 | Poems |  |
22
LINES ON A CHAINED EAGLE.
Of cloudland and the whirlwind heir and lord,How vainly round thee storm and midnight roared,
In thy high haughty life of power and pride,
Soaring o'er heaven-kissed mountains, ocean wide,
And all the glories, all the glooms of earth!
But now—forgetful of thy skiey birth,
Not now dost thou imperially aspire!
Tamed is thy glance of fury and of fire!
What weight chains mournfully thy realmless wings,
Once! once! the mightiest of earth's freeborn things?
And hast thou abdicated space and air,
Thy proud domain? —No! with a blank despair
Captivity o'ercame thee! Thou! O, thou!
Whom Nature's terrors might not teach to bow,
Whose neck a thousand thunders clothed and armed,
Round whom the tempests played, like serpents charmed!
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Thy joy thy dread, unshared pre-eminence!
How, in thy stormy strength and dazzling speed—
While the tall pine bowed like a broken reed—
Thou dashedst scornfully and swift along,
As to some loftier sphere thou didst belong!
Rejoicing in thy vast unfetter'd force,
Wild as the mountain-torrents in their course,
While thunders round thee boomed! and thou didst shake,
Till like a living comet's glared thy wake—
Redoubled lightnings from thy flashing plumes
Glittering athwart the tempest's quivering glooms!
How did the upper worlds and wastes of sky
Roll back the long peal of thy triumph-cry,
Shrill as a battle-trumpet's wakening breath,
Startling those elder worlds that know not death!
Now doth that cry, despairingly prolonged,
Scarce seem to haughty joy to have belonged;
No more, while shaping thy cloud-cleaving flight,
The burst is heard of thy sublime delight.
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Those kingdoms paved with purple and with gold,
Those long-resounding regions of the storms,
And sinkest, earth-chained, prone as earth's dull worms!
Better hadst thou, by all heaven's lightning flashes
Struck down at once, fallen to that earth in ashes!
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