Classic Poem

Bird-like, my heart was glad to soar and vault;
Fluttering among the cordages; and on
The vessel flew, under an empty vault:
An angel drunken of a radiant sun.

Tell me, what is that gray, that sombre isle?
'Tis Cythera, famed on many a poet string;
A name that has not lacked the slavering smile;
But now, you see, it is not much to sing.

Isle of soft whispers, tremours of the heart!
The splendid phantom of thy rude goddess
Floats on thy seas like breath of spikenard,
Charging men's souls with love and lusciousness.

Sweet isle of myrtles, once of open blooms:
Now only of lean lands most lean: it seems
A flinty desert bitter with shrill screams:
But one strange object on its horror looms.

Not a fair temple, foiled with coppiced trees,
Where the young priestess, mistress of the flowers,
Goes opening her gown to the cool breeze,
To still the fire, the torment that devours.

But as along the shore we skirted, near
Enough to scare the birds with our white sails,
We saw a three-limbed gibbet rising sheer,
Detached against the sky in spare details.

Perched on their pasturage, ferocious fowl
Riddled with rage a more than putrid roast;
Each of them stabbing, like a tool, his foul
Beak in the oozing members of his host.

Below, a troop of jealous quadrupeds,
Looking aloft with eye and steadfast snout;
A larger beast above the others' heads,
A hangman with his porters round about.

The eyes, two caves; and from the rotten paunch,
Its freight, too heavy, streamed along the haunch.
Hang for these harpies' hideous delight,
Poor rag of flesh, torn of thy sex and sight!

Cythera's child, child of so sweet a sky!
Silent thou bearest insult—as we must—
In expiation of what faults deny
Thee even a shallow shelter in the dust.

Ludicrous sufferer! thy woes are mine.
There came, at seeing of thy dangling limbs,
Up to my lips, like vomiting, the streams
Of ancient miseries, of gall and brine.

Before thee, brother in my memory fresh!
I felt the mangling of the appetites
Of the black panthers, of the savage kites,
That were so fain to rend and pick my flesh.

The sea was sleeping. Blue and beautiful
The sky. Henceforth I saw but murk and blood.
Alas! and as it had been in a shroud,
My heart lay buried in that parable.

All thine isle showed me, Venus! was upthrust,
A symbol calvary where my image hung.
Give me, Lord God, to look upon that dung,
My body and my heart, without disgust.