The violet crown by Sir Rennell Rodd :: :: University of Virginia Library

The summer seas lie smooth and fair,
The pause of sunrise holds the air,
The canvas woos the wind in vain
That chased the moon and dropped again;
All round us on the pearly deep
Dim forms of islands seem to sleep,
For suns of morning hardly break
Their truce of silence when they wake,
Whom years of woes have taught to bless
The peace of sweet forgetfulness.

O summer isles, whose young desires
Were music once on living lyres,
What time the Teian made divine
His wreath of roses drenched in wine,
The Lesbian sang her woman's woe
In bars of passion we but know,
Across a void of silence drear
From other hearts that throbbed to hear,
What ills untold make up the sum

That struck your soul of music dumb,
Through all the ages dark with crime
When earth was in her travail time!—
Her virgin youth was sunned with smiles
In these blue wave-engirdled isles,
But passion came, and youth went by,
The golden age was quick to die.

From west and east what white sails came
Whose only freight was sword and flame,
Beflagged with Crescent or with Cross,
Whose either gain was human loss!
O fierce red years of ruth and wrong,
You ill befit a summer song!
The smoking homes, the parting cries,
The hell let loose on paradise,
The lonely lives in alien lands,
The wrenched embrace of clinging hands,
When men were slain and women slaved,
Who death in better boon had craved,
While dread o'ershadowed every morn,
And night fell on a world forlorn;
The naked to the mountains fled,
And all the wells were choked with dead!

Ah me, the fair things made for joy
It needed ages to destroy,
The colonnades on marble quays,
The valleys cool with waving trees,
The terraced orchards up the hill,
The shrines we might have worshipped still,
The statues in the myrtle glade!
But man has marred what man had made,
What God and man had best combined,
And left the barren rocks behind.

The waves have washed the blood away
And ocean smiles her best to-day,
But will the voices wake once more
That made such music heretofore,
It echoes still across the tears
Of twice a thousand silent years?
Ah, surely, world of summer isles,
For hearts are here and woman's smiles,
And dreams to dream, and deeds to do,
And years of ruin to renew;
The last wild storm has passed to peace,
It found you still the soul of Greece.