Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE TEARS OF PSSAMENITUS, by JOHN RUSKIN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE TEARS OF PSSAMENITUS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Say ye I wept? I do not know
Last Line: The tears of him—who will not weep again.
Subject(s): Csmbyses Ii, King Of Persia (d. 522 B.c); Grief; Psamtik Iii, King Of Egypt; Tears; Sorrow; Sadness; Psammenitus Iii


SAY ye I wept? I do not know:—
There came a sound across my brain,
Which was familiar long ago;
And through the hot and crimson stain
That floods the earth and chokes the air,
I saw the waving of white hair—
The palsy of an aged brow;
I should have known it once, but now
One desperate hour hath dashed away
The memory of my kingly day.
Mute, weak, unable to deliver
That bowed distress of passion pale,
I saw that forehead's tortured quiver,
And watched the weary footstep fail,
With just as much of sickening thrill
As marked my heart was human still;
Yes, though my breast is bound and barred
With pain, and though that heart is hard,
And though the grief that should have bent
Hath made me, what ye dare not mock,
The being of untamed intent,
Between the tiger and the rock,
There's that of pity's outward glow
May bid the tear atone,
In mercy to another's woe
For mockery of its own;
It is not cold,—it is not less,
Though yielded in unconsciousness.
And it is well that I can weep,
For in the shadow, not of sleep,
Through which, as with a vain endeavor,
These aged eyes must gaze forever,
Their tears can cast the only light
That mellows down the mass of night;
For they have seen the curse of sight
My spirit guards the dread detail
And wears their vision like a veil.
They saw the low Pelusian shore
Grow warm with death and dark with gore,
When on those widely watered fields,
Shivered and sunk, betrayed, oppressed,
Ionian sword and Carian crest,
And Egypt's shade of shields:
They saw, oh God! they still must see
That dream of long dark agony,
A vision passing, never past,
A troop of kingly forms, that cast
Cold quivering shadows of keen pain
In bars of darkness o'er my brain:
I see them move,—I hear them tread,
Each his untroubled eyes declining,
Though fierce in front, and swift and red
The Eastern sword is sheathless shining.
I hear them tread,—the earth doth not!
Alas! its echoes have forgot
The fiery steps that shook the shore
With their swift pride in days of yore.
In vain, in vain, in wrath arrayed,
Shall Egypt wave her battle blade;
It cannot cleave the dull death shade,
Where, sternly checked and lowly laid,
Despised, dishonored, and betrayed,
That pride is past, those steps are stayed.
Oh! would I were as those who sleep
In yonder island lone and low.
Beside whose shore, obscure and deep,
Sepulchral waters flow,
And wake, with beating pause, like breath,
Their pyramidal place of death;
For it is cool and quiet there,
And on the calm frankincensed clay
Passes no change, and this despair
Shrinks like the baffled worm, their prey
Alike impassive. I forget
The thoughts of him who sent ye here:
Bear back these words, and say, though yet
The shade of this unkingly fear
Hath power upon my brow, no tear
Hath quenched the curse within mine eyes,
And by that curse's fire,
I see the doom that shall possess
His hope, his passion, his desire,
His life, his strength, his nothingness.
I see across the desert led,
A plumèd host, on whom distress
Of fear and famine hath been shed;
Before them lies the wilderness,
Behind, along the path they tread,
If death make desolation less,
There lie a company of dead
Who cover the sand's hot nakedness
With a cool moist bed of human clay,
A soil and a surface of slow decay:
Through the dense and lifeless heap
Irregularly rise
Short shuddering waves that heave and creep,
Like spasms that plague the guilty sleep,
And where the motion dies,
A moaning mixes with the purple air,
They have not fallen in fight; the trace
Of war bath not passed by;
There is no fear on any face,
No wrath in any eye.
They have laid them down with bows unbent,
With swords unfleshed and innocent,
In the grasp of that famine whose gradual thrill
Is fiercest to torture and longest to kill:
Stretched in one grave on the burning plain
Coiled together in knots of pain,
Where the dead are twisted in skeleton writhe,
With the mortal pangs of the living and lithe;
Soaking into the sand below,
With the drip of the death-dew, heavy and slow,
Mocking the heaven that heard no prayer,
With the lifted hand and the lifeless stare—
With the lifted hand, whose tremorless clay,
Though powerless to combat, is patient to pray.
' And the glance that reflects, in its vain address,
Heaven's blue from its own white lifelessness;
Heaped for a feast on the venomous ground,
For the howling jackal and herded hound;
With none that can watch and with few that will weep
By the home they have left, or the home they must keep,
The strength hath been lost from the desolate land,
Once fierce as the simoon, now frail as the sand.
Not unavenged: their gathered wrath
Is dark along its desert path,
Nor strength shall bide, nor madness fly
The anger of their agony,
For every eye, though sunk and dim,
And every lip, in its last need,
Hath looked and breathed a plague on him
Whose pride they fell to feed.
The dead remember well and long,
And they are cold of heart and strong,
They died, they cursed thee; not in vain!
Along the river's reedy plain
Behold a troop,—a shadowy crowd—
Of godlike spectres, pale and proud;
In concourse calm they move and meet,
The desert billows at their feet,
Heave like the sea when, deep distressed,
The waters pant in their unrest.
Robed in a whirl of pillared sand
Avenging Ammon glides supreme;
The red sun smoulders in his hand
And round about his brows, the gleam,
As of a broad and burning fold
Of purple wind, is wrapt and rolled.
With failing frame and lingering tread,
Stern Apis follows, wild and worn;
The blood by mortal madness shed,
Frozen on his white limbs anguish-torn.
What soul can bear, what strength can brook
The God-distress that fills his look?
The dreadful light of fixed disdain,
The fainting wrath, the flashing pain
Bright to decree or to confess
Another's fate—its own distress—
A mingled passion and appeal,
Dark to inflict and deep to feel.
Who are these that flitting follow
Indistinct and numberless?
As through the darkness, cold and hollow,
Of some hopeless dream, there press
Dim, delirious shapes that dress
Their white limbs with folds of pain;
See the swift mysterious train—
Forms of fixed, embodied feeling,
Fixed, but in a fiery trance,
Of wildering mien and lightning glance,
Each its inward power revealing
Through its quivering countenance;
Visible living agonies,
Wild with everlasting motion,
Memory with her dark dead eyes,
Tortured thoughts that useless rise,
Late remorse and vain devotion,
Dreams of cruelty and crime,
Unmoved by rage, untamed by time,
Of fierce design, and fell delaying,
Quenched affection, strong despair
Wan disease, and madness playing
With her own pale hair.
The last, how woeful and how wild!
Enrobed with no diviner dread
Than that one smile, so sad, so mild,
Worn by the human dead;
A spectre thing, whose pride of power
Is vested in its pain
Becoming dreadful in the hour
When what it seems was slain.
Bound with the chill that checks the sense,
It moves in spasm-like spell:
It walks in that dead impotence,
How weak, how terrible!
Cambyses, when thy summoned hour
Shall pause on Ecbatana's Tower,
Though barbed with guilt, and swift, and fierce,
Unnumbered pangs thy soul shall pierce
The last, the worst thy heart can prove,
Must be that brother's look of love;
That look that once shone but to bless,
Then changed, how mute, how merciless!
His blood shall bathe thy brow, his pain
Shall bind thee with a burning chain,
His arms shall drag, his wrath shall thrust
Thy soul to death, thy throne to dust;
Thy memory darkened with disgrace,
Thy kingdom wrested from thy race,
Condemned of God, accursed of men,
Lord of my grief, remember then,
The tears of him—who will not weep again.





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