When Jupiter has hid from view
The heaven, and Nature’s every hue
Is lost in blinding night.
Wild Sorrow and avenging Care;
And pale Diseases cluster there,
And pleasureless Decay,
Foul Penury, and Fears that kill,
And Hunger, counsellor of ill,
A ghastly presence they:
Suffering and Death the threshold keep,
And with them Death’s blood-brother, Sleep:
Ill Joys with their seducing spells
And deadly War are at the door;
The Furies couch in iron cells,
And Discord maddens and rebels;
Her snake-locks hiss, her wreaths drip gore.
Broods darkly o’er the shadowy realm:
There dream-land phantoms rest the wing,
Men say, and ’neath its foliage cling.
And many monstrous shapes beside
Within the infernal gates abide;
There Centaurs, Scyllas, fish and maid,
There Briareus’ hundred-handed shade,
Chimæra armed with flame,
Gorgons and Harpies make their den,
With the foul pest of Lerna’s fen,
And Geryon’s triple frame.
Alarmed, Æneas grasps his brand
And points it at the advancing band;
And were no Sibyl there
To warn him that the goblin swarm
Are empty shades of hollow form,
He would be rushing on the foe,
And cleaving with intrenchant blow
The unsubstantial air.
To Tartarus and to Acheron.
At distance rolls the infernal flood,
Seething and swollen with turbid mud,
And into dark Cocytus pours
The burden of its oozy stores.
Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,
His eye-balls each a globe of fire,
The watery passage Charon keeps,
Sole warden of those murky deeps:
A sordid mantle round him thrown
Girds breast and shoulder like a zone.
He plies the pole with dexterous ease,
Or sets the sail to catch the breeze,
Ferrying the legions of the dead
In bark of dusky iron-red,
Now seamed with age; but heavenly powers
Have fresher, greener eld than ours.
Towards the ferry and the shore
The multitudinous phantoms pour;
Matrons, and men, and heroes dead,
And boys and maidens, yet unwed,
And youths who funeral fires have fed
Before their parents’ eye:
Dense as the leaves that from the treen
Float down when autumn first is keen,
Or as the birds that thickly massed
Fly landward from the ocean vast,
Driven over sea by wintry blast
To seek a sunnier sky.
Each in pathetic suppliance stands,
So may he first be ferried o’er,
And stretches out his helpless hands
In yearning for the further shore:
The ferryman, austere and stern,
Takes these and those in varying turn,
While other some he scatters wide,
And chases from the river side.
Cries, ‘Tell me, priestess, what may mean
This concourse to the shore?
What cause can shade from shade divide
That these should leave the river side,
Those sweep the dull waves o’er?’
The ancient seer made brief reply:
‘Anchises’ seed, of those on high
The undisputed heir,
Cocytus’ pool and Styx you see,
The stream by whose dread majesty
No God will falsely swear.
A helpless and unburied crew
Is this that swarms before your view:
The boatman, Charon: whom the wave
Is carrying, these have found their grave.
For never man may travel o’er
That dark and dreadful flood, before
His bones are in the urn.
E’en till a hundred years are told
They wander shivering in the cold:
At length admitted they behold
The stream for which they yearn.’
In deep thought paused Anchises’ seed
And pondered o’er their cruel need.
Tombless and sad, there meet his view
Leucaspis and Orontes true,
Who Lycia’s navy led:
With him they left their Eastern home;
The south wind whelmed them ’neath the foam,
And men and bark were sped.
Was wandering restlessly,
Who, voyaging that fatal night,
While on the stars he bent his sight,
Was tumbled headlong from his post
And flung upon the sea.
Scarce in the gloom the godlike man
His lost friend knew; then thus began:
‘Ah Palinure! what God was he
That snatched you from my fleet and me
And plunged you in the deeps?
Apollo, true in all beside,
Here only has his word belied;
He promised you should ’scape and reach
In safety the Ausonian beach;
Lo! thus his faith he keeps!’
Then he: ‘Nor false was Phœbus’ shrine,
Nor godhead whelmed me in the brine.
I slipped: the helm by which I steered
Still to my tightening grasp adhered,
Broke off, and with me fell.
The ruthless powers of ocean know
’Twas not my fate that feared me so,
As lest your ship, of help forlorn,
Her pilot lost, her helm down- torn,
Should fail in such a swell.
Three long cold nights ’neath south winds’ sweep
I drifted o’er the unmeasured deep:
Scarce on the fourth dim dawn I sight
Italia from the billow’s height.
Stroke after stroke I swam to shore;
And peril now was all but o’er,
When, as in cumbering garments wet
I grasped the steep with talon
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