Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
The Coliseum
By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)A
Whose blood flowed unavenged upon thy sand;
Hold of the despot, refuge of the slave,
Den where the assassin made his latest stand:
Altar where hermits their devotion fanned,
Red scaffold where the unshaken martyr died;
Where sped the joust, where danced the motley band;
Stage ever changing! still the pilgrim’s guide
From earth’s remotest shores, who here have smiled or sighed,
Great Colosseum! at thy mighty shrine:
Earth’s bosom cumbered with the wrecks of power,
Shows naught beneath the sky to match with thine:
Earthquakes have heaved, storms rent, time worn each line
Of thy majestic fabric, but the eye
O’erteeming, nothing grander can combine
Than thy sublime but shattered symmetry,
Thou wonder, pride, and awe of all that pass thee by.
With the low carolling of birds that seem
To hold here an enduring festival:
How do their notes and nature’s flowers redeem
The place from stained pollution! if the stream
And reek of blood gushed forth from man and beast,
If Cain-like brethren gloated o’er the steam
Of immolation as a welcome feast,
Ages have cleansed the guilt, the unnatural strife hath ceased.
The white flowers blossom chapleting a ground
Whose dust was human, they bloom not the less;
Where be the myriads once those seats that crowned?
They gazed on thee, broad Moon! but did not bless
Thine urn, from which they drank no gentleness:
The fight, the hunt, the galley’s crashing prow,
Such were their morning hopes of happiness,
For which they waited with as feverish brow
As for some worthless aim our hearts are beating now.
Life’s infancy was theirs, its solemn end
Unknown, they felt not their humanity,
They knew not their vast souls. Lo! how ascend
Tier above tier those benches that extend
In shattered circles, where the Roman sate,
While on his nod, or voice, or finger’s bend,
The gladiator read remorseless fate;
Even so might life or death on one slight motion wait!
Of azure, sharply, delicately traced,
The light bird flits o’er flowers that wave from high,
Where human foot shall nevermore be based:
Grass mantles the arena mid defaced
And broken columns freshly, wildly spread;
And through the hollow windows once so graced
With glittering eyes, faint stars their twinklings shed
Lighting as if with life those sockets of the dead!
Its shattered and enormous circle rent,
And yawning open, arch and covering gone;
As the huge crater’s sides hang imminent
Round the volcano whose last flames are spent,
Whose sounds shall nevermore to heaven aspire,
So frowns that stern and desolate monument;
A stage in ruin, an exhausted pyre,
The actors past to dust, forever quenched the fire!