O FOREST dells and streams! O Dorian tide! Groan with my grief, since lovely Bion died: Ye plants and copses, now his loss bewail: Flowers, from your tufts a sad perfume exhale: Anemones and roses, mournful show Your crimson leaves and wear a blush of woe: And hyacinth, now more than ever spread The woeful "ah," that marks thy petaled head With lettered grief: the beauteous minstrel's dead! Sicilian Muses, pour the dirge of woe: Ye nightingales, whose plaintive warblings flow From the thick leaves of some embowering wood, Tell the sad loss to Arethusa's flood: The shepherd Bion dies: with him is dead The life of song: the Doric Muse is fled. Sicilian Muses, pour the dirge of woe: The herds no more that chant melodious know: No more beneath the lonely oak he sings, But breathes his strains to Lethe's sullen springs: The mountains now are mute: the heifers pass Slow-wandering by, nor browse the tender grass. Siclian Muses, pour the dirge of woe: For thee, O Bion! in the grave laid low, Apollo weeps: dark palls the sylvan's shroud; Fauns ask thy wonted song, and wail aloud: Each fountain-nymph disconsolate appears, And all her waters turn to trickling tears:— Mute Echo pines the silent rocks around, And mourns those lips that waked their sweetest sound. Sicilian Muses, pour the dirge of woe: But retribution sure will deal the blow: I, in this trance of grief, still drop the tear, And mourn forever o'er thy livid bier:— O that, as Orpheus, in the days of yore, Ulysses, or Alcides, passed before, I could descend to Pluto's house of night, And mark if thou wouldst Pluto's ear delight, And listen to the song: O then rehearse Some sweet Sicilian strain, bucolic verse, To soothe the maid of Enna's vale, who sang These Doric songs, while Ætna's upland rang. Not unrewarded should thy ditties prove: As the sweet harper, Orpheus, erst could move Her breast to yield his dear departed wife, Treading the backward road from death to life, So should he melt to Bion's Dorian strain, And send him joyous to his hills again. O, could my touch command the stops like thee, I too would seek the dead, and sing thee free! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DEXTER GORDON: COPENHAGEN/AVERY FISHER HALL by KAREN SWENSON TO CHLOE WHO FOR HIS SAKE WISHED HERSELF YOUNGER by WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT THE MASTER-PLAYER by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR AT THE SAND CREEK BRIDGE by JAMES GALVIN ON THE NEW FORCES OF CONSCIENCE UNDER THE LONG PARLIAMENT by JOHN MILTON A DREAM, OR THE TYPE OF THE RISING SUN by JEAN ADAMS MY GHOSTS by JOHN KENDRICK BANGS VERSES WRITTEN IN THE LEAVES OF AN IVORY POCKET-BOOK by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD |