 | Areytos or songs and ballads of the South |  |
SONNET.—WEEP O'ER WILL.
How wretched is the vulgar world's translationOf the great poets. Here is one who sung
In the first dusky dawning of creation,
And yet how much we misconceive his tongue.
His saddest of all elegies—a strain,
Like Tennyson's “In Memoriam” o'er a brother,
Expressive only of an earnest pain,
Pity and sorrowing, which he can not smother—
We turn, with little sense and less compunction,
Despising all its sentiment and tone,
Into a brutal, tyrannous injunction
To scourge the sufferer, spite of all his moan.
The wo that evermore hath whipt poor Will,
Needs Love and Mercy, now, to “weep o'er Will.”
| Areytos or songs and ballads of the South | |