Tag Archives: poetry

Week 604: The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner, by W.B.Yeats

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I celebrated my eightieth birthday this week, and yesterday ran a carefully measured road mile in 8 minutes 37 seconds, which in age-adjusted terms is not that bad but in absolute terms is pathetic. I am an absolutist.

So this week’s choice was an easy one. It’s not entirely apposite. I never had, nor am ever likely to have, a chair nearest to the fire – I see myself more as a presence in the outer dark, quietly listening – but the general sentiment will do for me.

The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B.Yeats

Week 603: Naming The Moths, by David Sutton

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We recently had an unusual visitor to our front door, where it clung for hours: this beautiful Lime Hawkmoth. I’m afraid my attempt at a photo doesn’t really do justice to it: the dark patches should be blacker, the green more vivid. It reminded me that I had once written a poem about moth names, which I find fascinating for their idiosyncratic poetry. They are not folk-names – since, unlike plants, Lepidoptera are not obviously useful the common folk never seem to have had much interest in differentiating and naming moths and the vernacular names are the invention of various gentleman naturalists who began to emerge in the eighteenth century: the full story can be found in Peter Marren’s very readable book ‘Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers’.

In the first five stanzas of my poem I imagine one of those early naturalists speaking in answer to someone who has hailed him as a poet, and modestly disclaiming the title. The remaining three stanzas are my own fanciful elegy for his kind.

‘arms and the man I did not sing’: an allusion to the opening words of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’: ‘Arma virumque cano’, I sing arms and the man.

Naming The Moths

‘You’d call me poet? Hardly, Sir,
         Arms and the man I did not sing,
But once upon an August night
         I named the Yellow Underwing.

‘We found on language’s great map
         A little corner, left all blank.
Such handiwork, without a name!
         (The Maiden’s Blush has me to thank).

‘How I recall that dew-damp eve
         Of honeysuckle-scented June
When first upon the Silver Y
         I set the summons of man’s rune.

‘I see them now, our haunts of old,
         Our hedgerow banks, our woodland glades,
Like memory itself they flit,
         My Early Thorns, my Angle Shades.

‘And some, you say, would honour us?
         Then, Sir, I am obliged to you,
But such was never our intent.
         We did what seemed our own to do.’

Swifts and Ushers, fold your wings
         Softly on the moonlit land.
They who loved you best are gone,
         Walking somewhere, lamp in hand,

Seeking down eternal lanes
         Moths the angels might have missed,
Proffering before the Throne
         ‘Some Amendments to Your List. ‘

Willow Beauty, Burnished Brass,
         China Mark and all the Plumes
With the Footmen gather, dance
         Lightly now above these tombs.

David Sutton

Week 602: After the Titanic, by Derek Mahon

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Following on from last week’s theme of the loss of the ‘Titanic’, this week’s offering is what I think is a very fine poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020), the subject of which is J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay was chairman and managing director of the White Star Line who owned the ‘Titanic’, and he was aboard on her doomed maiden voyage. He survived but afterwards was bitterly criticised for allegedly taking up a place in the lifeboats while there were still women and children aboard. This may not in fact have been the case, as there was much confusion at the time and eyewitness accounts differ, but he was ever after haunted by the loss and what was perceived as his failure to do the honourable thing, and he became a solitary figure, spending his summers at his Connemara cottage on the west coast of Ireland.

I admire this poem for its empathy, with its masterly last line that says it all.

After the Titanic

     They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
     I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
     I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
     Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
     In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
     Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
     Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
     On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
     I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
     Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
     Include me in your lamentations.

Derek Mahon

Week 601: From a newspaper article on the wreck of the ‘Titanic’, by unknown author

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I don’t remember where I came across this week’s piece, but I believe it to be from a newspaper of the time, possibly the ‘Sunday Express’, describing the last hours of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It seems to me a very fine piece of journalism, restrained and moving, with just the one touch of purple prose at the end. Of course, one must always beware of myths springing up around such events, and it is the British way to extract what heroic capital they can from total disasters – look at Dunkirk – but there does seem to be plenty of corroboration from eyewitness sources for its general veracity, and if one is tempted to smile at the self-conscious heroism of some of the participants, then remember this: they put their lives where their mouths were.

‘Benjamin Guggenheim appeared on deck with his male secretary, both resplendent in evening clothes. He told a steward: ‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the woman and children. We’ve dressed in our best and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen. If it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’.

Mrs Isidor Strauss also refused to go. ‘I’ve always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now? Where you go, I go’, she told him. As she rejected all pleas to get into a lifeboat, a friend said to Mr Strauss: ‘I’m sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in…’ He answered: ‘I will not go before other men’.

And that, wrote Walter Lord, was that. ‘Mrs Strauss tightened her grasp on his arm, patted it, smiled up at him, and then they sat together on a pair of deck chairs’.

… While the drama was unfolding, the ship’s band assembled on one of the decks and helped to keep up morale by playing ragtime tunes. ‘Many brave things were done that night’, wrote Beesley, ‘but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower, and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood, the music serving as their own immortal requiem’.

Week 600: The Performance, by James Dickey

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James Dickey (1923-1997) was an American poet and novelist who served as a radar operator in the Pacific during the Second World War. This week’s poem relates an incident from that war.

For once I’ll put my comments at the end, to avoid a major spoiler, so please read the poem first and form your own opinions.

The Performance

The last time I saw Donald Armstrong   
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,   
Going down, off the Philippine Islands.   
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,

And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,   
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving   
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.

Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,   
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,

And the enemy’s two-handed sword   
Did not fall from anyone’s hands   
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave

He had dug for himself, under pressure.   
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows   
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,   
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,

Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them—
The back somersault, the kip-up—
And at last, the stand on his hands,   
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured from the sea

And the headsman broke down   
In a blaze of tears, in that light   
Of the thin, long human frame   
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,   
Would have cut off the feet

Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen   
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,   
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done   
All things in this life that he could.

James Dickey

For me this poem is a real problem. When I first read it I thought it accomplished, moving, inspirational even. Then I came across a piece by a critic who had done some fact-checking. It turned out that the whole thing was pretty much made up. There had been a pilot called Donald Armstrong, but he had simply died in the crash. Another pilot with him had indeed been beheaded by the Japanese, but there had been no ‘performance’, no heroic gymnastics – that was something Dickey himself liked to do around camp, and he had simply projected it on to the situation in a kind of narcissistic wish fulfilment. I felt shocked and betrayed. But why, exactly? After all, we know that most of literature is ‘made up’. We don’t expect there to have been a real Odysseus who took ten years to get home after the Trojan War. We know Dante didn’t really get a guided tour of hell in the company of Virgil. We would not be perturbed to learn that the only pilgrimage Chaucer ever made to Canterbury was in his imagination, and we happily accept that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is a gross slander on the real king of that name who apparently ruled wisely and well for many years. In short, we normally accept the principle of ‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato’ – it may not be true, but it makes a good story.

So why do I feel that Dickey’s falsification of the facts in this case is such a letdown? I think it is because one feels it as a violation of trust, that in this instance so much hinges on the events described being literally true that if they aren’t, then what’s the point of it all? I don’t mind poets making honest mistakes. Larkin beat himself up about ‘An Arundel Tomb’ because he quite unintentionally misremembered or misinterpreted a few details. ‘Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it’s right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all’. I can live with that, and still admire the poem. But if you’re just going to take real people and real events and make stuff up about them for effect, then maybe you’ve chosen the wrong vocation and should be in politics, not poetry.

And yet, and yet… the poem still moves me. It is very confusing. Should I simply accept Dickey’s own view that there is nothing wrong in letting imagination prevail over veracity? What does anyone think?

Week 599: The Winged Horse, by Hilaire Belloc

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Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953; see also weeks 112 and 263) was a rambunctious, opinionated, larger than life figure whose reputation has suffered partly due to his oft expressed dislike of Jews, though it should be said that he abominated Hitler and totally condemned Nazi anti-semitism. Nor was he alone among intellectuals at the time in holding problematic views: T.S.Eliot’s anti-semitic streak has not stopped him from being venerated in certain quarters, nor has H.G.Wells’s enthusiasm for culling non-white races in the name of eugenics inhibited a continuing interest in his fiction. So maybe Belloc too deserves to be cut some slack, and perhaps anyway we should be wary of demonising writers for one unacceptable opinion and should simply reject that opinion while seeing what else they might have to offer. Which in Belloc’s case, as far as poetry goes, is a quantity of skilful, entertaining and sometimes quite edgy light verse, and some pieces like this which hover somewhere between the light and the serious.

Apparently this particular poem was written in reaction to his failure to obtain a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and expresses a defiant scorn for the academia that has rejected him. It seems odd to me that a poet should wish to compromise his independence of mind by too close an assocation with an academic institution, but evidently it was a lifelong disappointment to him. The poem is a bit of a romantic muddle – I would like to know just how high you would have to fly a winged horse to see the English Channel from anywhere near Wantage, and I’m not sure what the cast of the ‘Chanson de Roland’ are doing on the nearby Lambourn Downs – it’s a long way from Roncesvalles. But you have to admit it goes with a swing.

The Winged Horse: this is a reference to Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, ridden by the hero Bellephoron who defeated the monster Chimaera. The point here is that Pegasus is said to have created the spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon by striking his hoof in the earth, and drinking from the Hippocrene was thought to bring poetic inspiration, which ties in with ‘spouting well of joy’ in the last stanza.

Lambourn: a town in Berkshire famous as a centre for the training of racehorses, which are exercised on the nearby downs.

Roland: hero of the 11th century Old French epic poem ‘Chanson de Roland’, which is very loosely based on a real historical 8th century incident. In the poem the French emperor Charlemagne is leading his army back from Spain when its rearguard, under the command of his champion Count Roland, is ambushed in a narrow Pyrenean pass by a large army of Saracens (in reality it was a small army of Basques). Not wanting to be thought a coward, Roland refuses to summon help by blowing his horn, despite the repeated urgings of his friend Oliver (‘Cumpaign Rolland, car sunez vostre corn’, which I like to translate as ‘For f—k’s sake, Roland, just blow the bloody horn!’). As a result the entire rearguard is wiped out, with Roland the last to fall.

Marches: here used in the sense of borderlands – the historical Roland was military governor of the Breton March, responsible for defending Francia‘s frontier against the Bretons.

Turpin: a martial archbishop who fell with Roland, the last of his companions to do so. It may seem odd that a churchman should also be a doughty warrior, but it is well attested that among William the Conqueror’s retinue at the Battle of Hastings was a certain Bishop Odo. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that as his calling forbade him to shed blood, he eschewed the use of a sword and instead bashed people’s brains in with a club. So that was all right.

The Winged Horse

It’s ten years ago today you turned me out o’ doors
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores
And I thought about the all-in-all, oh more than I can tell!
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well,
He had flames behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side,
And I ride, and I ride!

I rode him out of Wantage and I rode him up the hill,
And there I saw the Beacon in the morning standing still,
Inkpen and Hackpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the strengthening of the day,
And there I saw the channel-glint and England in her pride
And I ride, and I ride!

And once atop of Lambourn Down towards the hill of Clere
I saw the Host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear,
And Turpin out of Gascony and Charlemagne the Lord
And Roland of the marches with his hand upon his sword
For the time he should have need of it, and forty more beside
And I ride, and I ride!

For you that took the all-in-all, the things you left were three,
A loud voice for singing and keen eyes to see
And a spouting well of joy that never yet was dried
And I ride.

Hilaire Belloc

Week 598: Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

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Another of Derek Walcott’s intriguing shorter lyrics, this one apparently on the theme of finding peace and healing after a failed relationship, or perhaps more than one failed relationship (Walcott was divorced three times), by learning to embrace oneself rather than another, and thus at last becoming self-sufficient in one’s own identity.

Looked at from this angle, the sentiment of the poem seems debatable. Surely if there is one thing that most of us, and perhaps especially poets, are not short on it is self-love, and maybe those failed relationships wouldn’t fail so readily were it not so.

But there may be another way of interpreting the poem. The fact is that poets, perhaps more than most of us, live with the perpetual fret of not having world enough and time, to love all that they would wish to love and be all that they would wish to be, and I think these lines can also be taken as a reassurance that this state of self-dissatisfaction can have an end, that there may wait for us a final contentment, a time to reap what we have sown. ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’ Well, it’s a nice idea. Me, I’m still fretting.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Week 597: Filling Station, by Elizabeth Bishop

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It’s an unlikely conjunction, but this poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) puts me in mind of Patrick Kavanagh, the man whose credo was ‘Nothing whatever is by love debarred’. A garage forecourt, just like Kavanagh’s chest hospital, seems an unlikely place in which to find poetry, but I guess that if you bring to the business a kind of universal empathy, a reverence for the fact, then anything is possible.

Note how the poem moves from a tone of apparent disdain, albeit mingled with fascination, to a final humbling realisation that here too a spirit of love is at work, expressing itself in the family’s valiant efforts to add homely touches to their challenging and work-impregnated environment.

I won’t say that I exactly like this poem – in fact I feel a strong urge to clean my hands with Swarfega after reading it – but I have to admire a poet so prepared to boldly go where few if any have gone before her.

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Elizabeth Bishop

Week 596: South Of My Days, by Judith Wright

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Judith Wright’s fine evocation of a vanished Australia, first published in 1946, gives full rein to her intense feeling for landscape and for the past of her people. There is decay here and desolation, and the sense of a heritage under siege, conveyed through images of winter and darkness and forgetfulness, but there is also resilience and a note of defiance. ‘No one is listening’ – this reflects Judith Wright’s fear that no one was paying attention to those issues that concerned her all her life: the wrongs of the colonial past, Aboriginal land rights, the environment. But of course, as the poem proves, someone was listening, and now the stories that went walking in her sleep are passed on to walk in ours too.

‘that tableland’: this refers to Judith’s home country, a region of the Great Dividing Range in northern New South Wales where she was brought up.

‘medlar’: a kind of tree yielding an edible fruit, usually eaten when bletted, i.e. in a softened state beyond ripeness.

‘Droving that year’: this refers to cattle droving, which was central to Judith’s family life. The first anecdote concerns a time of drought, when sixty cattle were lost at a river crossing and a sulky – a kind of horse-drawn cart – came into camp carrying a dead driver with flies announcing the death.

‘Charleville’: a town in Queensland.

‘the Hunter’: a river in New South Wales.

‘McIntyre’: the MacIntyre river in Queensland.

‘Bogongs’: an area of the high country of Victoria; this time the hazard is snow, and more cattle perish in blizzards: ‘we brought them down, what aren’t there yet’.

Tamworth: a city in northern New South Wales.

Thunderbolt: the name of a famous bushranger. The drover tips him off that troopers are on his tail.

‘True or not’: the factual accuracy of the anecdotes that the old man produces like a conjuror shuffling cards is less important to the poet than what he represents: the lore of her people, their ancient storytelling tradition.

South Of My Days

South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite –
clean, lean,  hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.

O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn –
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy years are hived in him like old honey.

Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand –
cruel to keep them alive – and the river was dust.

Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we
brought them down, what aren’t there yet. Or driving for Cobb’s on the run
up from Tamworth – Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn’t wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny,
him on his big black horse.

Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards.
True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days’ circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

Judith Wright

Week 595: Dido reproaching Aeneas, from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book IV

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This is one of the great passages of classical literature, from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book IV. In case anyone is unfamiliar with the story, Aeneas and his companions, fleeing from the sack of Troy, are shipwrecked on the coast of Libya, where they are taken in and entertained by the Queen of Carthage, Dido. Predictably she falls for Aeneas and they have a lot of fun together, including a hunting trip in which they take refuge from a storm in a cave where, to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, it appears that their relationship is consummated. So far so good, but Jupiter, who has other plans for Aeneas, is not too happy about this and sends his messenger Mercury to pay Aeneas a visit and speak to him on the lines of ‘Look son, enough of the hanky-panky, you do remember that you are supposed to be founding a new kingdom in Italy?’. Reluctantly Aeneas prepares to set sail, meaning to tell Dido at some convenient moment, but she gets wind of his plans and angrily confronts him. He tries to excuse himself with a ‘Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ speech, but women, I have noted, tend to be much less impressed by that sort of sentiment than are men, and in the speech below she gives him both barrels in reply.

Blake said of ‘Paradise Lost’ that Milton ‘was of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. I think it would be too much to claim that Virgil was of Dido’s party without knowing it: I have no doubt that he had a genuine belief in the Roman virtues of duty and piety, even setting aside the fact that as an intimate of the Emperor Augustus such a belief would be politic for him. But that does not stop his empathy for Dido and her suffering being remarkable in a man of the time.

The translation that follows is my own.

Dardanus: in  legend, the son of Zeus and Electra, and ancestor of the Trojan race.

‘No goddess was your mother…’: Aeneas was said to be the product of a union between the Trojan prince Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

Caucasus: a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, in classical times a byword for wildness.

The shift at line 7 into referring to Aeneas in the third person suggests that she can no longer bear to address him directly.‘and this is what the gods do…’: the tone here is heavily sarcastic, as if she does not believe a word of his protestations.

Talia dicentem iamdudum aversa tuetur
huc illuc volvens oculos totumque pererrat
luminibus tacitis et sic accensa profatur:
‘nec tibi diva parens generis nec Dardanus auctor,               
perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres.
nam quid dissimulo aut quae me ad maiora reservo?
num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit?
num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est?               
quae quibus anteferam? iam iam nec maxima Iuno
nec Saturnius haec oculis pater aspicit aequis.
nusquam tuta fides. eiectum litore, egentem
excepi et regni demens in parte locavi.
amissam classem, socios a morte reduxi               
(heu furiis incensa feror!): nunc augur Apollo,
nunc Lyciae sortes, nunc et Iove missus ab ipso
interpres divum fert horrida iussa per auras.
scilicet is superis labor est, ea cura quietos
sollicitat. neque te teneo neque dicta refello:               
i, sequere Italiam ventis, pete regna per undas.
spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido
saepe vocaturum. sequar atris ignibus absens
et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,               
omnibus umbra locis adero. dabis, improbe, poenas.
audiam et haec Manis veniet mihi fama sub imos.’

As he spoke, she looked him up and down,
A silent stare, surveying the whole man
And then in anger spoke to him. ‘Deceiver,
No goddess was your mother, nor Dardanus
The father of your race: harsh Caucasus
Begat you on the rocks, and tigers reared you.
But why hold back? What worse can come? Was he
Moved by my weeping? Did he look at me?
Did he shed tears, outargued? Pity me?
What can I cleave to now? The gods themselves,
Jupiter, son of Saturn, and great Juno
Look down on this and with no friendly eyes.
Where now shall faith be found? I welcomed him,
A castaway upon my shore, a beggar,
I saved his ships, I saved his friends from death,
With foolish heart I shared with him my realm.
Driven by the Furies, now I burn.
And so, you say, Apollo prophesies,
The oracles proclaim, Jove’s messenger
Carries his commandments through the air.
And this is what the gods do, this is what
Troubles them in their tranquillity?
But go, I will not keep you then, nor argue.
Go, seek your Italy, the winds be with you,
Find your land beyond the waves. And yet,
If the good gods have power, I pray that you
May drink your cup of death among the reefs,
Over and over calling my name, Dido.
I’ll follow you from far off with dark fires
And when my soul is sundered by cold death
My ghost will be about you. Cruel one,
You shall be punished, and I’ll know: that news
Will reach me even in the depths of Hades’.