6. 'Tis something, in the dearth of fame, Even as I sing, suffuse my face; For Greeks a blush-for Greece a tear.1 7. Must we but weep o'er days more blest? A remnant of our Spartan dead! 8. What, silent still? and silent all? 35 40 Sound like a distant torrent's fall, 45 And answer, "Let one living head,3 But one arise,- we come, we come!" 'Tis but the living who are dumb. 1 Byron, in Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza LXXXVII., thus refers to his Greek Bard: "Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung, The modern Greek, in tolerable verse; If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, Of others' feeling; but they are such liars, And take all colors-like the hands of dyers." 2 A narrow pass-the only road from northern to southern Greece, defended by the Spartan leader Leonidas against the Persians, B.C. 480. 3 What did Byron himself do for the Greek cause? 1 Of Samos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor. 2 A city noted for its wine, situated on an island of the same name in the Ægean Sea. 3 A devotee of Bacchus. 4 Byron saw and described "The Pyrrhic dance so martial, To which the Levantines are very partial." The Greeks learned the use of the phalanx and the war dance from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus. 5 Cadmus, a Phoenician, is said to have brought the alphabet to Greece. 6 Polycrates, tyrant of the island of Samos, in the Ægean Sea, was a patron of literature. 12. The tyrant of the Chersonese 1 Was freedom's best and bravest friend; That tyrant was Miltiades! 2 The only hope of courage dwells: But Turkish force, and Latin fraud, Would break your shield, however broad.? 15. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Our virgins dance beneath the shade 1 A peninsula of Greece. 2 The leader of the Greeks at Marathon. 3 A famous fortress in Epirus. 4 A fortified town in Turkey. 5 Descended from Hercules, who was of Doric origin. 6 Inhabitants of France. 85 7 Did not Turkish force, Latin fraud, and Greek cowardice break the Greek shield in 1897? I see their glorious black eyes shine; But gazing on each glowing maid, 16. Place me on Sunium's marbled steep, 90 95 1 Cape Sunium or Colonna, a rocky promontory. Byron alludes to some lines of Sophocles, in the tragedy of Ajax, in which a hero says: “Let me be where is the surf-beaten promontory of the sea, under the lofty hill of Sunium." GENERAL NOTE. -The impassioned eloquence of this unique poem is wonderfully effective. As The Prisoner of Chillon is the least Byronic of the author's best poems, this may be said to be the most Byronic. Besides its supreme merit as a work of literary art, the brilliant lyric affords many historical data, and furnishes a fruitful theme not only for a lesson, but for a whole lecture, on Greece, ancient and modern, her wars, heroes, poets, and patriotic struggles, which seem destined never to end. The poem should be committed to memory," and, what is better, "learned by heart." DARKNESS. I HAD a dream, which was not all a dream. Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went-and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watch fires-and the thrones, IC The palaces of crownèd kings-the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes 15 20 |