Upon Concluding Virgil
The book lay on the marble steps, bound In the silence of the newly dead.
The Chian sea was feasting beyond the tranquil urns.
Facing this wine-blue water, I cannot see you, Virgil, with the eyes of the dark Western monasteries.
Here, where the wrath of Achilles still burns in the rock, Where you can still snatch a glimpse Of the foam-stung sail of Odysseus, Pius Aeneas does not move, especially Since we know, what you did not know, Virgil, The Empire after Augustus. And your Daphnis, Your Meliboeus, the heaped up baskets of lilies, Your whole Arcadia, however pleasing, ' Do not ring true. We have both loved Homer And Theocritus too well to make good friends.
But your song on the fields and the flocks And the honey that comes from the sky Is true in this Aegean land, where the peasants Still fight with the same rude weapons Their stingy earth, and the sailors still number the stars, And call them, like old friends, by name.
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