the day
Was loud with flying song. -----
-- But let me pass along:
What brooks it the unfree to thus delay?
No secret turning leads from the gods' way.





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