Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SPARTA, by JAMES MONAHAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SPARTA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I dreamed of sparta...Of the withered hill
Last Line: On athens of the everlasting light.
Subject(s): Cities; Sailing & Sailors; Sparta, Greece; Towns; Travel; Urban Life; Journeys; Trips


I DREAMED of Sparta ... of the withered hill
where grass turned dust and stone, and no flower grew,
although that soil had drunk its pious fill

of Spartiate blood, new born, had taken its due
from mothers of the Elect, the iron-browed
who murdered their own for sake of the peerless few.

And underneath went flickering swords and a crowd
of brown, athletic, regimented boys,
who yet were jubilant and laughed out loud,

crossing the valley, throwing their knives like toys.
I knew the black Krypteia in my dream
and that to-day they hunted. Soon no noise

of laughter, no young knife's unblooded gleam
would tell of their northern hunting, only the spring
of a slavering hound, and a helot's dying scream.

Hill-shadow covered like a vulture's wing
Sparta below—not vine nor olive tree
nor all the wild fields down there blossoming

leavened the twilight of her cruelty;
so dark she lay and beautiful and vile,
as beautiful as the tapering knife might be

at the helot's throat; and foul as the hunter's smile.
Like a guardian viper round that sacred jail,
Eurotas coiled; and mile on errant mile

of the flowering valley was sullied with its trail —
ah! there beneath the visiting Trojan's eyes
Helen had bathed; there the Iliad set sail

for far, immeasurable boundaries
of seas that break on no blue, Grecian shore.
And a wonder surpassing Helen was its prize. ...

But there I saw no radiance. I saw
the river surging to a hurricane tide
that grew until it drowned the very floor

of my dream; and all the warriors who died
for that town's sake, and helots and infants slain
in crimson forfeiture to Spartiate pride

had touched the torrent with their deeper stain.
I saw it overflowing infinite
valleys of time; the ramparted disdain

of other Spartas bordered it, and night
reigned in those cities waging endless war
on Athens of the everlasting light.





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