Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Pompeii
By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)K
Between the willow banks it loves, that makes
Its low voice heard by thee as thou art treading
That green bank thoughtfully; the aspen shakes
Its boughs above, the deep sky gives and takes
Its azure from it, and that river keeps
Its name, while states have vanished as the flakes
Of snow, sun-melted: Sarno to the deeps
Rolls on, its waves no more the painted trireme sweeps.
Waves the wild fig-trees o’er its flower-crowned crest:
Enter, a world is opened from behind,
The dead are disinterred from Nature’s breast,
The buried raised from their sepulchral rest;
Living Pompeii again behold!
The vision in material life confessed;
Time hath the archives of the past unrolled,
Their household gods unveiled, and life domestic told.
And resurrection, day again began,
The law of fate suspended to record
The greatness and the nothingness of man:
Decay arrested and oblivion’s ban
From wrecks that rise on life’s cold shore alone:
Here, moralist! thou seest thy bounded span:
Truth stands embodied, and with audible tone
Points to the house, thy tomb, the dust that is thine own.
And recreation when the twilight sky
Hued with its beauty the delighted west:
When the sea’s rising breath refreshingly
Gladdened each heart, and soothed each wearied eye
Oppressed and fevered with the heats of day:
Moments when life was felt, when the light sigh
Was pleasure, impulses that all obey,
As Nature o’er the heart asserts her healthful sway.
The Street of Tombs! the dwelling-places rent
Of those who felt not fires that o’er them swept,
Engulfed within a living monument;
But in those hollow niches where they slept,
Yea, in their urns the fiery vapor crept,
The mountain’s ashes and the human dust
Together heaped: the dead no longer kept
Their couches, forth by earth convulsive thrust
From that last home where love the loved ones still intrust.
Of the refined patrician, where the hand
Of luxury ruled, and Art traced forms of grace
Which from time hidden could decay withstand;
Playthings that shall again resolve to sand,
Opened to skyey influence and air,
All that his vanity or fondness planned;
The law of nature it again doth share,
Decay, change, time, and death, too long evaded there.
The town was hushed, save where a faint shout came
From the far-distant amphitheatre,
Air glowed as from a sullen furnace flame:
The trees drooped wan, no breath a leaf to stir;
Each house was noiseless as a sepulchre,
And the all-sickly weight by nature shown
Pressed heaviest on human hearts; they were
All silent, each foreboding dared not own
Fears, the advancing shadows of an ill unknown.
In vision centering the astounded mind:
The mists that erewhile swathed his front are broken,
Hurled upward as by some imprisoned wind
Earth could no more within her caverns bind;
Lo, scroll-like forth in scattered wreathings driven
From his cleft brow, gray clouds that disentwined
From their black trunk shot forth like branches riven,
Opening their pine-like shape in the profound of heaven!
The mountain that had slept a thousand years
Wakes from his slumber! lo, yon sable flood
Of eddying cloud its giant shape uprears:
They gaze, yet fly not, who had linked with fears
Vesuvius robed in ever green attire?
But lo, each moment wilder, fiercer nears
The unfolding canopy, its skirts respire
Lightnings around, away, yon lurid mass is fire!