Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, GIRGENTI, by WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

GIRGENTI, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: So many here have struggled, fought the fight!
Last Line: Defeated always -- but how splendidly!
Subject(s): Death; Goddesses & Gods; Life; Mythology; Dead, The


So many here have struggled, fought the fight!
Life after life so many here have flung
As incense to the gods, that served -- for what
Save Cerberus' toll to nothingness?
Of what avail to them, to us,
Their gaunt resistance and their trust?
Across the clear, sad light of centuries,
Their epitaph reveals what line of comfort?
Those that with lit, courageous eyes opposed
The mean, the merely earth, the less than highest,
Was recompense or special profit theirs?
Did their names less profoundly plumb
The chasms of oblivion
Than theirs that never fought,
But, lightly submissive, spread
The purple for their summer hearts
Within the garden's cool,
Called for the golden cups, the snowy wine,
The honey-comb, and Aphrodite's flutes?
To which was happiness the booner comrade?
Sweeter than chaplets hold you sweat and blood!
Than easy pomp, strife and hot tears!
Which likelier served the gods?
Behold the gods of both in ambered death
Of fairy tales and poets' guile!
Which hold in heritage
Elysian meadows and eternal May?
Poor trade, indeed, hoped immortality
For hot lips and the certain spring!
Ah! but the nobler struggle did bequeath
Impetus, blossom-bearing warmth unto
That blind and mighty impulse to perfection --
The race's slow, incessant upward surge!
Dreams! dreams! About, about, behold
Their bastard-souled successors,
Legitimate in blood alone!
Here once were millions; gazing hence, one saw
The high-hung walls, the teeming market place,
The colors and the colonnades,
The curving city's brilliant amplitude. . . .
There hangs upon that northern crag,
As some dirt-wasp had hovelled there,
The drab inheritor of all that purpose;
Slattern of villages, where sat the lily-crowned!
Golden Girgenti!
Of soft Sicilian cities goldenest!
Gone, all gone thy gold,
Save where the rhythm of the ripened fields
Sweeps mellowing to the sea;
Save where the lonely temples lift their pride,
And on their maimed and desecrated fronts
The evening light lays heavenly pure hands.
Gone thy gold; thy beauty, childless, gone;
Gone alike the strugglers and the strife.
Only the bland, unflashing blue, the Libyan,
Holds yet its immemorial loveliness.
Thus from the lofty temple steps at gaze,
My thoughts came faltering.
But my proud heart leaped up in glittering mail
And called:
Tho' the gods be dead or never were;
Tho' death blow out the flame and soul be dust;
Tho' generation follow generation
Level, no higher footing gained, no hope
Broad day will sometime flood the race
Upon some mountain won with agony;
Tho' all dissolve and leave no mist of gold --
Yet vision only and the strife therefor
Shall I accept as life!
If here, across this present's windy peak, I gaze
Back, back across the infinite years,
And forward thro' the infinite to be --
Above the human rabble, past the soft
Guzzlers against the fertile breasts of life,
I see, I do behold, how proudly, them
Whom blind nobility, heroic uselessness,
Impelled to scorn all acquiescence, brute
And easy; to strike to the blood's last crimson for
The dream of their own making;
Defenders, tho' creators, of their own
Divinity; soldiers in sweat, in blood,
Before the mouth of death.
So long as one remain, but one,
To shout the battle cry and take no quarter,
So long the velvet ease of life is infamous,
So long I stand with him and beard the world!
Girgenti, O Girgenti, vanished all thy sons!
And only spring with equal glory spreads
Across thy hills its billows of deep bloom.
Empedocles, thy loveliest, is gone;
And Daedalus is dead; his wings no more
Shall darken up the east or shake the sea;
Nor any make return whose name thy mouth
Smiled to repeat. Yet not to them
My heart gives hail across the grave.
Oh, not to them whose heralding
Sufficient heaven gave to their attempt.
But to thy sons, that, silently,
Oblivion-crowned,
Battled as tho' the very gods made part,
And from their golden ramparts called applause.
Them do I hail across the heavy mold;
And them unborn, foredoomed to like red death,
Whose swords submit not chance, nor fate, nor flesh. . . .
My brothers, proud, tho' unworthy, let me stand with you
In stubborn rank against the wall of doom,
Opposing meek acceptance of the world;
Scornful of scorn and vileness and black sloth;
Battling, we know not why; dying, we care not how;
Glimpsing our kinship with the farther stars;
Defeated always -- but how splendidly!





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