THE BLACK SEATS


1348-9

Blue and ever more blue
The sky of that summer's spring:
No cloud from dawning to night:
The lidless eyeball of light
Glared: nor could e'en in darkness the dew
Her pearls on the meadow-grass string.
As a face of a hundred years,
Mummied and scarr'd, for the heart
Is long dry at the fountain of tears,
Green earth lay brown-faced and torn,
Scarr'd and hard and forlorn.
And as that foul monster of Lerna
Whom Heracles slew in his might,
But this one slaying, not slain,
From the marshes, poisonous, white,
Crawl'd out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain,
A hydra of hell and of night.
--Whence upon men has that horror past?
From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,--
The City of Flowers,--the vineyards of France;--
O'er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last,
Reeking and rank, a serpent's breath:--