Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Americas: Vol. XXX. 1876–79.
Ruins in Mexico and Central America
By Isaac McLellan (1806–1899)A
Of the deep wilderness of woods
It stands immured,—where seldom foot
Of passing traveller intrudes.
The groves primeval year by year
Above the spot renew their blooms,
Year after year cast down their wealth
Of foliage in these desert tombs.
Inscribed with hieroglyphics strange;
Column and pyramid sublime,
Defaced by centuries of change.
Here idols from their pedestals
Displaced by roots of mightiest girth;
There, by a close-embracing branch
Half lifted in the air from earth;
Or from their stations prostrate thrown,
Their huge proportions strew the ground,
With vines and brambles overgrown,
With interlacing creepers bound.
The Indian’s hatchet cleaves through wood,
Or trips the Indian damsel by,
Singing to cheer the solitude.
No sound, save when the sobbing breeze
Sighs through the forest’s dim arcades,
Or shrill call of the red macaw,
Or parrot’s gabble in the glades;
Or when the chattering monkey troop
Glide o’er the tree-tops in their race,
Like wandering spirits of the dead,
Haunting the shadows of the place.
Of temples and of wondrous shrines,
In the unwatered sands repose,
Where hot the sultry summer shines;
But forests lonely and immense
Enshroud these ruins from the sight,
And with their tangled barriers guard
The hidden secrets from the light.
Tradition has no tale to tell
And science no recórd to give
Of those who reared these ancient walls,—
Of the lost race that here did live.
Like bark that in mid-ocean rolls,
Her name effaced, her masts o’erthrown,
And none remaining of the souls
That once sailed in her, to relate
From what far-distant port she came;
Whither she sailed and what her fate,
And what her nation and her name.
But only may conjecture guess
The fancied story of this place,
And from these crumbling ruins gain
Some knowledge of the vanished race.
With awe beholds each mystic spot,
Ruins of unrecorded years,
The relics of a race forgot.
Beneath each gray, sepulchral cairn
He delves to find the heathen bones,
The statues of imperial kings,
The broken monumental stones.
All round are sculptured pedestals
Mid shivered columns wide outspread,
Where mighty roots of forest trees
Spring from the ashes of the dead,
That in their growth had levelled low
The pyramids the soil that strow.
The shattered monoliths o’erswept,
And flowers mid painted potteries
And shapely urns luxuriant crept.
The dust with antique treasure teems,
Weapons and ornaments of yore,
Great vases carved in arabesques,
Idols, that heathen tribes adore.
The prostrate stones in masses lay,
Colossal heads with staring eyes
And fractured limbs of granite gray;
The ruins of a race extinct,
The hieroglyphs of language dead,
Memorials of rites long lost,
The arms, the wealth of empires fled.
His soul with fascination filled,
When musing in that silent mood,
With sad, gray plains extended round,
Amid the hum of insect life,
Mid trees with scarlet blossoms crowned,
Mid all the bloom and solemn pomp
Of tropic nature’s wondrous place,
Amid the temples and the graves
Of a once haughty, vanished race.