Georgics

Lost to the light, as birds by myriads hie

To greenwood boughs for cover, when twilight-hour

Or storms of winter chase them from the hills;

Matrons and men, and great heroic frames

Done with life's service, boys, unwedded girls,

Youths placed on pyre before their fathers' eyes.

Round them, with black slime choked and hideous weed,

Cocytus winds; there lies the unlovely swamp

Of dull dead water, and, to pen them fast,

Styx with her ninefold barrier poured between.

Nay, even the deep Tartarean Halls of death

Stood lost in wonderment, and the Eumenides,

Their brows with livid locks of serpents twined;

Even Cerberus held his triple jaws agape,

And, the wind hushed, Ixion's wheel stood still.

And now with homeward footstep he had passed

All perils scathless, and, at length restored,

Eurydice to realms of upper air

Had well-nigh won, behind him following—

So Proserpine had ruled it—when his heart

A sudden mad desire surprised and seized—

Meet fault to be forgiven, might Hell forgive.

For at the very threshold of the day,

Heedless, alas! and vanquished of resolve,

He stopped, turned, looked upon Eurydice

His own once more. But even with the look,

Poured out was all his labour, broken the bond

Of that fell tyrant, and a crash was heard

Three times like thunder in the meres of hell.

‘Orpheus! what ruin hath thy frenzy wrought

On me, alas! and thee? Lo! once again

The unpitying fates recall me, and dark sleep

Closes my swimming eyes. And now farewell:

Girt with enormous night I am borne away,

Outstretching toward thee, thine, alas! no more,

These helpless hands.’ She spake, and suddenly,

Like smoke dissolving into empty air,

Passed and was sundered from his sight; nor him

Clutching vain shadows, yearning sore to speak,

Thenceforth beheld she, nor no second time

Hell's boatman brooks he pass the watery bar.

What should he do? fly whither, twice bereaved?

Move with what tears the Manes, with what voice

The Powers of darkness? She indeed even now

Death-cold was floating on the Stygian barge!

For seven whole months unceasingly, men say,

Beneath a skyey crag, by thy lone wave,

Strymon, he wept, and in the caverns chill

Unrolled his story, melting tigers' hearts,

And leading with his lay the oaks along.

As in the poplar-shade a nightingale

Mourns her lost young, which some relentless swain,

Spying, from the nest has torn unfledged, but she

Wails the long night, and perched upon a spray

With sad insistence pipes her dolorous strain,

Till all the region with her wrongs o'erflows.

No love, no new desire, constrained his soul:

By snow-bound Tanais and the icy north,

Far steppes to frost Rhipaean forever wed,

Alone he wandered, lost Eurydice

Lamenting, and the gifts of Dis ungiven.

Scorned by which tribute the Ciconian dames,

Amid their awful Bacchanalian rites

And midnight revellings, tore him limb from limb,

And strewed his fragments over the wide fields.

Then too, even then, what time the Hebrus stream,

Oeagrian Hebrus, down mid-current rolled,

Rent from the marble neck, his drifting head,

The death-chilled tongue found yet a voice to cry

‘Eurydice! ah! poor Eurydice!’

With parting breath he called her, and the banks

From the broad stream caught up ‘Eurydice!’”

So Proteus ending plunged into the deep,

And, where he plunged, beneath the eddying whirl

Churned into foam the water, and was gone;

But not Cyrene, who unquestioned thus

Bespake the trembling listener: “Nay, my son,

From that sad bosom thou mayst banish care:

Hence came that plague of sickness, hence the nymphs,

With whom in the tall woods the dance she wove,

Wrought on thy bees, alas! this deadly bane.

Bend thou before the Dell-nymphs, gracious powers:

Bring gifts, and sue for pardon: they will grant

Peace to thine asking, and an end of wrath.

But how to approach them will I first unfold—

Four chosen bulls of peerless form and bulk,

That browse to-day the green Lycaean heights,

Pick from thy herds, as many kine to match,

Whose necks the yoke pressed never: then for these

Build up four altars by the lofty fanes,

And from their throats let gush the victims' blood,

And in the greenwood leave their bodies lone.

Then, when the ninth dawn hath displayed its beams,

To Orpheus shalt thou send his funeral dues,

Poppies of Lethe, and let slay a sheep

Coal-black, then seek the grove again, and soon

For pardon found adore Eurydice

With a slain calf for victim.”

No delay:

The self-same hour he hies him forth to do