Classic Poem

What of unnamed adventurers?
It is better so.
A strange glance out of darkness
And nothing more to know,
Like the first white man in Benin City
Who wandered up from the sea
And worked in metals for a negro king
In the sixteenth century.
Fabulous age! there alone he labored
Aided by negro boys
Casting the life of that curious city
In Portuguese alloys,
Hearing outside along the roadways
The king's messengers' bells
And waited on by black tattooed wives
Necklaced with strings of shells.
The people of Benin might not cross water
No, not for any reason,
And the blood of a woman ceremonially shed
Brought on the rainy season,
And the king's palace stood among palaces
Where under the floor of each
A dead king lay in a heap of treasure
With slaves' bones within reach.
Benin is gone: the British burned it,
But not a tongue of flame
Can touch the miraculous sixteenth-century city
To which the white man came—
Benin the name without a city
With its ghost without a name!