A Rejected Newdigate
O Sicily! upon whose torrid shores
Here Scylla lurks and there Charybdis roars:
Where great Empedocles, that ardent soul,
Leapt into Etna and was roasted whole:
O smiling vales! and O tremendous heights!
Trod by the heroes of a hundred fights,
Now British tars, and then Athenian seamen,
Here Archimedes, there Professor Freeman!
'Twas evening: when in Enna's flowery vale
Persephone was plucking galingale,
And various other flowers less known to us
Than to translators of Theocritus.
Dis marked the damsel from the shades below
(Dis was the cause of all dis tale of woe):
And as with energy that naught appals
The Eight of Jesus chases Teddy Hall's,
As the grim bandit on the Thracian crag
Collars the lonely tourist's Gladstone bag, —
Dis seized the maid and bore her off dismayed
To share his kingdom in th' infernal shade.
Was it the hooting of the skyey owl?
Or rose from earth that melancholy howl?
Demeter marked the absence of her daughter,
And on the mountains and the plains she sought her:
All day she cried (in accents fit to deafen ye)
" Persephone! Persephone!! PERSEPHONE!!"
O who can paint a mother's speechless woe?
Not I, for one: mere narrative's de trop .
Though the detectives both of Rome and Sparta
Were furnished with descriptions of her daughter,
Though she repaired to various distant climes,
And put advertisements within The Times ,
In vain she questioned persons far and near:
She Asked a P'liceman — nothing could she hear:
And when she asked the men of Syracuse
" Where is she? where?" 'twas not the smallest use:
For though they speak Italian, you're aware,
None made response, nor " Ecco" answered " Where?"
Meanwhile Persephone, as schoolboys know,
Was ruling sadly in the shades below,
Where Acheron and Phlegethon and Styx
Their floods tremendous with Cocytus mix,
Where — but the details, and they're far from scanty,
You'll find described in Lempriere, or in Dante.
Some like the place: Persephone did not:
'Twas badly lighted, and 'twas rather hot:
Amusement slow — she really could not feel
A spark of interest in Ixion's wheel:
Though Pluto did his best to cheer his wife,
What she complained of was the want of life.
" Bear me," she cried, " O bear me back again
To Enna (loveliest village of the plain),
Where I was wont in girlhood's happy hours
(Myself a fairer flower) to gather flowers!"
Jove heard her prayer: and 'twas arranged that she
Should make an annual trip to Sicily.
So Britain's invalids (by doctors' hests)
Perplexed by maladies of throats or chests,
Fly from the hurricanes of winter hoar
To Cannes' retreat or Nice's genial shore:
Yet, when the spring asserts her genial reign,
So Britain's invalids come home again.
Thus Undergraduates, a studious race
(Their country's pride, and Oxford's chiefest grace),
Wearied with Plato and with Latin Prose,
Enjoy through half the year a well-deserved repose.
. . . . . . . . .
This of thy tale, Persephone! the abstract is and pith:
Some say it 's allegorical, and some a Solar Myth.
I dote on hoar Antiquity, and love its legends old, —
But yet I can't believe much more than half of what I'm told.
Here Scylla lurks and there Charybdis roars:
Where great Empedocles, that ardent soul,
Leapt into Etna and was roasted whole:
O smiling vales! and O tremendous heights!
Trod by the heroes of a hundred fights,
Now British tars, and then Athenian seamen,
Here Archimedes, there Professor Freeman!
'Twas evening: when in Enna's flowery vale
Persephone was plucking galingale,
And various other flowers less known to us
Than to translators of Theocritus.
Dis marked the damsel from the shades below
(Dis was the cause of all dis tale of woe):
And as with energy that naught appals
The Eight of Jesus chases Teddy Hall's,
As the grim bandit on the Thracian crag
Collars the lonely tourist's Gladstone bag, —
Dis seized the maid and bore her off dismayed
To share his kingdom in th' infernal shade.
Was it the hooting of the skyey owl?
Or rose from earth that melancholy howl?
Demeter marked the absence of her daughter,
And on the mountains and the plains she sought her:
All day she cried (in accents fit to deafen ye)
" Persephone! Persephone!! PERSEPHONE!!"
O who can paint a mother's speechless woe?
Not I, for one: mere narrative's de trop .
Though the detectives both of Rome and Sparta
Were furnished with descriptions of her daughter,
Though she repaired to various distant climes,
And put advertisements within The Times ,
In vain she questioned persons far and near:
She Asked a P'liceman — nothing could she hear:
And when she asked the men of Syracuse
" Where is she? where?" 'twas not the smallest use:
For though they speak Italian, you're aware,
None made response, nor " Ecco" answered " Where?"
Meanwhile Persephone, as schoolboys know,
Was ruling sadly in the shades below,
Where Acheron and Phlegethon and Styx
Their floods tremendous with Cocytus mix,
Where — but the details, and they're far from scanty,
You'll find described in Lempriere, or in Dante.
Some like the place: Persephone did not:
'Twas badly lighted, and 'twas rather hot:
Amusement slow — she really could not feel
A spark of interest in Ixion's wheel:
Though Pluto did his best to cheer his wife,
What she complained of was the want of life.
" Bear me," she cried, " O bear me back again
To Enna (loveliest village of the plain),
Where I was wont in girlhood's happy hours
(Myself a fairer flower) to gather flowers!"
Jove heard her prayer: and 'twas arranged that she
Should make an annual trip to Sicily.
So Britain's invalids (by doctors' hests)
Perplexed by maladies of throats or chests,
Fly from the hurricanes of winter hoar
To Cannes' retreat or Nice's genial shore:
Yet, when the spring asserts her genial reign,
So Britain's invalids come home again.
Thus Undergraduates, a studious race
(Their country's pride, and Oxford's chiefest grace),
Wearied with Plato and with Latin Prose,
Enjoy through half the year a well-deserved repose.
. . . . . . . . .
This of thy tale, Persephone! the abstract is and pith:
Some say it 's allegorical, and some a Solar Myth.
I dote on hoar Antiquity, and love its legends old, —
But yet I can't believe much more than half of what I'm told.
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