Poems By Richard Chenevix Trench: New ed |
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ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. |
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8
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.
Aristæus, all whose bees have perished by disease and hunger, inquires of Proteus the cause of this disaster and the remedy. Proteus replies:
Great as thy plague was thy crime: his lost wife angrily mourning
Orpheus, meriting ill that grievous doom that befell him,
Stirs (if no fates avert), for thee these righteous revenges.
She, while she fled from thee in headlong haste and unwary,
Nigh to her death, that snake of folds enormous beheld not,
Coiled in the brake at her feet, and guarding the banks of the river.
But then the choir of her equals, the Dryads, with shrill lamentation
Filled the high mountain tops; nor wanted voices of weeping
All o'er that rugged land, by Mars beloved; and the rivers
Mourned, and with high Pangæum Athenian Orithyia.
He with his hollow shell his sick soul loving to solace,
Thee on the lonely sea shore, his sweetest partner, sang ever,
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Yea, and the jaws of hell, the high portals of Pluto's dominion,
And that forest that glooms with a night of darkness and terror
Ent'ring, he came to the ghosts, he came to the Monarch, the dreadful,
Came to the hearts that know not to melt at man's supplication.
But, disturbed by his song, from the lowest recesses of Hades
Flitted the shadows thin, weak forms of the dwellers in darkness;
These than the birds not fewer, the thousands that hide in the branches,
Evening them from the mountains or storms of winter compelling;
Matrons, and men of old, and bodies of glorious heroes,
Left by the breath of life, and boys, and maidens unmarried,
And on the funeral pile youths stretched in the sight of their parents;
Whom the black slime all round, and the reed deform of Cocytus,
Whom with its sullen tide that marsh unlovely confined there
Keeps, and the river of hate with a ninefold girdle coerces.
Yea, and astonied then Death's halls and secret pavilions
Stood, and the Furies three, their locks with pale vipers enwoven;
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And, by the storm undriven, stayed moveless the wheel of Ixion.
And now, retracing his path, he had every danger surmounted,
And his beloved and restored to the upper air was approaching,
Pacing behind—for such was the law Proserpina gave them—
When, too heedless a lover, him madness seized of a sudden,
Such as might well find grace, if grace dwelt ever in Hades.
His Eurydice he on the verge and confines of daylight,
Too, too fond and forgetful! must pause and look back on; with that look
Wasted was all his toil, and the laws of the tyrant remorseless
Broken; the Stygian pools three times with a shrieking resounded.
Orpheus,' she cried, ‘who thee and me has ruined, the wretched?
Whence this madness immense? lo! the cruel destinies call me
Back, and my swimming eyes with a weight of slumber are sealing.
And now adieu; I am borne by a night of darkness surrounded,
Stretching to thee,—ah, thine no longer,—the hands that are helpless.’
Thus exclaimed she, and straight, like smoke that mingles in thin air,
Out of his sight she vanished, another way fleeing; nor ever
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Saw she again at all; nor him hell's ferryman henceforth
Suffered to pass that lake which each from the other divided.
What should he do, or whither, of wife twice widowed, betake him?
Move with what voice, what weeping, the powers of hell or of heaven?
Cold in the Stygian bark she already was crossing the river:
Him they report for seven whole months in order unbroken,
Under a lofty rock, by Strymon's desolate waters,
This among icy caves to have wept and weeping recounted;
Soothing the tigers with song, and with song compelling the forest;
As when, mourning beneath some poplar shade, Philomela
Wails for her ravished young, whom the cruel ploughman observing
Has from the nest withdrawn, an unfledged brood; but the mother
Grieves on a bough all night, her pitiful descant repeating,
Descant forlorn, that fills wide spaces with sad lamentation.
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