Classic Poem

Strophe I

I heard of those eternal pains
Which racked Ixion feels,
Fast bound by adamantine chains
To ever-turning wheels.

Doomed to this fate by angry Jove
For tempting to embrace
The Queen of heav'n with impious love,
His torments never cease.

For never did I hear or see
A man so racked before,
As Philoctetes seems to me;
What suff'rings can be more?

He never did an act was wrong,
But justice still maintained;
I wonder much that he so long
Such torments has sustained.

Tell me the cause, ye angry Pow'rs;
In Fortune's stormy seas,
He's tossed so many tedious hours,
Without one moment's ease.

Antistrophe I

Exposed to all the storms that blow
From whence he cannot fly;
And not a friend to feel his woe,
Returning sigh for sigh.

Not one the healing herb applies
To soothe his angry wound,
But torn with anguish there he lies
Extended on the ground.

The instant that his pains abate
He like an infant creeps
To find a plant to quell that heat,
And thus the venom sleeps.

Strophe II

Not from the sacred earth his food,
Nor from the tiller's care
Does he recruit his streaming blood,
But from the bird-flown air.

When soaring fowls advance this way,
He lets his arrows fly;
To certain death the feathered prey
Falls flutt'ring from the sky.

Ah! wretched soul, thy fate was hard,
To live ten years in pain,
To be from joyful wine debarred,
To drink the tasteless rain.