Classic Poem

I

What stony, bloodless Judith hast thou made,
Mantegna — draped in many a stony fold?
What walking sleeper whose benumb'd hands hold
A stony head and an unbloody blade?

In thine own savage days, wast thou afraid
To paint such Judiths as thou mightst behold
In open street, and paint the heads that rolled
Beneath the axe, and that each square displayed?

No, no; not such was Judith, on the night
When, in the silent camp, she watched alone,
Like some dumb tigress, in the tent's dim light

Her sleeping prey; nor when, her dark deed done,
She seized the head, and feasted thought and sight
Upon the ball that was no ball of stone.

II

There was a gleam of jewels in the tent
Which one dim cresset lit — a baleful gleam —
And from his scattered armour seemed to stream
A dusky, evil light that came and went.

But from her eyes, as over him she bent,
Watching the surface of his drunken dream,
There shot a deadlier ray, a darker beam,
A look in which her life's one lust found vent.

There was a hissing through her tightened teeth,
As with her scimitar she crouched above
His dark, doomed head, and held her perilous breath,

While ever and anon she saw him move
His red lascivious lips, and smile beneath
His curled and scented beard, and mutter love.