Text: J. Arthur Greenwood, “Appendix 4: False Accents in Byron,” Edgar A. Poe: The Rationale of Verse, a Preliminary edition, 1968, pp. 206-210 (This material is protected by copyright)

There the hired eunuch, the Hesperian choir,

The melting lute, the soft lascivious lyre,

The song from Italy, the step from France,

The midnight orgy, and the mazy dance,

The smile of beauty, and the flush of wine,

For fops, fools, gamesters, knaves, and Lords combine:

Each to his humour — Comus all allows;

Champaign, dice, music, or your neighbour's spouse.(1)

 

If, kindly cruel, early Hope is crost,

Still to the last it rankles, a disease,

Not to be cured when Love itself forgets to please.(2)

 

I saw two beings in the hues of youth

Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,

Green and of mild declivity, the last

As ‘twere the cape of a long ridge of such,

Save that there was no sea to lave its base,

But a most living landscape, and the wave

Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men

Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke

Arising from such rustic roofs; — the hill

Was crowned with a peculiar diadem

Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,

Not by the sport of nature, but of man;

These two, a maiden and a youth, were there

Gazing — the one on all that was beneath

Fair as herself — but the Boy gazed on her;

And both were young, and one was beautiful:

And both were young — yet not alike in youth.(3)

 

And thou wert sad — yet I was not with thee;

And thou wert sick, and yet I was not near;

Methought that Joy and Health alone could be

Where I was not — and pain and sorrow here I

And is it thus? — it iw as I foretold,

And shall be more so; for the mind recoils

Upon itself, and the wrecked heart lies cold,

While Heaviness collects the shattered spoils.(4)

 

‘Tis not harsh sorrow, but a tenderer woe,

Nameless, but dear to gentle hearts below,

Felt without bitterness — but full and clear,

A sweet dejection — a transparent tear,

Unmixed with worldly grief or selfish stain —

Shed without shame, and secret without pain.(5) [page 207:]

 

Spirits of Earth and Air,

Ye shall not so elude me! By a power,

Deeper than all yet urged, a tyrant spell,

Which had its birthplace in a star condemned,

The burning wreck of a demolished world,

A wandering hell in the eternal Space;

By the strong curse which is upon my Soul,

The thought which is within me and around me,

I do compel ye to my will. — Appear!(6)

 

Long years! — It tries the thrilling frame to bear

And eagle-spirit of a Child of Song —

Long years of outrage — calumny — and wrong;

Imputed madness, prisoned solitude,

And the Mind's canker in its savage mood,

When the impatient thirst of light and air

Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate,

Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,

Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain,

With a hot sense of heaviness and pain;

And bare, at once, Captivity displayed

Stands scoffing through the never-opened gate,

Which nothing through its bars admits, save day,

And tasteless food, which I have eat alone

Till its unsocial bitterness is gone;

And I can banquet like a beast of prey,

Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave

Which is my lair, and — it may be — my grave.(7)

 

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,

Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,

And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,

With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,

And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,

That not a single accent seems uncouth,

Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,

Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.(8)

 

But these are better than the gloomy errors,

The weeds of nations in their last decay,

When Vice walks forth with her unsoftened terrors,

And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;

And Hope is nothing but a false delay,

The sick man's lightning half an hour ere Death,

When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,

And apathy of limb, the dull beginning,

Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning, [page 208:]

Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;

Yet so relieving the o’er-tortured clay,

To him appears renewal of his breath,

And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;

And then he talks of Life, and how again

He feels his spirit soaring — albeit weak,

And of the fresher air, which he would seek;

And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,

That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,

And so the film comes o’er him — and the dizzy

Chamber swims round and round — and shadows busy,

At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,

Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,

And all is ice and blackness, — and the earth

That which it was the moment ere our..birth.(9)

 

These things are not made for forgetfulness,

Florence shall be forgotten first; too raw

The wound, too deep the wrong, and the distress

Of such endurance too prolonged to make

My pardon greater, but injustice less,

Though late repented; yet — yet for her sake

I feel some fonder yearnings, and for thine,

My own Beatrice, I would hardly take

Vengeance upon the land which once was mine,

And still is hallowed by the dust's return,

Which would protect the murderess like a shrine,

And save ten thousand foes by thy sole urn.(10)

 

The giant his astonishment betrayed,

And turned about, and stopped his journey on,

And then he stooped to pick up a great stone.(11)

Love, which the gentle heart soon apprehends,

Seized him for the fair person which was ta’en

From me, and me even yet the mode offends.(12)

 

Aye, if a poor man: Steno's a patrician,

Young, gallant, gay, and haughty.(13)

 

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:

His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,

So little trouble had been given of late;

Not that the place by any means was full,

But since the Gallic era “eighty-eight”

The Devils had ta’en a longer, stronger pull,

And “a pull altogether,” as they say

At sea — which drew most souls another way.(14)

 

To be the father of the fatherless,

To stretch the hand from the throne's height, and raise

His offspring, who expired in other days

To make thy Sire's sway by a kingdom less, —

This is to be a monarch, and repress

Envy into unutterable praise.(15)

 

Hark! the lute —

The lyre — the timbrel; the lascivious tinklings

Of lulling instruments, the softening voices

Of women, and of beings less than women,

Must chime in to the echo of his revel,

While the great King of all we know of earth

Lolls crowned with roses, and his diadem

Lies negligently by to be caught up

By the first manly hand which dares to snatch it.(16)

 

I yield not to you in love of justice,

Or hate of the ambitious Foscari,

Father and son, and all their noxious race;

But the poor wretch has suffered beyond Nature's

Most stoical endurance.(17) [page 209:]

 

When thousand ages

Have rolled o’er your dead ashes, and your seed's,

The seed of the then world may thus array

Their earliest fault in fable, and attribute

To me a shape I scorn, as I scorn all

That bows to him, who made things but to bend

Before his sullen, sole eternity;

But we, who see the truth, must speak it.(18)

 

The Earth ‘s grown wicked,

And many signs and portents have proclaimed

A change at hand, and an o’erwhelming doom

To perishable beings.(19)

 

Or worse; for it has been a canker in

Thy heart from the beginning; but for this,

We had not felt our poverty but as

Millions of myriads feel it — cheerfully;

But for these phantoms of thy feudal fathers,

Thou mightst have earned thy bread, as thousands earn it;

Or, if that seem too humble, tried by commerce,

Or other civic means, to amend thy fortunes.(20)

 

Thou art a conqueror; the chosen knight

And free companion of the gallant Bourbon,

Late constable of France; and now to be

Lord of the city which hath been Earth's Lord

Under its emperors, and — changing sex,

Not sceptre, an Hermaphrodite of Empire —

Lady of the old world.(21)

 

Lone, lost, abandoned in their utmost need

By Christians, unto whom they gave their creed,

The desolated lands, the ravaged isle,

The fostered feud encouraged to beguile,

The aid evaded, and the cold delay,

Prolonged but in the hope to make a prey; —

These, these shall tell the tale, and Greece can show

The false friend worse than the infuriate foe.(22) [page 210:]

Alas! his deck was trod by unwilling feet,

And wilder hands would hold the vessel's sheet;

Young hearts, which languished for some sunny isle,

Where summer years and summer women smile;

Men without country, who, too long estranged,

Had found no native home, or found it changed,

And, half uncivilised, preferred the cave

Of some soft savage to the uncertain wave —

The gushing fruits that nature gave untilled;

The wood without a path — but where they willed;

The field o’er which promiscuous Plenty poured

Her horn; the equal land without a lord;

The wish — which ages have not yet subdued

In man — to have no master save his mood;

The earth, whose mine was on its face, unsold,

The glowing sun and produce all its gold;

The Freedom which can call each grot a home;

The general garden, where all steps may roam,

Where Nature owns a nation as her child,

Exulting in the enjoyment of the wild;

Their shells, their fruits, the only wealth they know

Their unexploring navy, the canoe;

Their sport, the dashing breakers and the chase;

Their strangest sight, an European face; —

Such was the country which these strangers yearned

To see again — a sight they dearly earned.(23)

 

You — Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion

From better company, have kept your own

At Keswick, and through still continued fusion

Of one another's minds, at last have grown

To deem as a most logical conclusion,

That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:

There is a narrowness in such a notion,

Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for Ocean.(24)