The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Ptolemy, Seleucus, Eumenes, Cassander.
Eum.
You shall do wisely, sir, not angering him:
The king is triply altered since you saw him:
Antipater, your father, should know this:—
He is sad, and stern, and proud.

Cas.
My father's honour
Is sacred as your king's. Year following year,
Olympias, haughtiest of her sex, and subtlest,
Scorning an equal, hating a superior,
Warred on his worth. He deigned her no reply:
He kept his charge, old Macedon, in peace:
Yearly he sent his king recruits, and ever
Held his firm foot upon revolted Greece.
He's strong in truth.

Ptol.
The king can bear all truth;
Yet trusts not truth when braggart. This remember;
Be ceremonious when you see him first:
Hating these pomps, he hates those too that grudge them.

Sel.
Hephestion's death some whit disturbed the king:
The obsequies complete, he brightens daily:
Would you had seen the pyre!

Ptol.
Describe that pyre:
'Twill make him understand the royal sorrow:
It was grief's madness—yet its beauty too.

Sel.
Sir, 'twas a work of nations in a month:
A mile of Babylon's huge wall went down
To fashion forth its base: the cost thereof
Had ten times built the Athenian Parthenon:

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'Twas earth's supremest structure, seen, and lost.
Forests down-felled sent forth its colonnades,
Huge pines, that, range o'er range to heaven ascending,
Forgat not yet their friends, the winds, but sighed
As on their native hills. In silver robes
Those far-retiring columns shone, sun-touched,
Tier above tier; the level spaces 'twixt them
Gold-zoned in circling cornices distinct
With sculptured frieze Titanic—giant wars,
The strength upheaved of earth assailing heaven
Kept down by overhanging weight of gods.
Seen 'gainst the blue, were Syren shapes that lured
The seeming mariner to death; with these,
White groups of sea-nymphs weeping round a wreck:
So fine the art, half Asian and half Greek,
That, from their wreathèd conchs and shells unwinding,
The tube-enthrallèd zephyrs breathed around
Such strains as sailors hear on haunted shores:
Far off the song was sweetest, saddest near.

Eum.
To me 'twas marvellous most by night.

Sel.
The stars
Died out: the purple vault deepened to black
Above that lower firmament of lights
Which seemed a heaven more festive, nearer earth
A many-shining city of the gods.
All night the wind increased, till that strange music
Swelled to a dirge so deep that some who heard
Went mad, they say, and died.

Eum.
When midnight came
The king gave word. The omnipresent fire
Leaped to mid-heaven. The packed horizon showed
As though the innumerous glebe had turned to man;

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And each face pale as death!

Ptol.
You have seen the site:
'Twill need the gales of many a stormy winter
To clear away those ashes.

Cas.
True: chest-deep
My horse staggered among them. Griefs like these
Tread out our lesser woes. The king would teach us
The transience of man's greatness and his joy:
Now know I why he built of wood not stone:
He built us up a lesson.

Eum.
What? that grief
Is transient likewise?

Cas.
Nay, I meant not that.

Ptol.
He taught a nobler lesson. Has he learned it?

University of Virginia Library

Scene II.—Palace Terrace at Babylon.