Poems with Fables in Prose :: :: University of Virginia Library

Milo, the wrestler oiled, whom victories—
Six times the Pythian, six the Olympian—crowned,
Could shoulder a bullock, run the stadium round,
And in a day devour the beast with ease.
Thrice-happy too, in philosophic strength,
Showed sumptuous ladies paths to Hera's shrine
And crushed his fellow-Greeks of Sybaris,
Haling their treasure to Crotona. In fine
This subtlest of protagonists at length
Taught his folk, force was all, and all force his.

Sybaris was thy kin. Why then, Crotona,
Did Milo lead thee to crush Sybaris?
Why tortured he the men of Sybaris?
He coveted their golden port, Crotona!

At sunfall as the titan athlete went,
His mighty self-love nursing discontent,
By a forest path, some Dionysian storm
Of impulse spurred him to a feat enorm.
Cresting the Sila's granites, a strange tree—
A boulder wedged its cloven trunk—to sea

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Spread limbs of shade forth, westward, north, south, east.
Its high fantastic-rooted talons capt
The granite. It stood desolation-wrapt.
Mysterious, wounded, long, long had it stood
Deep-rifted, but a kindly fortitude. . . .
And Milo's pride of thew, restless, on edge,
Heaved out the boulder, made himself the wedge,
Thrust the gap wider—that old wound increased—
(Faint shivers running through the foliage)
Until the great bole writhed, sprang, caught him fast,
One arm locked in the yawning of the wood,
No more out of its shade to be released;—
Unless he transmigrate into this tree
His body turns to a fetter, a prison, a grave!

Could such dumb wills, outside his will-to-be,
Have their own wounded being? Or did he rave?
That grip was real. Skywards without end
Its branch'd nerves did most curiously extend,
As they might be the fibrils of a brain—
Stood he within the ganglions of some brain?

With what a movement strange the whole tree moves,
In thick-running waves of umbratility!

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The heavy-fronded murmurer of the groves
Is dash'd by sudden inward beams—it moves,
And lo! a pattern in its vapoury
Spirals unwreathing, spirals without end
Shaped into glimmering lights, a scatter'd train,
Corollas luminous, green nebulæ. . . .

Beneath stood Milo, prisoned. To the last,
Madness and ghostly wolves approaching fast,
Still in delirium, still defiantly,
Milo bragged on, shouting up boughs divine,
“Who, then, art Thou, whose hold outwrestles mine?”
Silence fell round him, that for him was worse
Than mortal.

But to You (whose name
Verse will not utter, lest it darken verse),
Who were a greater Milo by your fame,
But a Nation, that, before the Multiverse
Fountain of souls, seems one whom nothing awes,—
To You, light-headed with your own applause,
Taunting the world whose agony You cause—
Crying with the lips of Milo still the same
Insult—“Who art thou, to imprison me?”
Immense boughs whisper back, “Humanity!”
Innumerable leaves, “Humanity!”