Selected Poems (28 page)

For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh,

Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage,

Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful page.

LXXVI

720

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?

Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? no!

True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,

725

But not for you will Freedom’s altars flame.

Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!

Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;

Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.

LXXVII

The city won for Allah from the Giaour,

730

The Giaour from Othman’s race again may wrest;

And the Serai’s impenetrable tower

Receive the fiery Frank, her former guest;
¹

Or Wahab’s rebel brood who dared divest

The prophet’s
²
tomb of all its pious spoil,

735

May wind their path of blood along the West;

But ne’er will freedom seek this fated soil,

But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil.

LXXVIII

Yet mark their mirth – ere lenten days begin,

That penance which their holy rites prepare

740

To shrive from man his weight of mortal sin,

By daily abstinence and nightly prayer;

But ere his sackcloth garb Repentance wear,

Some days of joyaunce are decreed to all,

To take of pleasaunce each his secret share,

745

In motley robe to dance at masking ball,

And join the mimic train of merry Carnival.

LXXIX

And whose more rife with merriment than thine,

Oh Stamboul! once the empress of their reign?

Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine,

750

And Greece her very altars eyes in vain:

(Alas! her woes will still pervade my strain!)

Gay were her minstrels once, for free her throng,

All felt the common joy they now must feign,

Nor oft I’ve seen such sight, nor heard such song,

755

As woo’d the eye, and thrill’d the Bosphorus along.

LXXX

Loud was the lightsome tumult on the shore,

Oft Music changed, but never ceased her tone,

And timely echo’d back the measured oar,

And rippling waters made a pleasant moan:

760

The Queen of tides on high consenting shone,

And when a transient breeze swept o’er the wave,

‘Twas, as if darting from her heavenly throne,

A brighter glance her form reflected gave,

Till sparkling billows seem’d to light the banks they lave.

LXXXI

765

Glanced many a light caique along the foam,

Danced on the shore the daughters of the land,

Ne thought had man or maid of rest or home,

While many a languid eye and thrilling hand

Exchanged the look few bosoms may withstand,

770

Or gently prest, return’d the pressure still:

Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy rosy band,

Let sage or cynic prattle as he will,

These hours, and only these, redeem Life’s years of ill!

LXXXII

But, midst the throng in merry masquerade,

775

Lurk there no hearts that throb with secret pain,

Even through the closest searment half betray’d?

To such the gentle murmurs of the main

Seem to re-echo all they mourn in vain;

To such the gladness of the gamesome crowd

780

Is source of wayward thought and stern disdain:

How do they loathe the laughter idly loud,

And long to change the robe of revel for the shroud!

LXXXIII

This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece,

If Greece one true-born patriot still can boast:

785

Not such as prate of war, but skulk in peace,

The bondsman’s peace, who sighs for all he lost,

Yet with smooth smile his tyrant can accost,

And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword:

Ah! Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most;

790

Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record

Of hero sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde!

LXXXIV

When riseth Lacedemon’s hardihood,

When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,

When Athens’ children are with hearts endued,

795

When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,

Then may’st thou be restored; but not till then.

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;

An hour may lay it in the dust: and when

Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate,

800

Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?

LXXXV

And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,

Land of lost gods and godlike men! art thou!

Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
¹

Proclaim thee Nature’s varied favourite now;

805

Thy fanes, thy temples to thy surface bow,

Commingling slowly with heroic earth,

Broke by the share of every rustic plough:

So perish monuments of mortal birth,

So perish all in turn, save well-recorded Worth;

LXXXVI

810

Save where some solitary column mourns

Above its prostrate brethren of the cave
¹

Save where Tritonia’s airy shrine adorns

Colonna’s cliff,
²
and gleams along the wave;

Save o’er some warrior’s half-forgotten grave,

815

Where the gray stones and unmolested grass

Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave,

While strangers only not regardless pass,

Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh ‘Alas!’

LXXXVII

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

820

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,

Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,

And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields;

There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,

The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air;

825

Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,

Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;

Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

LXXXVIII

Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground;

No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,

830

But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,

And all the Muse’s tales seem truly told,

Till the sense aches with gazing to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon;

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold

835

Defies the power which crush’d thy temples gone:

Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.

LXXXIX

The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same;

Unchanged in all except its foreign lord –

Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame

840

The Battle-field, where Persia’s victim horde

First bow’d beneath the brunt of Hellas’ sword,

As on the morn to distant Glory dear,

When Marathon became a magic word;
¹

Which utter’d, to the hearer’s eye appear

845

The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career,

XC

The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow;

The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;

Mountains above, Earth’s, Ocean’s plain below;

Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!

850

Such was the scene – what now remaineth here?

What sacred trophy marks the hallow’d ground,

Recording Freedom’s smile and Asia’s tear?

The rifled urn, the violated mound,

The dust thy courser’s hoof, rude stranger! spurns around.

XCI

855

Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past

Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng;

Long shall the voyager, with th’ Ionian blast,

Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;

Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue