PARAPHRASE OF ISAIAH XXXIV.
Come near, ye people, to the Almighty Lord;
Come, listen, all ye nations, to his word,
And hear the fiat of his sure decree:
Let the wide earth re-echo to the sound,
The world, and all its fulness, ring around;
For what Jehovah utters—that shall be.
Against the nations he has bared his wrath;
Fury and indignation mark his path;
And all their armies backward shrink in dread:
Their hosts to one wide slaughter he hath given,
And by his sweeping sword their cohorts driven,
Shall roll in one deep, bleeding pile of dead.
Their corpses heaped upon the battle-field,
No friend the rites of sepulture shall yield;
There they shall rot, and welter in the sun:
The worm shall be their covering, and their shroud
The stench that rises in a tainted cloud,—
Like rivers from the hills their blood shall run.
And all the host of heaven shall waste away,
A sooty steam shall dim the light of day,
And darkness brood o'er all with raven wing;
The sun, the moon, the stars away shall roll,
The skies convolving like a folding scroll,
And there unmingled Night her veil shall fling.
The hosts of heaven shall from their centres rush,
And all their frame, in one tremendous crush,
With trailing flames to earth its arches bend;
As when the vine's sere foliage falling plays,
And ripe figs drop in autumn's lonely days,
So shall those countless worlds of light descend.
The purple of their crime has filled the sky,
And stained it with a deep, a guilty die;
And there Jehovah bathes his burning sword:
High o'er Chaldea's land that falchion waves,
A people doomed and destined to their graves;
It falls,—urged onward by the avenging Lord.
It falls,—and every soul a victim dies;
In mangled heaps their weltering corpses rise,
The king, the prince, the servant, all are gone:
That sword, with slaughter wearied, drips in gore;
With clots and hair and brains bespattered o'er,
It rests,—the work of vengeance now is done.
Scared by the terrors of the Conqueror's eye,
Like sheep and goats, a timorous flock, they fly:
The sword behind them thirsts and flashes still:
It longs on all their carcases to feed,
And as the palpitating victims bleed,
From the warm stream of life to drink its fill.
Armies and peasants, camps and cities, all
Doomed to one spreading desolation, fall,
Like bulls and lambs before the lion driven:
The soaked earth steams a hot and feverish cloud,
The gore-fed weeds their crumbling bones enshroud:—
Come near, and see the wrath of injured Heaven.
'T is silent, lonely, desolate,—a land
Of molten rocks, of white and dazzling sand,
Where stifling vapors fill the poisoned air;
With pitchy slime its sluggish rivers flow,
And lava-torrents heave and boil and glow;
Bitumen burns, and sulphur flashes there.
The quenchless fire shall redden through the night,
And send aloft, by day, a smoky light,
And rolling clouds in heavy folds ascend;
From age to age, the traveller, on his path,
Shuddering shall see that wasted land of wrath,
And back with fearful steps his journey bend.
Ruin is on that city of renown;
Her towers and battlements have thundered down,
The engine of the Lord hath laid them low:
The busy hum of trade, the slave's employ,
The warrior's echoed shout, the glee of joy,
Are hushed in that eternal overthrow.
The trumpet shall in vain to battle sound;
No armed host shall proudly throng around
Their captains; all their pomp and power is gone:
The courts and chambers, to the Arab's tread,
Ring, like the vaulted caverns of the dead,
And silence sits upon the monarch's throne.
And there the pelican shall build her nest,
And feed her young ones from her bleeding breast,
And by the bittern's boom the hush be broke;
The owlet sit and mourn in every tower,
And when the day is dark, and tempests lower,
The raven in sepulchral omens croak.
On every tumbling wall and mouldering shrine
The Lord, the unerring Lord, shall stretch his line,
And in eternal ruin thou shalt lie;
Sure as the plummet settles to the ground,
Thy courts shall echo, with an empty sound,
To the scared wanderer, as he hurries by.
And thorns shall choke the palace of her kings,
The bramble and the nettle twine their stings,
And mantle o'er her bulwarks and her walls;
The lurking lizard there shall dwell and breed,
The ostrich on the tall, rank grass shall feed,
That rustling waves in her deserted halls.
In the dark watches of the lonely night,
In one infernal chorus shall unite
The wild-cat's yell, the gaunt hyena's howl;
The baboon to his fellow-baboon cry,
The wild blast of the desert whistling by
Ring with the harpy screaming of the owl.
There shall the viper nestle, and shall lay
Her filmy eggs, and there her young shall play;
There she shall coil, and watch beneath the shade,
And on the traveller, darting, fix her sting;
And there the vulture fold his sooty wing,
Beside his mate in sordid slumber laid.
Go read the fatal volume of the Lord;
Go listen to his sure, unerring word:
“Thou, Babylon, shalt rise in glory—never;
But I will sweep my besom over thee,
And all thy pomp shall fade, and thou shalt be
A desolation and a hiss for ever.”
