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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
OR, turning to the Vatican, go see | |
| Laocoön’s torture dignifying pain,— | |
| A father’s love and mortal’s agony | |
| With an immortal’s patience blending: vain | |
| The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain | 5 |
| And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp, | |
| The old man’s clench; the long envenomed chain | |
| Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp | |
| Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp. | |
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| Or view the lord of the unerring bow, | 10 |
| The god of life and poesy and light,— | |
| The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow | |
| All radiant from his triumph in the fight; | |
| The shaft hath just been shot,—the arrow bright | |
| With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye | 15 |
| And nostril beautiful disdain and might | |
| And majesty flash their full lightnings by, | |
| Developing in that one glance the deity. | |
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| But in his delicate form—a dream of love, | |
| Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast | 20 |
| Longed for a deathless lover from above, | |
| And maddened in that vision—are exprest | |
| All that ideal beauty ever blessed | |
| The mind within its most unearthly mood, | |
| When each conception was a heavenly guest,— | 25 |
| A ray of immortality,—and stood, | |
| Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god! | |
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| And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven | |
| The fire which we endure, it was repaid | |
| By him to whom the energy was given | 30 |
| Which this poetic marble hath arrayed | |
| With an eternal glory,—which, if made | |
| By human hands, is not of human thought; | |
| And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid | |
| One ringlet in the dust,—nor hath it caught | 35 |
| A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which ’t was wrought. | |
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