Classic and Contemporary Poetry
GIRGENTI, by WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY 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! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A FRIEND KILLED IN THE WAR by ANTHONY HECHT FOR JAMES MERRILL: AN ADIEU by ANTHONY HECHT TARANTULA: OR THE DANCE OF DEATH by ANTHONY HECHT CHAMPS D?ÇÖHONNEUR by ERNEST HEMINGWAY NOTE TO REALITY by TONY HOAGLAND OVERTONES by WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY |
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