Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AN ADAPTATION OF AN EPISODE IN VIRGIL, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AN ADAPTATION OF AN EPISODE IN VIRGIL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A scald, whose song was ever of the norns
Last Line: To the forgetting and forgotten dead.'
Subject(s): Death; Goddesses & Gods; Mythology; Dead, The


'Tris litore cervos
Prospicit errantis; hos tota armenta sequuntur
A tergo; et longum per vallis pascitur agmen.'
ÆNEID I, 184

A scald, whose song was ever of the Norns,
Stood once on steeply seaward-facing land,
When lo! arboreal horns,
And far, far down, stags wandering on the sand,
And after these, up a long inland vale,
Coming from out of the old inland unknown,
Great deer-droves looming pale
And vague, for overhead thick mist is blown,
Yea, overhead the cold dawn-drift is riven,
And the weird wind thereof lamenteth sore,
Till, by the gods' hands driven,
Silently forth from view go stags and deer.
Then sang that lonely scald to the loud wind
With tongue made heavy by a weight of weeping—
'Lo! it is human kind,
In the night born, and through the dim dawn sweeping
From the gods' gaze, silent and sudden hordes,
By mist-wrapt ways of shifting sand, and led
By splendour-brainéd lords
To the forgetting and forgotten Dead.'





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