Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, I SAW THREE TEMPLES, by ROSELLE MERCIER MONTGOMERY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

I SAW THREE TEMPLES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I saw three temples, dead and desolate,
Last Line: And all about them blooms the flower of death!
Subject(s): Cities; Paestum, Italy; Temples; Urban Life; Mosques


The three ruined temples at Paestum, in lower Italy, are all that remains of
the Greek city of Posidonia, which flourished there in the sixth century B.C.

I saw three temples, dead and desolate,
Between the purple mountains and the sea.
About them lay a level, lonely plain
Where bloomed the flower of death, the asphodel,
Above an ancient city buried there.

Upon the plain a placid peasant drove
A brace of milk-white oxen to the plow,
Across the sunken city's walls and towers,
Upturning carelessly the fallow dust
That time had made of Posidonia . . .

I watched the plowman bend to toss aside
Some fragment that had struck against the blade.
Was it the shattered image of a god --
One of the long-forgotten gods whose shrines
Stood vast and vacant there before my eyes,
In beauty terrible?
Beholding them,
I heard the thunder of the centuries;
I glimpsed again the splendid, ancient days,
When, by the grace of great Poseidon,
This buried city's ships bestrode the waves;
When far-off harbors knew her daring sails;
When there was noise and commerce in her streets.

I heard the singing in the temples there,
The chanting priests, the lowing bullocks wreathed
For sacrifice, the shouting worshipers
Who flung their supplications and their prayers
Up to the gods -- the gods so quiet, now,
Beneath the furrows of the peasant's plow,
So silent there below the asphodel.

Only the bare, brown columns, standing stark
Against the unremembering sky, remain
Between the purple mountains and the sea --
Three lonely temples on a level plain . . .
And all about them blooms the flower of death!





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