Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A FABLE FOR LYDIA, by CONDE BENOIST PALLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A FABLE FOR LYDIA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sweet love is slain! I saw him at your gates
Last Line: Of high olympus, silent watching.
Subject(s): Goddesses & Gods; Legends; Mythology; Zeus


Sweet Love is slain! I saw him at your gates
Prostrate, ah me! upon th' ensanguined ground,
Slain too with his own arrow and by you!
What dreadful and most clamorous deed
For vengeance this, O Fairest Cruelty,
Than Artemis more cruel when she slew
The children of the tearful Niobe
Repentant of her boast.

Who would not weep
Save you, to see him marbled there in death,
His traitrous arrow in his gaping wound;
The crimson fountain of his streaming life
Poured out upon the pitying earth, his locks
Astray upon his alabaster brow
With veilèd eyes beneath pale pencilled lids,
Eclipsed in darkness.

Woe, deep woe and pain
Divinely bitter in the breasts of all
The gods, and cloud about Olympian heights
Heavy with sorrow of the brooding storm;
And direst wrath within Olympian halls,
For that young Eros lies untimely dead.

Zeus lays his hand upon his thunderbolt,
And in the darkened caverns of his mind
Wrath mutters, while at the presage of his frown
O'er drooping eyes glowing with pented lightnings
All heaven pales, and Heré veils her face
With trembling hands.

Great Mulciber, aloft
His mighty hammer swung to smite and shatter,
Stands, a statued rage; Apollo starts
And grips his silver bow, one hand upon
His swiftest shaft ablaze with restless fire;
And by him panoplied Minerva lifts
Her poisèd spear keen with a thousand deaths,
While on her shield the Gorgoned locks hiss wrath.
So all the gods in fair Olympus' round,
Each in the several manners of their powers,
Divinely angry and divinely swift
To vengeance, rapt in the amazèd rage
Of sudden harm breaking the halcyon joy
Of their Olympian calm, together rise
Threatening.

But chief the Cytherean goddess,
The roses slain in either cheek, and all
Her loosened tresses streaming down
Cascaded gold in riotous neglect,
Lifts up her voice piercing and wailing out
Upon the shuddering winds that bear her grief
To the four ends of earth disconsolate;
For she is mother of young Eros dead.

And at the foot of Zeus' throne she kneels
With outstretched arms and slender petaled hands,
And prays the great Ceraunian Father thus:
"Not vengeance do I seek, O Thunderer,
Not thy red bolt upon the guilty head—
For what avail that now to Eros slain?—
Though just thy vengeance for the sacrilege—
But life again for Eros, life renewed,
Immortal save from his own arrow sent
By hand of mortal, who O'ercomes the god
Himself and slays him with the fatal shaft
Aimed at his conqueror: For so the Fates
In council sacrosanct decreed, beyond
Thy might to break or bend—Frown not, O Zeus,
Father of gods and men that so I plead!
But hold thy hand! Release the eager bolt,
And hear me more before it be too late!—
For in that far inscrutable abyss
Of Fate, that underlies Olympus' heights
And all the vast foundations of the world,
'Twas willed of eld that only by the hand
That breached the fatal way of horrid death
To Eros' heart, could life be brought again;
If that same hand but pluck the arrow forth
And turn it on the heart that owns the hand,
Eros again will breathe immortal life
And gladden our high court with ancient joy.
Stay then thy hand, hurl not the dreadful bolt!
And seal not on the brow of Eros death
Forever! And in her heart that slew, the barb
Transfixed shall bring not death, but fairer life,
For fatal unto him alone alas! his shaft.
Straightway to earth will I with wingèd speed
And seek out her, who slew my boy and made
Olympus dark for all the gods, and earth
Disconsolate—a goddess at her feet,
Praying her tender pity for a god,
My son!"

So saying rises the mother goddess,
And gathering, as she rises, her unloosed locks,
With delicate and deftest fingers winds
The glittering strands in queenly coils about
Her head, and crowns it with their massy gold.
And going to the jacinth parapet
That rings Olympus height, where coo her doves
In silvery harness to her ivory car,
Mounts, and speeding downward to the earth
Wings swiftly through the flowing air that sings
In amorous cadence through the slender spokes
Of golden wheels, and far into the deep
Of blue below sinks from the straining sight
Of all the rangèd gods upon the verge
Of high Olympus, silent watching.





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